Our Crowdfunder.co.uk Campaign - Pledge your support today!

 

 

 

Hello Brand Builders : 

We have launched a campaign on Crowdfunder.co.uk to get enable us to hire our branding/marketing team to populate our new Brand Database with the competitors of our Crowdfunder.

READ ON IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE.

OR

GET FREE COMPETIVE ANALYSIS WHEN YOU PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT HERE

OUR PROJECT : A BRAND DATABASE
We are building a Brand Database for small businesses to have access to affordable ££-£££ competitive analysis. A traditional branding agency would charge you £,£££-£££,£££ to build your brand for you. 

With the funds we will hire 3 marketing graduates for 6 weeks to populate the Brand Database with Brands so we can launch our site and our first Brand Strategy Tool. 

We want to put YOUR COMPETITORS in our Brand Database first so you, our Crowdfunder Supporters can receive full benefit from our first Brand Strategy Tool on the day it is launched.





HOW THE BRAND DATABASE IS KEY TO HELPING SMALL BUSINESSES
We excel at making people happy about shopping and we want to show you how you can create your Brand Proposition, Story, Values Culture & Vision through an analysis of your competitors. Our tools do this. The Brand Database is connected to each brand strategy tool and when selected, populates each tool with the competitive information for you, enabling you to leap over the branding learning curve and position your brand in your market with an informed point-of-view.

OUR FIRST BRAND STRATEGY TOOL :
Our first tool is a Brand Proposition tool. You'll learn what your competitors offer to customers in exchange for their business and which brand offerings you should focus on to have a chance to be successful in your market. You'll then position your brand in amongst your competition by the value of importance that each offering has for your business and to your customer. At the end of the step-by-step tool, you'll be able to download your results as a presentation-ready graphic. This is Branding 2.0.





WHY WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT :
1) It has always been our plan to initially populate the Brand Database with Brand information before we launch. We want to make a positive financial impact for every business that uses our Brand Database, so we've decided that we should fill the Brand Database with Brands that our Crowdfunder supporters have identified as their competitors, so they can receive full benefit from the first tool on the day we launch.

2) Our Brand Database will later be populated by crowdsourcing and, or by hiring our Brand Concierge service to populate the tools for you. This is a unique opportunity to receive some traditionally expensive competitive analysis for a truly low price.

3) Our Brand Culture has a mentoring facet : Everyone on our BrandStarMe team has mentored graduates into competent, confident human beings who now love their careers. We'd like to do our part and put some graduates into the workforce in a field they actually studied.

OUR BUSINESS :
We are bringing affordable branding to small businesses, which is an underserved market. So many businesses are failing and our tools can help small businesses audit their brand from a customer point-of-view. We want your customers to love you, believe in you, trust you, go to you and recommend you.
We aren't designing logos or brand identities, we only focus on helping businesses create the vital brand strategies they need to become more successful businesses. After you have a solid brand strategy you can then re-design your logo and market a brand identity that truly suits your business.


OUR BRAND CULTURE :
"Our Team is Your Team" Building a great Brand is about focusing on what your customer needs and wants. In that spirit : Our attention is focused on all aspects of what what our customers' need to build their brands. We want you really enjoy working on your brand.

(A not-so-secret-secret : successful brands work on their brands every single day, that is why they are successful)
Once you like/love your brand you can live it and then you'll want to work on it everyday too.

WHY WE ARE DOING THIS :
After 17 years of designing stores for high-end and luxury retail brands for my full-time profession and gifting my time to startups and small businesses for branding strategy sessions; I found that I could make clear and quick impacts in peoples livelihoods, by running their business or idea through my branding methodologies. I really enjoyed helping entrepreneurs align their business to a brand they could champion, so I founded BrandStarMe and recruited some talented branding enthusiasts to build it with me.
We turn businesses into brands. Support us to help us bring this vision of affordable branding to small businesses.

Check out our Branding REWARDS HERE.

RECIPE DELIVERY! The new grocery shopping.

I needed dinner inspiration. At some point everyone needs it.

Of course there is online grocery delivery and Waitrose seems to have an endless selection of prepared meals, but frankly, I am bored of online grocery shopping and in-store shopping. Waitrose prepared meals have lost their appeal.

I want to cook and end up with meals that are an explosion of flavour and taste. 
I went in search of the new grocery shopping and 'Recipe Delivery' is where I have found my inspiration.

Recipe Delivery is a tasty business model. 
I have been exploring four UK based startups seeking to restore your domestic god and goddess status in the kitchen.

On my short list of services to try are HelloFresh, Gousto, Jessica'sRecipeBag and Dinnr.

All of the companies will deliver recipes with ingredients to your door for specific number of meals each week. The ingredients will be exact to eliminate wasted food and most of the meals take around 30 minutes to prepare.

The variation of each business model can be found in the details, both on their sites and digging beneath the surface.

I looked at aspects that are important to me, such as selecting recipes for my bag/box order, perusing ingredients, delivery days, mixing vegetarian with non, exotic ingredients and prices.

You may want to consider a few of these details before you select your Recipe Delivery service.

Delivery days :

Jessica'sRecipeBag delivers on Monday evenings

Dinnr delivers Monday through Saturday and has same day delivery

HelloFresh and Gousto deliver on Tuesdays

 

Prices of ingredients and delivery : 

Since I had a refrigerator full of vegetables and Gousto had a downloadable recipe list, I decide to start soft and both shop and cook the first week. I checked prices of a complete DIY meal in comparison with a delivered recipe meal to see if customers were getting charged for a premium food delivery service and if they were getting value for money on the groceries.  

The simple answer is you'll be getting charged the premium delivery service as expected and getting charged above retail prices on the food as well. All of these services are fledgling and they probably aren't yet getting access to wholesale prices on food. When they do, they most likely will keep the savings to aid growth and the customer won't see the deals get better.

If you only want 1 dinner this week, but 4 the next, then Dinnr is your service. It does appear to be slightly higher in price, but it is costly to deliver one dinner at a time.

Grab Bag or Recipe Bag Curation : If the recipe is important, then you should know that HelloFresh and Gousto let you see the recipes when you order your recipe bag/box for the week. 

Dinnr doesn't spell out their recipes or ingredients, but on their site you order each meal separately so it isn't an issue and pictures sell the dishes well. They also have starters and desserts, which the other services don't have.

Jessicasrecipebag just lets you order a bag of meals of their secret curation. There are lots of images on the site of the types of meals one can expect to receive, but it looks like 'comfort food' reigns here so I am not sure if this service is for me if I can't see what is going to be delivered to my door.  

Seeing the recipes on HelloFresh and Gousto have the added benefit of indicating the number of calories/fat/carbs/protein on each recipe.

Since this is a branding education-esque blog, I'll point out that Jessicasrecipebag acts more like a parent brand, where they give you what they think is best instead of the peer-to-peer model of letting you decide if you would like to order what is on offer by revealing the week's recipes. It is rare to go into a restaurant and let the chef make you whatever he feels like, unless you are paying for the privilege and even more rare for a grocery delivery service to pick all of your groceries for you. It simply doesn't happen often in food service, thus a brand needs to be aware that hiding their recipes may put some people off making that first order. Trust comes after the customer enjoys their first order.

Even seeing the recipes I managed to miss something important to me. In the 5 recipes I made from the downloadable Gousto recipes, 3 out of 5 had onions in the ingredients, of which I am not a huge fan. I didn't even realise it until the third recipe. 

Ingredients - everyday ordinary or are we seeking something more unique in a service :

Once I began thinking about the onions, I explored the ingredients and recipes of each brand further.

Each brand had recipes that I could order from a local takeaway. Maybe it is knowing how much salt is or isn't in the food because I have the pleasure of preparing it, that is at the heart of the Recipe Delivery business model. Or does it offer the opportunity to be more?

Now that I am engaged with the business model, I want more. I want to cook with flavour and lots of it. I want to try recipes of cuisines that I don't currently know how to cook and learn how, but I want them to taste better than my local takeaway. I want to be a burgeoning master chef in my own house!

Two of the recipes I tried from Gousto were slightly Eastern Asian in design and taste, but I was left a little disappointed that extent of exotic ingredients was a little fish sauce, rice noodles and bean sprouts.

There is real opportunity for one of these brands to breakaway from the pack and inspire the home cook with authentic meals that are flavorful works of art. Give us recipes with hard-to-find, expensive ingredients that expand our taste buds. Give us a reason to choose your brand over another by giving us ingredients we can't find ourselves at Sainsbury's. Build a little story of origin or discovery that we can share at the dinner table. Engage us, delight us and we'll be your biggest fans.  

HelloFresh is moving in this culinary direction. It has stories about cinnamon and chocolate and begins to make the ordinary, extraordinary with a slight twist of ingredients. Unfortunately I just missed two weeks of great recipes. This week they have comfort food and I see a few onions, so I'll try them out in the near future.

The recipe bags - a little customisation would increase conversion

One thing I have noticed about all 4 of the Recipe Delivery services is that there is no way to indicate that you don't eat pork, or that you are trying to omit meat for one meal a week and you'd like one meal to be vegetarian to expand your palette a bit more. I have an entire cookbook devoted to vegetarian meals, but still struggle to make a meal from it. I'd welcome a little help as long as I didn't have to endure 3 meals a week that are vegetarian. 

Some customer customisation would be a great feature to see in the future of these brands. A 'I'd like to try seafood once this week' bag or the 'no comfort food for me please' bag would make it more interesting.  Even a way to indicate upfront dislikes would help the brands to understand why a loyal customer takes a week off.

I plan to try each of the Recipe Delivery services in the coming weeks. I really enjoyed cooking the Gousto meals, learning how much lentils to serve for two people and knowing how many calories were in the meal I was serving. I am sure I will be delighted in ways I didn't imagine. 

Happy dinner exploration!

What is your opening line?

One of my favourite new magazines is Stylist. I like it because it carries an attitude that any woman can be amazing in every area of her life with the right purpose, just as it's male counterpart magazine, Shortlist exudes that every man can be cool in his own way with no apologies needed. A recent article was brilliantly simple and begged to be my first branding blog because like the first line of any book the opening line of your brand whether it is written, visual or experiential will be the essence of your fledgling creation, which your customers will experience over and over like Groundhog's Day.

So, how does one sum up their brand in one VERY inviting opening line?

Take a look at the article 'The best 100 opening lines from books’ and I’ll decipher it.

First the title is DISARMING because it tells you it is going to give you plenty of literary popular culture that you can drop into conversations boosting your 'intriguing person quotient.'

Need to lighten the conversation and steer the topic? Find your commiserating smile of sympathy and try "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…" 

from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

 





Or have you wished you had a wild card, scene-stealing introduction? Try, "It was the day my grandmother exploded" from The Crow’s Road by Iain Banks. Hopefully you've read the book and have a ready analogy to offer to the topic at hand. Then once you start to make sense to those you’ve cleverly interrupted; introduce yourself. The important thing to remember will be to go with it without faltering.

 The second solid successful aspect is the LAYOUT. You can see the article is about a paragraph long followed by neat rows of colourful book covers the size of postage stamps. It is very INVITING and is UNDERSTOOD in one look.

Third, as you pass your mouse over mostly iconic book covers, the start of an opening line pops up in a magnetised window allowing a glimpse beyond the cover. You can decide if you'd like to read the rest of it by clicking through. There is no pressure to EXPLORE, but it is hard resist the temptation to flick through all of them. 

It is interesting that like a tweet, the entire sentence doesn't even need to be complete and you already have decided whether it is interesting enough to continue reading the rest of the “opening line.” Think what that could mean for your brand's opening line. A few words, a look, a colour can be enough to allude to your all-powerful presence. What does the word ‘house’ mean to you? What does it mean to you if I mention 'Nick Jones' and 'house' together? All of a sudden, 'house' is selective and exclusive on many levels. 

The fourth aspect worth highlighting is the article is an illustration of why brands like Vilebrequin and Havaianas have rocketed to the top and now define the once peripheral categories of apparel and footwear. They CHOSE TO PERFECT ONE TYPE of apparel and footwear category then have successfully redressed the type in an unfathomable number of options that appear to never lack inspiration.

Here the book covers represent someone's favourites, which is often a magazine's core purpose, to pass on the fashionable. There will be something for everyone here and thankfully it does not make you choose whether you are an eBook, paperback or hardcover person. Choosing to like as many opening lines as you want is FUN and UNCOMPLICATED.

The fifth aspect the article gives is subtle EVIDENCE OF why you should engage, read and TRUST them by giving you a not-quite-traceable quote offered by Jamie Klinger of Stylist. “As the first thing the reader reads, it's been said that the opening line sells a book whilst the closing line sells the author's next one.”

The wisdom in these words is timeless and transcendent. It can be applied to the brand you are creating once you have considered the genre you plan to author.

Maybe the biography section wouldn’t be your first choice in a bookstore, but consider that your new brand will be a biography between you and your brand, built on the vision of your brand story woven together with your character, style and values.

If "truth is stranger than fiction" and attentions are better diverted, then what is the ideal opening line for a brand?

Charles Dickens certainly has found his place in the classics, but with an opening line, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” you know it will be a story of trials and tribulations, which is not ideal for a new brand.  I think most would prefer if their brand was closer to Joseph Heller’s first line of his book, Catch 22.

"It was love at first sight."