Branding is so full of meaning that it’s quite hard to grasp the main concept. Basically branding is about matching all facets of your product (and surrounding services) to the needs of your customers. Start-up branding is closely related to positioning, in that it is about researching what makes your most relevant customers buy and recommend your product/service (for simplicity sake let’s talk about products here) and adjusting it appropriately.

It is a lot more than fancy graphics or the packaging of the product. It is everything from the relevant minimal feature set, to timing when to enter the market to colors, typography and logo.

Before I delve into the gory details, I will simply describe how I go on about it. By no means is this the relevant source for state-of-the-art branding/development but it is, by now, a honed process to get to reasonable results quite cheap and fast. And this is what matters in a cash-strapped start-up!

I consider this a side-project; at least in terms of continous attention. It is quite important, probably as important as product development (at least for B2C-products) – but branding is nothing that I am able to rush. If I am writing software for 16 hours a day instead of 8, I will get significantly further during that day. While thinking about a claim, naming or a smart graphical representation (aka logo) it is impossible for me to ‘push’ my thoughts. Depending on work-load, I set aside one or two days per week on average, which means maybe spending one full day on creating meaningful naming patterns for a product, but over the rest of the week, revisiting and reconsidering for a few minutes daily.

Right a the beginning of a project, while doing initial feasibility research and talking to all the stakeholders, my branding process begins. In an iterative process, I am considering what problem the product may solve exactly. Then, by thinking about related problems in my domain I reconsider if it makes sense to broaden or narrow down the scope of my research. It’s absolutely vital to repeatedly narrow and widen the scope until all related areas haven been well thought through. A wrong focus here is very expensive (at least in terms of ressources) later on.

After having the best scope nailed down, you are able to answer the most encompassing branding question: “What is the character, the basic feeling, the overarching solution my product stands for?”.
BMW identified “Freude am Fahren”/”The Ultimate Driving Machine” as their core value proposition. This doesn’t sound like much but from this condensed statement flows everything else -> a sportive color-palette, aggressive car styling, matching typography and such.

With CabChap things evolved like this:

1. Finding and refining the scope of the product (online market for on-demand transport). So it’s not just the demand-side of human transport or the offer-side, it’s not scheduled traffic like busses or trains. This will be refined along the way.
2. Deciding/making-up on a customer base. CabChap will most probably have 40+ year old, non technical cab drivers and on the other hand techno-freaks that wear a suite and are well versed with their iPhone/Blackberry.
3. What kind of characteristics are ideally suited for this product and these customers? I don’t know, but my guess is, that these two groups prefer most likely a friendly and competent site. So the feeling I would like to communicate is friendliness/chap”iness” and competence/cleanliness.
4. The results can be found in the name (CabChap); Cab, besides being an alliteration and easy to remember, communicates ideally the concept of on-demand traffic for everybody. So, by just hearing the name you may guess it has to do something with human transport. And this is already quite an achievement if you don’t plan to spend millions on building a brand like Coca-Cola or the like.
5. Secondly the logo carries cleanliness and – hopefully – competence. At first I opted for a serif-font to communicate british/old-style but figured later that this is no ideal fit. And, actually as an afterthought, I happend to stumble on the ‘ab’ part in ‘Cab’, which lends itself nicely to a graphical mark for icons, logos etc.
6. From there finding fitting colors (black, white, orange), derived from BlackCab, the orange Cab-Sign and matching styles in webdesign (simply, typo-based, little and concise content with lots of white-space) is just a small step.
7. If the end-result will fit together isn’t so clear yet, but with another iterative honing process I will get there eventually.

Now, I am tired. More thoughts on this later.