Category: Market

Not every business is, or should be, humble. Lots of brands are about power and attention, and that’s okay. But if you have a brand which values humility, marketing can be a real challenge.

It’s natural to want to highlight your strengths, or at least, highlight what you think your customers might perceive as strengths. I’ve found that this approach often feels unauthentic, pitchy, and too “keyword” verbose.

Instead, be honest. Write as though you were talking to a very close friend, whom you want to recruit. Show them your best aspects, but keep it real.

How else can you talk about yourself, without talking about yourself?

I’ve always said that a logo can make or break a business.

More specifically: finding a visual identity which deeply resonates with your audience can help your product immensely. By contrast, if your visual identity is jarring to your audience, it can seriously set you back.

A piece of advice given by Seth Godin is that logos are “just a placeholder, a label waiting to earn some meaning”. He stresses that your brand is what matters – and he’s right. However, where he and I disagree is on how much influence the visual representation of your brand has.

There’s a reason that companies like Apple and Nike spent tens of thousands of dollars on their logo. To the lay person, a swoosh or a half-eaten apple may seem simple, but a lot of research and iteration goes into fine-tuning their reverberative quality.

The work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Max Braun may seem simple, but it takes a lot of talent and experience to boil something down to its barest essential. As Clare Boothe Luce is famous for saying, Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

A layperson could never architect a building as simple as Farnsworth House. A bootstrapping entrepreneur could never design a logo as effective as Starbucks.

What is your area of expertise? If you were to outsource your visual identity, where could your talent and experience be focused?

Dean Owen is the entrepreneur behind a new luxury dog apparel business: Owen & Edwin.

Dean was having a hard time converting his online following. He noticed that his audience loved the idea of his product, but were hesitating to pay the premium price tag associated with his luxury dog coats.

This is a common problem. When a new product launches, especially in a higher price bracket, there’s often market hesitation.

One tempting approach would be to lower your prices in order to gain a little momentum. Bad move! Your audience will expect less, think they’ve got less, share less, associate your brand with less, and complain more when you hike your prices.

Dean realised that purchase hesitation isn’t ever because of price. It’s because his audience lacked trust.

Owen & Edwin was an unknown brand, so it’s audience didn’t trust that they would be getting what they paid for. So, they introduced a new product: Dog Biscuits.

The biscuits, sold at cost, introduced the audience to a purchase with much less risk involved . From dog treats, the customer might choose to purchase a dog collar or other accessory. Finally, the customer knows and trusts the brand, and they are ready to buy their pooch a luxury coat.

It’s unreasonable to expect our audience to trust us from the very start. What can we do to slowly introduce our products to our customers, and earn their trust along the way?

Dishonesty is easy. Dishonesty by omission is even easier.

Sometimes, dishonesty disguises itself as innovation. For example, Google is dishonest about the user data it collects. This crafty monetisation strategy is easy to justify: Free Search, Better AI, etc. But it’s still dishonest, and it leaves a bad taste.

Facebook is another example of deceptive innovation, trading your privacy for profit. They’ve built an amazing product, but at what cost?

Apple understands this principle. Since they don’t compete in the big-data arena, they can uniquely offer their products as more private. They advertise this, knowing that privacy influences buying decisions.

User awareness of these ethically-grey practices is growing. As a result, there now exists a “Free-Pause” – a hesitation while our audience asks what’s in it for you?

There’s no need to throw away big-data innovations, but we must commit to being more transparent with our customers about how we make money.

How can you to set your audience’s cynical minds at ease?

Choosing a product name is hard. There are two schools of thought:

1. Spend time finding the right name, it should be memorable, unique and descriptive. Your URL should be easy to remember.
2. Name isn’t important. Your brand builds its own meaning over time. Choose the first random words that come to mind. Any domain will do.

I’d suggest that these are both right.

Your name is important. Your brand does build its own meaning over time. Your name should be memorable, but only needs to be unique in your niche. Finding a good URL can be helpful, but isn’t that important.

Should your brand be descriptive, like Meetup.com, GitHub, or iPhone?

Or, should your brand be random, like Gimlet, Apple, or Drupal?

I believe the best names are a mix of both. They use metaphor to allow both colour and meaning. Consider:

• Google – A googol is a huge number, a metaphor for the amount of results.
• Amazon – The largest river in the world, just like the online store.
• Basecamp – An area used for staging a long climb, or your project.

Find a metaphor for your product, and from that, find a word which is short and memorable. You’ll figure out a domain name that works.