Challenge Coming into a new startup, my first task was to rebrand so that we could accurately represent  ourselves within the market. Our initial branding had been pieced together by the developers who  had built the product in the first place -- therefore there was no expertise, research conducted, and  much of the brand centered around what the four founding members preferred.

Selection Because the end user’s experience was entirely unknown to us, I decided to use the  storytelling tool in order to focus solely on their experiences, in their words. Because brands  themselves need to be stories that end users can resonate with and be inspired by, it made sense  to us to first start with what resonated and inspired our users by simply asking them to share  experiences in which they felt particularly connected to a brand or product.

Application To begin, a small pool of people who fit our target audience were included in user  interviews where we simply asked them to tell us about brands or products that they felt  connected to and why. Answers ranged from color schemes feeling fresh or innovative,  using humor in microcopy, or seeing ads that made them feel a part of something  bigger than themselves. We transcribed each interview, identified the commonalities, and grouped  them so that we could quickly assess the things that mattered most to the  interviewees. We noticed a trend of the words empathetic, fun, and intentional and were able to  feed those words right into our brand’s origin story. This way, right from the start, our brand was  centered around the ideals of our customers rather than our own preconceived notions.

Throughout the branding process we checked in with new target audience members,  asking them to share their stories so that they would be reflected. By the end of the  process, our entire brand was an accumulation of our user’s stories and was very well  received when launched.

Insight In previous rebrands, we had always started building upon the values and stories of the company  stakeholders rather than the end users, resulting in brands that didn’t quite connect to users the  way we intended. By acting as a vessel to share user’s stories, it was much easier for other  members of our target audience to see themselves in the brand. It also gave us a shared  vocabulary right out of the gate that expensive market research wouldn’t have uncovered as  efficiently. It also allowed us to uncover some new ideas about our product roadmap.

Approach When collecting stories, I would definitely recommend investing in transcription technology. :)  As for the process itself, it might have been more helpful to introduce the concept as an exercise  so that stakeholders could see the value. There was a lot of pushback about focusing on the user’s  stories rather than theirs. Otherwise, we found the tool incredibly valuable.

