The document discusses developing brand basics such as a product name and logo. It recommends first listing brand words to define how customers should feel about the brand, creating a mood board with images to represent the brand's mood or tone, and selecting a limited color swatch that evokes the desired mood. Doing this preparatory work provides clarity before deciding on a name and logo to create a brand that satisfies the identified attributes. Examples are given of brand words for Amazon, Uber and Freshdesk and how colors can communicate moods for different brands.

2. Develop Brand Basics
Vishnu Gopal

3. Why?

4. Your brand is what most
customers encounter first.

5. & first impressions matter.

6. It helps to put a little bit of
thought into designing your
brand.

7. So, first: what do you need at
this stage?

8. Two things:
1) A Product Name
2) A Product Logo

9. But: before jumping into
deciding name & logo, let’s do
some prep-work.

10. Build 3 things to get more clarity:
1) List down brand words
2) Create a moodboard
3) Pick a colour swatch

11. Let’s go over those one by
one.

12. 1)List down brand words

13. List down a set of words that
customer should feel/think
about when they see your
brand.

14. e.g. what should a customer think of when he sees
the Amazon brand?
A: “A-Z”, “reliable”, “fast”, “quality customer care”,
“wide selection”, etc.

15. So write down that answer first,
and then work backwards to create
a brand that satisfies all those
answers.

16. More examples:
Uber: “professional”, “slick”, “fast”, “good service”,
“reliable cars”
Freshdesk: “fresh”, “new”, “different”, “the opposite of
boring”, “not business as usual”

17. Note: you can only do this after you’ve
decided the 1 customer segment you
should focus on for the Alpha launch.
See “Identify Customer Segment for
Alpha”

18. 2)Create a mood board

19. What’s a moodboard?
It’s a list of images & graphics from
the internet that best represent your
brand.

20. Pinterest is a good tool to use
to collect & display these
images.

21. Example mood board for a
meetings app:

23. This is about evoking in the customer a
certain “mood”. The same mood that
you want him to be in when using the
product.

24. Products can be serious & business-
like. Or they can be fun and playful. It
depends on the problem space &
customer needs.

25. 3) Create a color swatch

26. Every brand uses a limited
set of colours.

27. Let’s take SV.CO’s colours:

29. These colours are intended to
evoke a certain mood:
“Friendly”, “Young”, “Cool”,
“Bright”

30. As an exercise, look at the primary
colours of other brands you use. For
e.g. why does Uber primarily use
Black?

31. So this is what you have to do:
1) List down brand words
2) Create a mood board
3) Pick a colour swatch

32. Submit attachments with all this information.
1) A list of brand words
2) A link to the mood board
(on Pinterest or somewhere else)
3) A colour swatch