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Branding, positioning, and product marketing

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

Quickly after starting at Headstart – an early-stage enterprise HR AI SaaS company – I noticed two major things.

Firstly, our brand identity was corporate and stale.

Just because we were selling to the largest businesses on the planet didn’t mean we were destined to be blue and bland.

Secondly, our mission was to prove that people are more than a piece of paper, and deliver the next generation of diverse, future leaders into business. It was more than a product – it was our responsibility.

How could we inspire action around such an important social movement with a brand look-and-feel that was stuck in the early 00’s?

Here’s how.

But first… Branding vs Positioning

Positioning, if you’re a regular reader, is about occupying a space in the mind of your customer. It’s about being The Thing For Someone (rather than something for everyone), delivering clear and differentiated value, and discriminating against bad-fit prospects.

Branding, on the other hand, is how your positioning is brought to life with the visual look and feel, your messaging and tone of voice, and the vibe you portray to the world. To be successful, branding has to be consistent and recognizable – once you’ve got it, use it – everywhere.

And positioning should always come first. Decide who you are, and then explore how you best show it.

Headstart case study

We started with refreshing our mission, revisiting positioning, and bringing life into our tone of voice.

We said au revoir to ‘Prioritise diverse candidates’ and hello to ‘Making recruiting fair’ – levelling up from benefit to value.

We leaned into contention, opinion, and focused on the dichotomy at stake between discrimination and fairness – we needed to find and activate the radicals in our target market, those who were motivated and engaged to change their approach.

So when it came to the visual identity, we knew what we had to do.

No more ‘typical business branding’. We leaned into a look-and-feel inspired by movements like Extinction Rebellion – bold, brash, chaotic, in your face. Unmissable.

Icons and design elements, sticker visuals, vibrant and bold block colors, big capital letters, thick bold sans-serif fonts.

We thought there’s no better way to visualise our mission than by including humans in our identity. Diverse humans: people of all races, disabilities, backgrounds, styles. Confident humans.

We knew we were onto a winner when we saw the mockup below.

Then… we put it into practice.

Our sales deck no longer looked like a sales deck… It was a manifesto. Big, bold slides. Eye-catching, almost distracting templates designed to surprise.

Our event collateral looked like handouts at a rally, not just a brochure.

Our social accounts were more like that of a cause, than a SaaS company.

We also asked the designer to deliver assets, templates, and elements that we could easily recreate in Canva, to scale brand design without needing continual design support.

So, how much did this cost? How long did it take?

Traditionally, brand redesigns cost tens of thousands, take months, and have to be signed off by a committee of people.

Well, no – that’s simply an unconscious decision that you make.

This took us about five weeks, from start-to-end. By focusing on reusable assets and templates, we could speed up the process, creating assets that we needed and asking the designer to perfect. And approvals were simple: just me and the CEO.

Did it work?

  • Qualitatively yes – we received tons of great feedback on it from prospects, partners, and folks in the market.
  • Quantitatively? Honestly, who knows. Covid hit just as we rolled it out, so we’ll never know.

But without a question, I’m really proud of how well this came together.

Branding tips for product marketers

Most product marketers will have a tangential relationship with brand: it’s something you might get involved in, but probably just as an aside.

But, product marketing really should be more involved in the whole process.

From identifying and bringing clarity to the target customer, to developing positioning that’s designed to resonate with them, and then representing the customer voice in the creative review room.

But there are a few things you can do to support the process:

  • Collate together customer research with business strategy – who your target customer is, why they’re the target customer, and what the opportunity is.
  • Provide positioning that links the value your target customers desire back to your product features and benefits. Without clear connections between them and proof points, you can make outrageous claims that aren’t supported by reality – which then creates a bigger gap between the brand and what you can deliver.
  • If you have some input over the branding process, push for a small review group – avoid branding by committee.
  • Don’t let the branding project run away. Use a tight, well-defined brief that delivers in multiple milestones.
  • Think about how you’ll use the branding in conjunction with positioning. Plan with deliverables in mind, but create a simple system of templates and guidelines that you can work with.

Good luck!

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