You don’t need a logo for your app, you need a brand

Looking at the successful businesses of the 21st century, whether technology unicorns or digitally transformed existing businesses, it’s customer orientation that has changed the game. Our view is that this is no coincidence, customers are the meeting place between the unmet need and the profitable fulfilment that define business ideas. Through the customer, the business is the brand and the brand is the business.  

There is no better time in a business’s journey to connect these than at the beginning; it shapes the definition of success, determines what would be worth investing in, and, importantly, defines who is ideal to recruit for the organisation to represent what needs doing and how it gets done.  

The growth of three of the world’s largest companies by marketing capitalisation, Apple, Amazon and Google, is a reflection of organisations deliberate about their perspective on the customer problems they solve, the people they hire, the innovations they develop, and the innovations they build that evolve from the minimum viable product wrapped in a loveable brand.  

If growth-focused business is the profitable fulfilment of unmet needs, the reality is that the world doesn’t have a shortage of problems worth solving profitably, but the good ideas are no match for the competitive advantage of scale in winning the hearts and minds of customers. While the evidence is clear that technology can create an advantage against scale incumbents, what remains true is the nature of the customer advantage. The value of a minimum loveable brand experience is the secret weapon of the new players and competitors.  

In stark contrast, innovating to start a business in South Africa can seem more a reckless abandon than a well-thought-out path to growth and success. That’s largely because the headwinds for many new enterprises here are real and determine the likelihood of success. According to a study by the University of the Western Cape, South Africa has a higher start-up failure rate than anywhere else, as 70%-80% of small businesses fail in the first five years. 

This poses a considerable developmental challenge for new brands in South Africa, reinforcing that without quality, scalable solutions, and reliable partnerships to plug into businesses and expedite their needs, sustainable growth remains beyond the reach of many entrepreneurial ventures.  

A unique and distinctive edge you can execute in a high-innovation world 

The Kantar BrandZ study demonstrates the evidence that brand-led thinking inspires growth for organisations, and steer and shape their performance. In developing businesses from scratch, many have been built on new disruptive products, a process of product development that has evolved to the principles of the minimum loveable product. There is a growing understanding of the power of a minimum loveable brand, which is built on what is relevant about the product and how it is resonant with customer problems and distinctive in how it sets the offering apart ​from others.​ It is about building a brand system that delivers the relevance, resonance and distinction into what the organisation develops, what it delivers, how it delivers, how it decides on the ideal employee match for its ambitions, and how to enable them to work together to that end.

So what can help Africa’s new innovative businesses build?  

Alan Knott-Craig (cited on the list of top 100 young African business leaders) notes that one of the biggest reasons start-ups fail is because entrepreneurs end up “getting into bed with the wrong people”. New businesses need experts who can validate their strategies but, more importantly, believe in and support the vision and mission of the business.  

We believe that business is brand and brand is business. 

With every obstacle a good idea can encounter, businesses need every advantage, and in the world of top-line growth, brand-led thinking is the ultimate advantage. 

It is knowing that good ideas deserve good brands that inspired the launch of Yellowwood GI(x)GB Labs. 

Our job, to be done through partnerships, is to enable high-innovation and high-growth businesses journey into resonant, sustainable and human-centric brands. 

How we do this in the GIxGB Lab? 

We have built a three-cycle brand lab designed for rapidly growing, highly innovative environments, adapted from long-standing brand development principles: 

Lab 1: Data-led to inform insights and define market opportunities.  

Lab 2: Developing your brand by pinpointing its position in markets and the minds of users, customers, partners and employees.

Lab 3: Capturing opportunities and brand delivery inside your organisation and the key communication in the market for customers or users as well as potential partners. 

In each lab we use our proprietary Disruption® framework to facilitate choices for development of the critical distinctive elements of a brand.  The framework unpacks, identifies and verifies opportunities and provides a growth-oriented analysis of industry and competitors through the utilisation of data as a tool to unlock customer insights that can define ideal strategies.  

These strategically formulated assets breathe life into the brand positioning, allowing us to quickly take a brand to market — a brand that can shape the expectations and create relationships that encourage demand.

We use the years of brand building and expertise in brand development to preformulate architecture structures that can create choice matrices against the commercial ambitions that innovation enables.  

For more information, please contact info@ywood.co.za.

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