Reimagining Your Identity: Build Brand In The Cracks

Almost every article I’ve read online tells you how to build a brand from day zero. I’ve spoken to 1500+ founders and realized that many entrepreneurs realize too late that brand building and marketing must be treated as distinct yet interconnected processes. I blame it on our textbooks — brand hasn’t been paid too much attention to in educational literature — because building a startup, running it, and marketing were more important.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

If you’re reading this, and have a brand that’s more than 1 year old, and you haven’t built brand (yeah, you!) — I gotchyu.

Here’s one reason to listen to my musings (minus the rant), I want to be helpful, not counter-productive

I’m Vanshi, I’m the founder of The Fingerprint Labs, and I’ve been in brand creation and strategy for 4 years now. I’ve told countless founders why they need to build brand on day zero, or sooner than never — and we have about 150+ success stories. The rest, I hope read this piece.

Here are 5 telltale signs you haven’t built a brand:

1. You’re overly dependent on paid channels for your next customer, view, and conversion. This indicates that your organic reach and brand recognition are lacking.
2. You’re constantly pivoting because you haven’t found ‘a fit’ with your audience. You’re throwing new ideas and ways of life at them — but they aren’t resonating.
3. Your social media feeds look like you woke up that morning and decided to post something and you slapped on a logo. There’s no consistency in visual language.
4. You can’t explain your brand and your customers can’t either because you never really deep dived into UVPs, USPs and RTB’s.
5. You have no customer-led UGC, just paid influencer collabs and showcases. You’re missing out on genuine connections!

Hard relate to any of these?

Let me help you

If I were in your place, here’s what I would do.

1. Accept you have a problem — if any of these points above ticked something off your checklist, then yes, you do have a problem. The sooner you realize it the better, and the sooner you get help, the better. If you’re just going to chase and try to convince a customer to buy on paid and yet you think that’s success— you’re very wrong!
2. Get the team into a huddle — from the heads of departments to the intern. This is a fixable problem, having a huddle will help you see the problem at hand without layers and sweet talk.
3. Decide which path you want to take — will you hire a consultant? or will you attempt to do it internally? Or start with the second, and then move to the first for finesse?
4. Set a timeframe — Brand strategy, and fixing is extensive. Set a timeline to get a minimum viable brand out there so you can start fixing and build brand alongside with some guardrails in place.

Here’s how you’ll build a Minimum Viable Brand:

1. Research the market and your competition

Look outside, to dive deeper inside. Look at your closest competitors and see what they’re doing. Act like a third party to this, where bias does not exist. Think about what their strategies are, and what are they doing to resonate with the audience. Look at their messaging, content pillars and visual guidelines. This will give you an idea of what’s sticking, how they’ve evolved, and what’s working!

2. Nail your target market

This is two part — who is currently buying, and who do we want to buy from us. The first part will give you a deep-dive into the demographics and psychographics of the audience. The second is the aspirational point showing you where you want to go. At this stage, if you’re confused, you can most certainly do a survey or have a conversation with current/potential future customers. This will give you a POV on what they want, why they buy and what will keep them buying.

3. Look at the culture around you

Keep an eye on emerging cultural trends and shifts within your target demographic. Look at what they’re talking about, what do they care about. Look at a 10K feet view here, micro isn’t going to work. See how things have changed over time, and how your brand can relate. Relating culturally to your target audience helps you build relevance and a channel of communication with them — speak their language, understand the undertones, and take part in conversations that matter (after you’ve finished this activity) No one likes an unwanted guest in their party!

While you’re doing this, you’ll also be able to decipher which trends are going to be ever-lasting, which ones are going to fade. You need to catch on to trends, think long term and maybe flip the script to be relevant.

4. Create a UVP, positioning and RTB

A UVP is a Unique Value Proposition — this helps you sum up your value add to the Universe, in simple terminology. Having a UVP also helps you understand your core strengths as a company and what is working for you.

Positioning is your guidebook into perception building with your ideal customers. This therefore helps you internally to agree on a direction and a place you want to capture in the ICP’s mind, on the outside it helps you to stick to a spot in the market without changing and pivoting too quick.

RTB is a confidence supplement to whatever you might’ve said/claimed in your positioning statement. Having an RTB builds customer confidence, and emotional resonance with time. Internally, it helps you decide on what messaging/story to repeat so consumers ‘get it’

5. Breathe life into your brand with a purpose, vision, mission, and values

While this might look like fancy words on the outside, this is a crucial thing customers look for before buying into your brand. What do you really stand for? — Are you really able to make a difference in the world?

It’s so easy to get into purpose-washing wherein it’s meaningless words put together to look fancy on a document or on a wall or even better, on the website — that’s why you need to be cognizant about what you write here. It’s not just fancy words — you have to live up to your promises for customers to buy into your brand.

6. Relook at your voice and tone

If you’ve been building for 1+ year, your voice and tone has occurred by chance, and if it’s working — stick to it, if it isn’t — change.

Voice and tone helps brands develop a human-like persona which replicates and enacts a real human. This builds trust and credibility with the brand.

Don’t change it if it’s working, change if it isn’t.

7. Craft a brand story

Now that you have all the pieces in place, put them together into a story that’s loved and can be retold/reshared.

For this you need

• a villain — something your audience despises, something that they’re trying to fix in their lives and they aren’t able to
• a hero — your brand, the savior, the know it all

You can utilize storytelling structures like the Hero’s Journey to outline the main character (your customer), their struggles, and how your brand provides a solution that leads to transformation.

When you’re writing a brand story, think from the customer POV, not yours. Look back at your research. What can you say that matters to the audience, and they’ll spend more than 30 seconds reading.

A story/philosophy is core to every company. It helps you move from being just a product/service to one that has meaning and depth.

8. Create messaging pillars

What and how your brand says repeatedly is super important when building brand in a competitive market. Decide on 3–5 things you really want to say — something game changing or slightly obtuse — that will help you stand out.

You want to relate but you also want to make your brand heard. Thin line indeed.

Draw up 3–5 of these, and for each, explain what the pillar is meant to convey, what are some words to use under each, some RTB’s that relate to each. Make it comprehensive so that whoever is handling content knows that they need to include a pillar in every output from your company.

You can’t have your brand changing what it’s saying, based on who’s saying it.

9. Create visual consistency

Visual consistency helps build recall. Decide on your logo, imagery, color and font placements across platforms. Make a brand guide with details on each so that irrespective of who’s handling this — there is one standard guidebook.

You can be aesthetic, you can also be loud, you can also be somber — the point here is to be impactful. Pick whatever aligns with your brand personality and being. By now, you’re clear on what kind of a brand you’re building.

A lot can be said here, about the best way to do this therefore I’ll leave this part to the visual gurus to handle. While I, as a strategist, do look over it and guide the team — there’s only so much knowledge I have about RGB/CYMK and other fancy designer terms.

Note of caution: I’ve made this sound much simpler than it is — intentionally. The goal isn’t to scare you, the goal is to make you take action — and fast!

Leaving a brand in the hands of the customer means you’re letting them build their own percpetions and story about your brand — the thing you work day and night for!

Overwhelmed and want to hire someone instead of DIY-ing it after reading this?

Let’s talk?

I’m Vanshi, I’m the founder of The Fingerprint Labs — we work with challenger brands and their founders to create, build, and manage their brand. We truly love working on Minimum Viable Brand projects.

Reach out here for a quicker response.

Or, if you’re an I’ll figure it out person, DM me, I have a huge resource on my Notion for brand strategy articles I’ve read, and liked.
PS: might take you 147 years to figure out what’s the best advice/framework to follow — take a risk if you want to. DM me on Linkedin -I’ll send it over.