Things you didn't know about branding - and why pitch decks are so. hard.

Find out more about Ceemo here: https://www.ceemo.ai/

Transcript

[EPISODE INTRO]

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard   

Today's guest is a consultant-turned-founder helping early stage startups figure out how to tell their story to get VC funding. We’re going to discuss both the challenges of creating a winning pitch deck and the importance of having a brand identity overall.

As it turns out, there is much more to branding than one might think. If your idea of branding is “pick 2 colors randomly” – and I’ve been guilty of that as well – this episode is definitely worth a listen.

What you’ll learn:

• How to create a story that will help you get funded

• The danger of overrelying on templates and what it takes to bring them to life

• And, finally, what founders get wrong about branding – and how that affects their startup’s growth

[TRANSITION]

Heather Lawver

Hi, I'm Heather Lawver, founder and CEO of ceemo.ai. I've been an entrepreneur pretty much my entire life, started my first company when I was 13. And I'm really passionate about how design storytelling, creative writing, and entrepreneurship all come together to help you explain who you are, what you do, and why it matters.

[TRANSITION]

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

You've helped founders raise over $12 million in funding, what are the most common pitch deck mistakes that you see when you start working with them?

Heather Lawver

We've actually crossed $20 million in funding now.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Congratulations!

Heather Lawver

Thank you! The most common mistakes I see, first and foremost, they don't have a story, which seems really fundamental. But we're so trained as entrepreneurs to think in terms of bullet points, or simple slides, and each slide has its own topic, and that's it, there's nothing there to bridge the gap from slide one to slide two.

And that kind of makes sense, because the last big innovation in pitch decks was Guy Kawasaki’s 10-slide template that tells you exactly what belongs on each line, which is great. But it's just a laundry list, it tells you what needs to be in this slide, not how to knit them together into something compelling, interesting and entertaining for the audience to look at.

So I like to help founders think of what's the story that knits them all together, what's the story that makes it human and relatable, and something that an investor is gonna get excited about.

The second big mistake is they use a template, which is fine, I run a template company, so I'm not against templates. But what I am against is where your pitch deck follows the template so closely, that it doesn't look anything like your brand, your identity, your website or your product.

Ideally, a pitch deck should be a lovely welcoming introduction to who you are and what you do. So that you create that seamless experience between when you meet the investor for the first time and give the pitch to when they go to the website to learn more, or explore your product. So you need to have a compelling story.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard 

Brand consistency makes sense. But to play the devil's advocate a little bit shouldn't be your job as a founder to make sure that the story is a part of the presentation. And the deck is just like the background for the bullet points. 

Heather Lawver

To some extent, yes.

In the classes I teach at different accelerators I always like to say that you as the presenter, and Narrator your founder should be Beyoncé. And your slides are there as your backup singers. They're not the star, you are.

And ideally, this slide should be there to reinforce the chorus of whatever it is you're saying, not your entire script.

It's not a teleprompter, it's just there to reinforce and highlight whatever your most important statements are.

But a pitch deck is an example of your ability to sell. And an investor wants to know that you can sell your product in a way that's consistent with your market. So that consistent brand appearance is about maintaining that example of being able to sell and part of being able to sell is maintaining consistency so that you stay recognizable to your customers.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

Okay, but do I really need a story to sell to my total addressable market? Shouldn’t I just go with the features. <*snark mode engaged*> No? What? Tell me more. Why do I need the story?

Heather Lawver  

Everything in life is about stories. Everything. The most successful brands are about stories. The way that you explain what those features are depends on the ability for your audience to understand how those features affect them as people.

That's all storytelling, the way how we view who we are individually as human beings. It's about the stories we tell ourselves. The human brain is hardwired for stories. So the best way to connect with your audience and convince them to part with their precious dollars is to tell them a compelling story.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard 

That makes sense. And yet storytelling is this fuzzy, nebulous concept that can mean anything from “Find your why” to hero's journey. So to be clear, like are we taking our prospective investors on a hero's journey?

Heather Lawver 

In a way, yeah. But it's about identifying who that hero is. Lots of founders think that they need to be the hero on that journey and that they need to be looked on as the business equivalent of Superman, who can, you know, leap tall buildings in a single bound. 

But I think what's most effective is for the audience to feel like the hero on that journey for the investor, to get a taste of what it's like to be that hero.

And if you can excite them to feel like they're solving a big problem and on top of that, they also get to make a lot of money while doing so, I think that's way more engaging. Because that builds up that sense that, oh, my gosh, I've got to dive into this opportunity before I miss out because investors love nothing more than to kick the can down the road, to wait, to watch for more traction, because it derisks the investment for them. So their motivation is to keep watching, keep waiting, whereas for the founder, their motivation is “I need the money right now, please.” So I think there's no better way to overcome that bridge in delay by making the investor the hero on that journey.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Okay, so it sounds like the story, ideally, creates some urgency. 

Heather Lawver 

Definitely.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Can you maybe –  not to put you on the spot or anything, but can you maybe give an example of like, what that urgency can be? Excitement is nice, but like, wouldn't it make sense to wait a little bit?

Heather Lawver 

Yes, that is the tightrope walk for every founder, with every pitch deck, because you want that sense of urgency, but you don't want to appear desperate.

You want them to feel excited to join and like they're gonna miss out if they don't hop on the train right now, without ever giving the sense that the train is about to derail – and without it feeling artificial and fake either. So that is a very difficult tightrope to walk. And there's no magic bullet for it. It's totally different for every founder and every company.

But generally speaking, I like to frame it as around whatever your milestone is, whatever it is that you're raising money to accomplish. That's how you build that sense of excitement. So for Ceemo right now, our next big milestone is to build… it’s kind of twofold.

There's one side of it, where we're finishing up our algorithms, where we'll be the first in the branding industry, to use market data to influence brand creation. So we don't want to lose that opportunity of the first mover advantage. And we're early enough that that means the investors can join and get a really good deal on that, while we build rapidly on this algorithm. So the trick is to find some way that you're truly unique, and how that differentiates you within the market, and why there's a ticking clock on making that happen. That makes sense? 

I think that's where a lot of templates fall short, is they assume that every company needs the same 10 slides, or the same 10 slides in exactly that format. 

And I ran into that when creating our own platform, Ceemo. I tried to keep it tight because I didn't want to overwhelm the customer. But at the same time, pick a team slide for instance, a really easy way where I started getting tripped up in designing our templates.

The layout’s really important. But the layout changes dramatically whether you have a solo founder or co-founder, do you have a team that's three people or seven people, and the layout and composition of the site completely changes. But most templates I've seen give you one team slide with one set number of people and that's it.

So then you end up with an artificial problem when you're a non-designer trying to fill out this team slide template of “Oh crap, who do I include? Who do I not?” And that's totally beside the point. The point of a team slide is for the investor to get to know you and understand: do these people have the skills necessary to execute on the plan? But suddenly you're stuck wondering, oh my gosh, who do I leave out of my team? Because the templates are restrictive artificially. And that is part of a bigger problem with templates in general: imagine trying to do that with your business model, pricing scheme, your projections.

And so I think that too many templates end up feeling restrictive. When the goal of a good template is to give you frameworks to think about details in new ways. But if you end up restricting the user, you're not actually helping them accomplish that. 

That's the challenge: how do you create a template that helps the user understand the underlying purpose of the slides without putting them into a straitjacket that may not even apply to what it is they're doing? And that's exactly why Ceemo templates ballooned to 40 plus slides. Because I wanted to make sure there were frameworks for any possible design, any possible product type, any possible business model. And they all come with information that helps you understand the underlying purpose of this slide so that hopefully the end user can have a better understanding of which slide will help me convey my story to its best? I think that's where a lot of templates really fall short.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard   

What about storytelling prompts? Can I break a storytelling prompt – as a founder?

Heather Lawver 

Yes, yes. And that's a very interesting challenge. And it's what I realized. That's the second part of our milestones that are coming up. We've developed an idea for an AI pitch narrative generator, or pitch deck specifically, where the goal isn't to write the story or the script for them. Because if you go to ChatGPT right now, and you ask it to write a deck, what it spits out every single time is a bulleted list after bulleted list after bulleted list.

It's not a story. It's not a narrative. It's just a Kawasaki template template over and over.

What we're trying to do is take that hero's journey, for instance, take how a founder tells her own story, put it through a variety of different storytelling frameworks, and then spit their story back out, showing how you can tell the story of your company in a variety of different ways to suit whether it's a sales deck, a pitch deck, a series A deck, a seed deck, or an angle deck, using creative writing techniques to accomplish that.

Not to write the deck for them, but to help founders bridge that understanding of they have one way of looking at their company, and one way of telling their story. And hopefully opening up their perspective, and showing how you can say the same things in different ways to reach a different audience. 

[TRANSITION]

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard   

This is one of the cases where templates and prompts (or frameworks) can lead you astray. For websites, in most cases, that means following existing trends like short headlines, placeholder images and not providing enough information on your homepage. All of that without taking into account what your prospects need to hear to be ready to convert.

But as it turns out, when you're working on a pitch deck, the most common mistake is actually trying to say too much and overstuffing your slides with all the things your potential investors don’t need to know – yet…

[TRANSITION]

Heather Lawver 

Where founders get so beholden to the concept of totality, and a macro view that they think, oh, an investor just won't get why we're awesome, unless they understand everything, the entire history of everything we've done as a company. And if I don't convey that in three minutes, they'll never get it. And that's a mistake.

That happens a lot.

Because it's a misunderstanding of how storytelling works first, but it's also a misunderstanding of what's truly important about your company.

But I get it, because I've been a founder, I am a founder, and I totally get how I have fallen in love with the totality of what I see Ceemo could be… that it's very easy to forget and go, No, they'll get to that eventually, but they'll never get to that macro glorious view, unless I get them to accept the kernel at the very beginning.

And there's a class I teach at accelerators about this where I call it getting from idea to adoption. That that's all your pitch deck has to do, you have to get them to understand the idea, the core idea, the very beginning of it, and get them to the point where they're excited to learn more, that they're willing to adapt that idea as true and move forward, that’s all your pitch deck has to do but founders get so in love with the idea of everything that they can cram that into a three-minute template.

That degree of detail and specificity they think they have to cram into a three-minute pitch  and it just ends up with really long text heavy slides and pitches that balloon to 30 minutes long.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard 

Do you feel like there's a way to shift thinking, as you work through this for founders, to avoid the bloated decks and the multiple paragraph blocks and the everything is important mindset?

Heather Lawver 

Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of shortcuts so much as it is about education and helping founders think through the logical process of what's important in a deck, what an investor is thinking about, as they're reviewing a deck, and then helping the founder work through a process of reconciling the two.

I think the failing in a lot of templates is that it's all from the founder’s perspective. It's all about what the founder wants to say, and what the founders journey is, and founder, founder founder. And that further disconnects the founder from what the audience is experiencing, and what the audience cares about.

And with pitch deck, specifically, the audience is a potential investor. And a lot of founders don't have any connection with investors outside of just asking for money, so it can be very mysterious and frustrating, not understanding what's going on on the other side of that equation.

And so a lot of what we've done at Ceemo is trying to put that education into the decks that we generate, is helping them understand what is the investor thinking about at this stage and how can you use that information to better tailor your data, your story, the content you're putting in there, and then streamline it.

Another aspect of that one guiding principle we have as a company is my favorite Albert Einstein quote: “If you can't explain it, simply, you don't understand it well enough, yet.”

Being able to explain what you do, who you are, and why it matters very quickly and succinctly is a way to prove to an investor that you have a deep understanding of whatever it is you do.

So a giant block of text to an investor is going to say, you haven't really figured this out yet.

But a quick, informative, truly meaningful sentence shows that depth of understanding and mastery. So as much as possible, as a founder, you want to streamline that information and make it extra impactful and extra meaningful in as few words as possible.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard 

I love that you called out “meaningful.” Because what I see happen a lot is “let's make it short” means we also make it so high level that there's no way to even understand what the product is supposed to do.

Heather Lawver 

Yes, that's a big problem. I've seen that over and over and over again. And one of my favorite games to play when founders get stuck on that is to say, borrow the slogan, where you take whatever slogan you've come up with, completely divorce it from your company, your logo, everything else and look at it on its own – and see if you can tell anything at all about who you are, what you do, and why it matters.

Start to put it with other companies' logos, see if it could be just as little or just as much with someone else.

And if it's not clear, if it's not actually conveying any information, it doesn't matter that it's short. Because it's not meaningful. It's not helpful. So why would it take place?

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard   

Because it looks good

Heather Lawver 

Yeah, conveys a feeling, or brand identity. No, it needs to convey useful information. And if it's not doing that, it's not serving you.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard   

Okay, so how do you help founders go from super high level to back to like this is meaningful, short enough. And it actually is differentiated.

Heather Lawver 

It's quite a process. Because short simplicity is very difficult.

I usually start with… when I did all this manually, we'd start with a word association game and try to differentiate:

•  what is it exactly that you do

• What is it exactly that the customer feels and experiences during the pain point that leads to them discovering and purchasing from you?

• And where do those two things meet?

And ideally, between the company name, and a short slogan, we should get an understanding of who your customer is, the pain point they experience, what they are purchasing and why.

And it's very difficult to do in a small number of words. But it is doable.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard   

Okay, that sounds like a lot to fit into one sentence.

Heather Lawver 

It is, it is definitely a game of brevity. It's very difficult to get right. And then believe me with revisions, I inevitably see founders come back and keep adding more words to it all the time?

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

Yep. Okay, well, in that case, what does get it right look like? And how to know when to, like, sit on your hands and not add more words?

Heather Lawver 

Um, I like to think of getting it right as when you can say that one sentence and you see the investor have an aha moment that they feel and they seem intrigued. They're excited to learn more, but they know enough that they understand what market you're in, the motivation of your customer and again, what your main differentiator are. Doesn't mean they have to understand the entire picture, doesn't mean they have to, in a sentence, become an expert, whatever it is you do, it's just enough that you're laying a nice foundation of context, so that the investor then knows what to expect.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard   

So something we touched on was brand continuity. At which point have you done enough branding, to go out there and start talking to investors?

Heather Lawver 

I like to think of it as you have the basic ingredients. So you have a logo that can fit in multiple print scenarios. I usually like to have a primary color, a secondary color, white and black. So that way, you can fit any possible scenario. You have a font suite, where you have a headline font and a text style, and you use those consistently across everything you do. You have a color scheme, and you know generally what color goes where and for what purpose. And then you have consistent design elements that you can use throughout your website, your marketing materials, your one pager, your pitch deck, and that’s pretty much it.

The only other thing missing from that is what I like to call a brand identity, which is… Imagine a personality for your company, a guiding principle about the general tone of voice and the feeling and vibe you get from it. So one way I like to help founders think of it is: if your company were a celebrity, who would they and making sure that your tone of voice matches that as close as possible. If you’ve got those things, you’re good.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard 

Well, that sounds like a surefire way to have an identity crisis, especially if you're pre-seed and you go “What, I need to have fonts now?!” When do I need need it?

Heather Lawver 

Need need it. Um, I like to think of having it whenever you need to start marketing to people. Because it's all about maintaining that consistency of who you are and making sure that you're memorable and you stand out.

And what I think is most important about having a brand identity is, it starts to do the work for you. Where it can give cues about what industry you're in, it can give cues about who your target customer is. If it's done right, give cues about where you are in development, what your business model is.

And if you have that solid brand identity, a) you're going to be more memorable and b) it can be a way to subconsciously start telling your story before you ever even open your mouth.

So, at least when I'm creating a company, it's one of the very first things I do. Because it also helps me organize that thought process of a basic business model: who's my customer, what demographic? Are they in? What do they care about? What speaks to them? What's the emotion of their pain point, what's the emotion, when they discover me and I solve their problem?

A really good brand, to me, helps me organize those quintessential ideas that underlie a solid company and then gives them form.

So I think the difference, though, is when you do it, so in my scenario, at least, I've already done that research to some extent. But maybe I'm weird that way. Like, before I started Perfectly Pitched, I had already been working with those customers for about three years in a volunteering capacity, so I had done the initial customer discovery already.

But if you haven't done that customer discovery, then I would say, that should be done before you do the branding, because those two kind of need to go together. But a well-done branding process can also help you figure that out. But unfortunately, a lot of brands, the way a lot of brands are created, they don't really think about that it's more about just pretty colors. So who knows.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Okay, so tell me more, I want to know how figuring that client branding can help me figure out my market?

Heather Lawver 

Yeah, absolutely. Um, well, at least the way I do it, both manually and with Ceemo is we spend a lot of time looking at the human angle of how you're going to be perceived, how you want to be perceived, and who your customer is.

So we spend a lot of time on thinking about how the customer asked what other companies they purchased from, what their demographics are, what their life is like. Because to me, at least, that tells me a lot about what other brands is my brand going to be sitting next to like on a shelf or on social media, what is it that speaks to those customers so that I can make sure that I appear the same way.

And all of that is a customer discovery process of making sure that your assumptions line up with actual behaviors.

A great example of that, I had this one client at one point where they were in the healthcare industry. And they were running a diagnostics company. And it was all about cancer testing. And they could not get it out of their head that their logo had to be red, red, red, red, nothing but red and really dark, like oxblood red. And I kept thinking, you're not putting yourself in the shoes of your customer, because in that context where you're going to be seen, every color they liked was blood, mortality, death, like the context of that color for their customers were all negative.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

But also Red Cross though?

Heather Lawver 

That's slightly different, the brighter, happier red. And there was a reason behind why the Red Cross was designed the way it was in order to stand out on a battlefield. So there are different historical contexts there versus diagnostically. So yeah. And the cultural context of red at the time that that was originally developed. But yeah.

So it was very clear that they were thinking about it from the founders perspective, not from the perspective of the customer. And that's where good customer discovery comes in, is helping you step outside of yourself and into the shoes of your customer so that you understand how they're perceiving you. And ideally, a good brand should be built from that perspective, not the founder’s. 

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

Okay, slightly snarky follow up question, can you just use colors?

Heather Lawver 

You could do that. But your brand's not going to be as effective as if those colors had strategy and meaning behind them. Because those colors could be just useless and pretty. Or they could be conveying something that's unique about you.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

For example?

Heather Lawver 

Let's see, a really good example: I was working with a client who was developing a sperm bank of all things, for specifically the BIPOC community because she was a BIPOC LGBTQ woman who was trying to have a baby with her wife.

And she found out that less than 1% of all sperm donors in the US are black. And so they literally had next to no choice and no availability. And that drastically hurts anyone in that community that is having fertility issues or are a gay couple or anything like that. 

So she wanted to convey in the branding that it was specifically for that community, and to be inclusive, etc. 

We ended up using color colors that have a very specific cultural context to them to reinforce those feelings, while at the same time trying to overcome cultural sensitivities that prevent black men from being sperm donors. There's a lot of cultural animosity against it. 

And so she was trying to instill within the company in the educational programming, this sense of pride, that it's a contribution to your community, there is a sense of respect to it, and overall feelings of value and community within it.

So we pulled from colors that have a rich history to Africa, I based their color scheme on the original colors that led to the first creation of wealth in Africa, where Northern Africa specifically got rich mining what were the first purple and blue dyes in history, that now when you think of royal colors, most people think of jewel tones of rich deep purples, rich deep blues and reds. The reason for that is Africa. And so even though the average person wouldn't look at that purple and go off, it's Venetian purple, I know exactly what you're referring to, they still get that cultural reference of richness, royalty, well-respected, etc.

So her branding reinforces the same intention she has behind the educational component of her company.

So she could have just gone with random colors. But her brand reinforces what her underlying mission is.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard 

What about strictly for profit organizations?

Heather Lawver 

Yes, color can still play a big part in that. A great example is the branding of Best Buy's. They had very specific ideas in mind of how they wanted customers to feel inside of their stores.

They chose colors accordingly. Blue helps people to feel calm, at ease, and that things are possible. But they wanted to counter that with keeping people moving. Yellow conveys energy, it helps people make decisions faster. So they chose blue and yellow specifically to have that sense of calm, but keeping people making decisions with yellow and energized.

So it all gets into what are your underlying goals? And how can we use color to reinforce that or convey a specific message. So even if we're not talking about reinforcing feelings of pride in Africa and your diversity, there's still ways that colors can help you achieve your goals even if that goal is making more money.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

If you could change one or several things about the way founders approach branding, what would you change?

Heather Lawver 

The very first thing would be feeling like it's not important. 

I literally the very first time I developed a class for an incubator was the program manager said well before you can teach a class about branding, you actually have to make them think it's important.

I totally get it. Founders are so busy. They have so many plates spinning in the air, that their heads are practically on fire, and why do they need one more thing to care about? But to me, I wish founders would realize your brand is part of who you are as a company.In that exact class that I designed for that incubator, I liken it to your clothing. If you were showing up to a really important make-or-break pitch, which would you rather show up in: a perfect custom tailored suits, for a pair of old stained dirty pajamas, which do you think is going to be more impressive, which is going to make your job easier, which is going to make you look like you belong in that room and carry the gravitas and experience and credibility to open that next door of opportunity?

I guarantee you, you'll have an easier time if you're in that perfectly tailored suit.

That is the importance of branding. Branding is the perfectly tailored suit for your company. It's what makes you belong in your marketing, can be what makes you stand out for the right reasons or the wrong reasons. It's so important. It's the same as clothes are the first subtle impression that you leave on someone that you meet your brand is the first subconscious impression of your company, so make sure that it's working for you, rather than against you.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard 

So how can I de-risk it? Okay, I'm sold on branding being important now. But how do we know like, does it work for me right now?

Heather Lawver 

Yeah, how you de-risk it, is in being mindful of the perception people have about you as a company. 

What questions come up most often when people react to you, and the way people perceive you, the subtle subconscious cues about how they interact with you.

And then you evaluate that with someone like me, who's trained in understanding those branding ques, and then what needs to be tweaked in them?

A really good example was a company that we actually volunteered for. We do volunteer brand work. It’s a company called IssueVoter. And they're a nonprofit. They are nonpartisan, and they help engage people with laws being passed in Congress and being able to express your opinion to your representatives as quickly as possible.

They had a really hard time raising money, because every time they sent out materials, people thought they were a for-profit company, rather than a nonprofit. And that really slowed down their ability to get donations because, of course, who's gonna donate to a company, right?

And they couldn't figure out what it was. And it turned out, they had been using a lot of the similar brand cues to political action companies and a lot of polling companies, so they look more like a for-profit company than they did a nonprofit.

And so we started doing polling, and sending out the branding to random people and asking them what their perceptions were of the company. And it kept coming back as for-profit, partisan, etc. So we kept that in mind while rebranding the company, redid the surveys.

And sure enough, then everyone knew that they were nonprofit.

So the trick is, in looking for what those misunderstandings are, that come up repeatedly, when you're engaging with public and your customers, trying to be honest, and evaluate what could be sending those signals, and then trying to tweak them, and then re-engaging with customers afterwards to see are you actually accomplishing your goals? Or are you just contributing to confusion?

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

Okay, two follow up questions. One, can you give us some examples of branding cues, like what does it look like in real life? And two, can you tell more about how you found people to call and how you made those two rounds of calling work?

Heather Lawver 

Yeah, sure. With IssueVoter specifically, it was really subtle stuff in some ways, and then really blatant in others. For instance, they weren't very even in their use of red and blue in their logos. And in American politics, those colors are very culturally coded, where red is always Republican, blue is always Democrat. And so since they were very heavily red, in politics, everyone assumed they were on the right, they were Republican only.

Their choice and typeface also looked slightly juvenile. So the assumption there was that it was about trying to get young people to vote. So things like that, that were very subtle at first glance, carried extra cultural meaning within their market. So then when we updated it, we made hard and fast rules that anytime the color blue was shown, the color red had to be shown in equal measure.

All of their buttons couldn't be one or the other, we had to introduce an accent color that didn't have those political connections. The typeface didn't look quite so young, it needed to be more professional, so that it was very clear, we weren't just for young people, that kind of thing.

So it's being aware of whatever cultural connotations there are with the elements you're using, and making sure that they actually fit within whatever your marketing.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Okay, so how did you find out that this is how the brand was perceived?

Heather Lawver  

Thankfully, the founder was fairly well aware of these issues, she just wasn't quite sure where they were coming from. But she had been cognizant of that while trying to fundraise, that kind of thing. So we then went about trying to talk to people, she had a lovely team of interns who did some polling online, on college campuses, that kind of thing. And then after we redid the brand, we started out sending out surveys to advisory board members, to users, and then again, repeated that with random people on college campuses. And surveys online.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

Okay, tell me more about this surveys online part. Because just in case, we don't have college campuses, right there, what can we do?

Heather Lawver 

Yeah. That can be a little tough to make sure that you're getting honest feedback outside of people who may be biased in your favor, like if you're sending out to friends, or whatever like that. But we use Google Forms. It was used a lot when we were trying to decide exactly what logo to go with.

We showed, for instance, when we had different iterations of the logo to be considered, we had them shown in a random order, and then had people choose whether they liked it, just liked it, etc, on a sliding scale. 

And they can offer feedback, we'd ask them pointed questions about stuff, like, what does this make you think of, assumptions about is this for profit non-profit. I can't remember every question we asked about that. And then we had posts on social media, that we then targeted to different demographics, and then paid to boost those obviously, so that we can get some feedback.

And it just pointed to those Google Forms, didn't cost a whole lot, got a handful of responses that were very informative, and went from there.

And then it took several iterations to go through it, and make sure that we got all the data we needed. But it was really helpful in guiding the design process and making sure that our limited perspectives were not sending it in a direction we didn't anticipate.

And those surveys did actually end up helping us with recognizing some cultural connections we weren't aware of, because of our limited perspective, and then tweaking those accordingly.

[TRANSITION]

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

Let’s pause for a second recap:

• Just like with copy, it’s all too possible to have design blind spots and not be able to anticipate how your brand will be perceived. 

• And not being able to just magically predict what your target market will think of your brand is not a big deal – as long as you’re willing to iterate and improve

You can never completely de-risk your launch – whether we’re talking about your brand identity or your copy. But you can get as close as possible to getting it right by iterating and gathering feedback. 

But first, you need to recognize that you have a problem. This is what Heather suggests you should do if you suspect your branding is not landing right with your audience.

[TRANSITION]

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

So in this case, I think it's great that the founder already had some ideas as to why the branding is not working. If you were to work with a founder, who's completely lost, like, no clue, it's like, something is broken. Is that the words? Is it the branding? How would you suggest they go about solving this problem?

Heather Lawver 

The first thing I usually suggest in that instance is market research, where you want to dig into who your top competitors are, and what are they doing, and how far off the mark are you from what your competitors are doing?

Because I guarantee you the biggest competitors in your industry, would have paid a lot of money to top ad agencies to do focus group testing out the wazoo to understand what market drivers there are among your customer base.

So it's very helpful for you as a founder to look at those top competitors. Look at who is in a similar stage of development as you and see what the similarities are there and see if you're standing out somehow, and maybe that's what's driving those negative reactions.

And that's what Ceemo… we’re developing algorithms to automate that process. Because that kind of research can be very expensive if you pay an ad agency to do it manually. But you as a founder can do it, across logos, look for consistency and color schemes, consistency and font families, overall styles and vibe, and see if you're within the same general family.

Now, I don't think you should just copy exactly what they're doing. But you want to look for what the overall trend is. I like to think of it as going to a party and asking what the attire will be. You don't want to show up to a black tie gala as if it's a pajama party. Same thing with your branding, you want to make sure that you look like you belong in the room, but when you're standing out, you're standing up for the right reasons. And not because you showed up in pajamas.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

So it sounds like there's a fine line to walk here as well as it was so many things branding. So in the room of a specific industry, what does standing out look like? If I'm trying to not look like I'm gatecrashing the party?

Heather Lawver 

That's a great question. And it will vary by every industry. But what I usually like to recommend is you look for what the trends are. So let's say healthcare is a good example, where the vast majority of logos are going to be blue or some shade of blue.

I would say, then look for what other strategic thing is it about you that makes you stand out? And how can we tie that to another color, or another typeface that is somehow in the blue family, or a tertiary blue.

For instance, if everyone else is doing blue, maybe you could do purpley blue, or teal blue, where you're still in the same family, you're still in the same feeling, but you're doing something slightly different. But whatever it is, I want to make sure that that difference is somehow meaningful, is somehow carrying some strategy behind it.

Just thinking of an example… Another company that I worked for, they had three main pillars of what their topics or services were that they covered. And so the number three was very important. We ended up designing their logo with a typeface that had three lines to it. And so every time we talked about the brand, it was always in threes, they have three colors in their colors and three lines in their logo. And so that stands out. So if you can find some way to look like you belong, then stand out for a strategic, artistic and meaningful reason, that could be a great way to look like you belong, like  you're not crashing the party.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard 

Okay, and now you're turning your knowledge into something scalable, that can do this for our founders without your direct involvement? 

Heather Lawver 

Yes. Which has been a lot of fun. But also quite a process. Yes. Because now I'm in the exact shoes that I have helped other people. But yes, what we're doing at Ceemo, we've partnered with Crunchbase, to automate the market research side of things specifically, where we're developing an algorithm that will trawl the most recent investments in your industry. And you can identify who your top three competitors are.

And we will dig into that look at what are the branding trends that are securing investment most recently in your industry among founders who are like you, and use that to inform your brand and combine that data insight with your specific strategy as a founder.

So we ask you to choose three keywords to define how you want to be perceived by our customers or user base. And between those two things, we generate a whole brand book with a wordmark logo, a color scheme and a font scheme. And then to help make it easier for you to apply that that brand consistently, we then take that new brand and apply it to pitch decks and soon other marketing materials like one pagers, letterhead, social media templates and even websites to fill in those gaps to make it easier for you to maintain that consistent branding.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

Well, I think the assumption is that the founders will know which three words they need to put in so that they can get the result they want. Do they though?

Heather Lawver   

The brand quiz is designed to try and help you understand that, so that you can think like there's prompting on the side that asks you to think about…close your eyes imagine it's five years in the future, so you're where you want to be, your company's a huge success.

Now imagine what it's like for that customer to see your logo for the first time. What is it that you want them to feel, or think consciously when they see your logo?

And so that prompting will help build those things carefully, they can browse through our list of keywords with accompanying icons that represent those feelings or thoughts, so that they can then choose them with some strategy or intention behind it.

And then they'll see how that guides the creation of their brand.

And if the colors and fonts aren't quite what they had in mind, they can always go back and put those keywords into a new order or choose new keywords and see how that influences the creation of their brand, so that hopefully they start to get a sense of how color, font, etc. combines with intention to create a brand that's meaningful for them.

[TRANSITION]

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard  

Thank you for listening!

I hope that this episode will help you overcome the blind spots that are making it so hard to create a winning pitch deck – and take into account both your target audience and your competitors as you work on your startup’s brand.

If you would like to find out more about Heather and her startup, go to ceemo.ai.

Sign up for my newsletter, The Lightbulb Moment Club, to get notified about new episodes and also to receive bonus content.

For this episode, it’s Heather's take on why it is so extremely hard to write your own pitch deck and work on your own branding. And as a consultant turned founder, Heather knows about it firsthand. 

So if you’re also struggling with writing any type of marketing collateral for your startup – it’s not you. It’s all a part of the startup journey.

Getting your branding to be on point is only half the battle. The next step is going to market.

In the next episode, I'm going to talk to one of my favorite marketers about what go to market actually is, how to reframe lead gen to help sales and marketing teams work together in harmony, and what it is that founders get wrong during those early days when they're just figuring their product market fit and their go to market strategy.