Minimal Viable Branding: Developing a brand blueprint for Growth
Minimal Viable Branding is our agile approach designed to help growing business connect with their evolving audience without losing their identity.
I’ve been working with amazing innovators and visionaries in tech for the past decade. The most common hurdles that they face is not having a consistent brand that builds customer relationships, and not having a sticky vision that helps their teams collectively make decisions.
We believe that when branding is done right, it gives form to vision – this helps visionaries lead with clarity, empowers their team to innovate with confidence, and helps customers buy into that better world they are trying to create.
Focus on what's most important – Your unwavering truth.
If you are an entrepreneur, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Minimal Viable Product. It is the most basic product that a startup can build to prove its differentiator. Likewise, MVB focuses on why a potential customer should buy into the promise that you are making, and that your competition will have a hard time matching.
The minimal viable mindset isn’t about taking shortcuts, producing a subpar product. MVB and MVP is about focus. MVP focuses on the feature that none of your competition has or will have a hard time copying, giving you a competitive advantage.
Signal Works Architecture's Brand Culture Playbook.
“Giant Shoulders is a design agency that solves business problems. Their branding approach helped us realign our company by applying our brand to express our mission, consolidating our process, managing and leading our employees, and our external communications.”
Eric Army, Founder of Signal Works
Put a stake in the ground – Position your brand to succeed.
It is bad business to try and be everything to everyone. Brand building is all about understanding who you are and the promise you are making. We believe that a brand is a promise made, a product is a promise kept, and marketing is a promise shared. We believe these are all one experience. By understanding your promise, you’ll attract the right kind of customers.
Great brands are clear about what they stand for and organize their business around it. For example, Walmart isn’t known for its customer service, but for its competitive prices. That is their promise, and if they spend money improving their customer service, it will only drive their prices up.
The Giant Shoulders’ MVB process helps entrepreneurs focus on what is most important to them: How they are different from their competition and why customers should care.
While turning an abstract idea into a tangible brand is very important to get started, it isn’t yet the full expression of what your brand can grow into.
SEE OUR Brand WORK →
Our co-creation process to get you further, faster.
Branding is difficult. It requires turning an abstract idea into something tangible that connects emotionally. It involves making a series of big decisions, including: What is the name of your business? What are people going to remember you by? How do you describe yourself? What should your logo look like?
We believe that the best way to serve our clients is to work shoulder to shoulder answering tough questions like these collaboratively. Time and resources are always in short supply, so we have to be creative in how we deliver the most impact in the least amount of time. Our process is designed so that we make all key decisions in-person during workshops, cutting time, and finding clarity in the chaos.
This makes our MVB process faster and cheaper, but most importantly the process makes the brands we build are more effective, more impactful, and have greater buy-in from all stakeholders.
Our process can bring a new brand to market in two months. It is done in two parts, split by a co-creation workshop in the middle of the process. The first month is a discovery process where we find clarity in chaos. Through a series of exercises, meetups, and conversations, we work to discover and distill the promise.
During our co-creation workshop, your business leadership will collaborate with our strategists and creatives to develop the most effective visual and verbal brand. We designed a workshop around the hardest decisions that you’ll have to make so that our experience can facilitate and support confident decisions that set the brand up for success. Once these decisions are made, we spend the remaining month refining the direction and giving form to the brand.
We deliver tools that speak to your audience.
At Giant Shoulders, we believe in creating impact. While we take pride in making beautiful in-depth brand books, we focus on building the tools that equip you to engage your audience with your brand immediately.
We’ve developed brochure websites on platforms like Squarespace to quickly and cost-effectively bring a brand and message online. We’ve built decks for entrepreneurs who are pitching to investors and customers alike. We’ve also used the Minimum Viable Brand process to help a client align their team around the vision and promise of the company, and created an internal onboarding document.
What is next after your MVB?
A clear promise and well-communicated brand attracts the right customers but also serves as the north star of why you do what you do. Looking back at your own promise can be a great reminder, and guiding light for new team members to better understand and align themselves with the business.
While turning an abstract idea into a tangible brand is very important to get started, it isn’t yet the full expression of what your brand can grow into. That is why we test, measure, collect feedback and iterate after we help you launch. This is the best way to align your story with what’s important to your customers. We believe that brands are essential to building relationships, and the MVB approach helps you create impactful brands that are authentic and resonant.
Brands, like relationships, are built over time.
The power of brand comes from the relationships that are built over time. People come to associate a brand with an idea or an emotion by repeating key messages and fulfilling a promise. It took time for Nike to come to stand for ‘Just do it’, Apple with beautiful Design, Target with accessible quality.
Your brand will take time to grow. You can only make the best decisions you can today because you can’t control the future. What you can do today is focus on the things that make you who you are.
