What is Branding?
Branding Explained to Deep Tech Startup Founders.
If I ask you to explain to me what "branding" is in your opinion, I bet you would say: "branding is the name, logo, slogan and graphic charter of my company"?
In fact, that's just the outer skin of the onion!
Imagine we are all characters in a movie, life. By all, I mean each individual, but also each human-based organization: governments, administrations, non-profit associations and companies (from independent-individual consultants to startups, SMEs to large national, multinational, transnational corporations).
So if every organization is a character in a novel or a movie, called life, then the author or screenwriter must attribute to his organization all the characteristics of a colorful character.
Only memorable characters make a novel a bestseller or a movie a blockbuster.
And there can be no long-term memorization (of you as a person, your vision, your mission, your cause, your product, your company...) without emotion. Emotion cannot emerge without sensoriality and/or imagination.
To make the other feels an emotion, you must first feel that emotion. This is called emotional contagion (mediated by mirror-neurons). Like a radiator that heats and emits energy you perceive through your senses making you feel warmer, you must continually emit a range of emotions that you want other individuals in your space to feel. Thus, these individuals will have towards you the emotional attitude that you wish to obtain from them.
Why ?
Because we only remember the characters who make us feel emotions, those with whom we identify or those who make us dream and who are projections of what we would dream of looking like (whether these projections are attainable or not like superheroes for example).
Your organization, once introduced into its spatio-temporal world (your cultural, social and economic ecosystem) must deform the latter. This distortion is measured by your imprint or emotional weight, ie your ability to emit emotions, emotions that will mark (distort) your space-time. If you do not radiate emotions, your space-time will not express emotions in response to your presence, ie you do not impact your space-time, you do not exist! I repeat you do not exist.
Be a Sun for your Earth (ie your customers).
Branding is the art of designing the attributes that will make your organization a colorful character with an emotional weight, a remarkable and memorable emotional imprint in its playing space.
A novel or film character has an identity that will be based on:
- his personality (expression of his psychology ie his way of thinking based on his values, his way of speaking and behaving in public, his way of dressing, his cultural tastes, his mores)
- his history, his network of friends and allies, his adversaries and enemies
- his country, his land, his environment
The branding expert therefore thinks of the organization as a fictional character by including its adversaries and enemies who are also colorful:
- The King's Four Musketeers would be nothing without Cardinal Richelieu and his guard (or The Jedis without Darth Vader and his stormtroopers).
- The Avengers would be nothing without Thanos
- Batman and Robin would be nothing without the Joker, the Penguin and the other villains.
- Steve Jobs and his Apple would be nothing without the supervillain Bill Gates and his Microsoft.
Dear scientists and engineers, founders of deep tech or high-tech startups, you have been deformed by your initial education and your career in R&D. You have devoted years, even decades, to master critical, rational and Cartesian thinking, which has made you discoverers-inventors that ordinary mortals would gladly call a genius.
But at the same time, this ordinary mortal evolves in a completely different sphere, that of emotions and human relationships. Your education has made you a stranger to the world of emotions, to the world of ordinary mortals. However, you scientists and engineers represent only a tiny minority of Humanity (less than 1% of the population) and this in all developed societies. And at the same time, what you have set out to develop and offer to the world will ultimately address and benefit ordinary mortals.
You must not only speak to this ordinary mortal from the very beginning and throughout your entrepreneurial adventure, but above all, you must speak to him with a language he understands, the language of emotions and the imagination!
You need a translator, expert in the conception and orchestration of human emotions, an expert in the imagination. This translator is a branding expert.
Imagine if you were the inventor of the 1st functional submarine in history, and that you had as an expert translator, Jules Verne in person with you?
Do you think that with the help of Jules Verne your startup would have been ignored, worse despised?
With Jules Verne, your adventure would have benefited from a grandiose, exhilarating and extraordinary staging that made millions of people dream. This is branding.
The name, the logo, the slogan and the graphic charter are only the title, the catchline and the visual of your entrepreneurial adventure movie, certainly these elements are important … but are not the content of your adventure.
Another parallel:
A great King at the head of a prosperous and powerful kingdom has a standard, a flag of his own.
But it is not this standard that makes the King a great monarch.
But this standard alone reflects the greatness of the King and the prosperity of his kingdom.
The role of branding is to help an ambitious King ensure that his greatness and accomplishments can be recognized by the mere sight of his standard.
This is branding.
CALL TO ACTION
You are the founder of a Deep Tech or High-Tech startup, and you are now convinced that your survival and your success will be driven by a bold Branding, contact me, let's discuss it.
Dr. Ari Massoudi https://www.linkedin.com/in/arimassoudi/
Read more about Branding for Tech Startups here at https://www.episteme-entrepreneur.com/blog/deep-tech-startup-founder-branding