YOUR ULTIMATE BRANDING GUIDE

Komard's Klass

Lesson Plan for NFT Brands & Businesses

Prepared by Komards NFTS

OVERVIEW & PURPOSE

The purpose of this Komards Klass is to give you all the tools you need to properly build a brand for your new NFT/Web 3 small business. In this klass we will walk you through all the steps, thoughts, and processes for branding in an effective manner with a proper road map, to guide you every day, much like a business plan or a road map for a project.

WHAT IS A BRAND?

So, what is a brand? Well, a brand isn’t just a name or a logo that you use to distinguish yourself from others.

Your brand is made up of several elements, including the following:

• Name
• Logo
• Colors
• Fonts
• Design
• Voice
• Messaging
• Tagline
• Behavior
• Attitude

Your brand decides how other people will perceive you. Whether those people are within your business or outside it. All of them need to have a good perception of you.

First impressions aren’t the only ones that are important here. Second, third and fourth impressions are also really important. It takes an average of 7 to 10 times of being seen before potential consumers take the initial step to commit to a relationship with you. Thus I can't stress the importance of being consistent.

People are going to interact with your business. And, if they like what they see, feel, or perceive from you the first time around, that’s great. They will likely come back for more, which will make you even more successful.

All of that will leave the first impression on the people who first meet you. But, the way that you behave in the future will also affect how they see you.

However, if they happen to have a bad experience with you, don’t think that they will forget about it. In that case, you need to do your best to make it right and ensure that it never happens again.

Your small business’s brand has the same potential as household brands like Nike, Apple, or even Twitter and it all starts with the details.

Successful brands go way beyond a high-quality logo and a clever name. A unified brand fuses everything from products to consumers to positioning into the combined package that is your company.

IN THE DETAILS

Everything you do as a business and brand are as equally important as the details of your organization. Here are a few questions you should consider as you are flushing out your brand.

• What makes your brand unique?
• How is your business different from all your competitors?
• What do you do better than everyone else?
• What does your brand stand for?
• How does your brand make the world (or your consumers' lives) better?
• What 3 words best describe your brand?

Regardless of what your business is or does you need to understand you will never please 100% of the people 100% of the time. With that as a business you will always have to fight for your share of the market in the chosen niche.

What I mean by that is to look at Open Sea. Open Sea holds 80% of the NFT Marketplace business. Yet we see other marketplaces like Official NFT, Magic Eden, Rarible, all actively fighting for their share of the market. I promise they all have goals for how much of the market they are looking to capture.

You are not the only one who wants to build something great from the ground up.

Pay attention to the things your consumers want and need. Don't be afraid to ask your potential consumers what is a pain for them or what it is that they want or what would make their lives better. Use tools like polls and Google Forms to ask. There are a number of other FREE tools and services to get the feedback you need to ensure that you're meeting their needs. If possible do this before you launch your business and brand!

If you somehow manage to achieve meeting your consumers needs, you’ll still need to be ready to make any and all necessary changes in the event that your product or service doesn’t meet your consumers expectations. Remember it is just as important for you to be teachable, adaptable and willing to adjust as needed for your consumers as it is for you to deliver products and services that enhance the lives of your consumers.

Consumer Profile

The consumer profile worries about how other people feel about buying products and services from your business.

The consumer profile consists of three categories:

• Consumer Jobs
• Pains
• Gains

Consumer Jobs

You have to focus on the jobs that your consumers have done and currently do for a living. What can you provide as a product or service that will make their jobs easier?

Don’t just focus on the functional jobs. Emotional, social, and service jobs are also incredibly important.

Pains

You need to focus on identifying the problems that many of your consumers might face when they’re trying to get the job or task done or maybe even one of their goals.

Pains are the challenges that make their lives harder than they have to be. Whether it's their jobs or even their home life. At the end of the day it causes them to have to work a lot harder.

This leads us to our third and final point of the consumer profile:

Gains

A gain is the opposite of a pain. However, they also focus on the positive outcomes that your consumers expect when the job or task is completed.

This is the core of what you need to know in order to have a well-rounded picture of what your consumer profile is all about. It helps you to better understand who your consumers are and identify the pains they have.

Value Map

A value map takes up the second half of the value proposition. The value map focuses on how your products and services relieve pains and create gains.

With it, you can list:

Products and Services

Pain Relievers

Gain Creators

Products and Services

The products and services you are producing are really important. They’re what your value proposition offers to get the job or task done efficiently and effectively.

Pain Relievers

As the name suggests, pain relievers focus on how products and services can minimize or reduce the pains. After that, you can focus on how to create the gains.

That way, the consumer experience can be significantly better. This can be from an improvement to the quality of life, or even something that just simplifies a task or job.

Gain Creators

As mentioned above, after you’ve focused on how to minimize or reduce pain with pain relievers, you can move on to gain creators.

Gain creators outline how your products and services create the gains and why they are so beneficial to your consumers. And, by also focusing on how your products and services can ease pains and create gains.

Now, you know how to use the value proposition to create products and services that consumers need and want, it’s time to accurately depict it with the right visual design elements.

Bring Your Brand Life

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Your business’s name, logo, or tagline may be the first thing your potential consumers see, it needs to pack a punch.

If consumers initially perceive your brand as a cheap knockoff, then you’ll face a nearly impossible climb up the mountain to persuade them otherwise. Everything from your name to your typography needs to communicate consistency and reliability.

Let's talk about some of the core elements of branding and what you need to consider as you begin designing and making decisions about your brand and business.

Name

More times than not your business’s name is the first glimpse of it by consumers as such it carries a massive amount of weight. When naming your business it needs to be creative, descriptive, unique, and memorable, but not confusing. Make it original, but not so far out there that it causes confusion.

Some brands, like Nike, have names whose origins mean practically nothing to consumers. Think about it—what does Nike actually mean? In Greek mythology, Nike was a winged goddess who personified victory. While that backstory resonates with the Nike brand and the Swoosh, you probably never knew that and you likely still identified Nike with success and winning, thanks to the brand’s worldwide reputation.

Now, take Netflix, as an example. Immediately, without any previous encounters, we know the brand is about visual entertainment. Now, that’s not to say that Netflix is doing a better job of branding than Nike, after all they are different types of brands and businesses but it does show us that we’ll want to choose carefully and to consider the impact our business’s name will have on our brand.

When it comes to building your brand and naming there is not any one right or wrong answer. We have seen businesses with the most outrageous names and branding tactics quickly become trend setters. Just know that a name has the power to make or break a business.

Taglines and Slogans

More times than not businesses forget the tagline or slogan and are often times overlooked, an afterthought of a company’s brand, but this catchy, succinct phrase has the potential to shape your brand’s identity: Here are a few examples:

“The happiest place on Earth,” “A diamond is forever,” “The ultimate driving machine,” “Move the way you want.” “What's in your wallet?,”

According to Adobe Express these are among the top 30 memorable slogans and taglines in business. Chances are you know at least half of them. Why?

These short, memorable quotes leave a clear brand message in your mind. Your tagline or slogan is often one of the aspects your consumers will remember most about your brand, so this is your opportunity to transmit an important message.

If you look at Komards NFTS our message is clear, concise and direct. “Making Our World A Better Place!” From that you know that our goal is to aid in helping people and the world to be better and do better.

So how do you come up with the right slogan?

• Keep it short: A few syllables at most. The longer it is, the harder it’ll be for consumers to remember.
• Include a key benefit: Don’t focus on the product features—focus on the benefits. Rice Krispies doesn’t sell the flavor—they sell the sounds of their product with “Snap, Crackle, pop”.
• Differentiate your brand with something unique: What does your brand do differently than your competitors? Verizons “Can you hear me now? Good.” This puts focus on the quality of the service they provide while bringing awareness to the lack of quality of other carriers.
• Impart positive, powerful feelings: Use upbeat language that creates positive vibes. For example, Wheaties uses the tagline “Breakfast of Champions” to lift up their audience and leave them with strong, champion-like feelings.

Logo

Your logo has the potential to be as recognizable as your brand’s name. If you look at the Komards orc the colors contrast and show a rough exterior and gives off a sense of toughness, endurance, and perseverance.

Your logo deserves considerable thought, time, and attention to detail. This element of your brand is a non-negotiable part that you may want to consider hiring a professional graphic designer to create.

Take Apple, for example. While the Apple logo’s inspiration is still up for debate, the apple with a small bite taken out of it is now one of the most recognizable symbols on the planet. However, an apple itself does little to illustrate the product, value, or benefit that this brand delivers other than the name of the brand itself.

Some brands choose to use creative variations of their chosen names as logos. Look at eBay, Google, and Lyft are great examples of brands that typically use their business names as their logos.

If you had not noticed we have touched several times on being consistent. When designing a logo it is no different, try to make it consistent with your brand’s identity. The simpler you make the design, the easier it’ll be for consumers to remember. Think about it as if you'd never seen the logo before, and Ask yourself: “Would I be able to understand what this company does and is about?” If it’s too complex to pass this test, you might want to simplify the design.

Colors

Every color has meaning, and influences feelings. The psychology behind each color is complex and compelling with a variety of emotions and feelings. Every color has certain emotions and ideas attached to it that can and will impact your consumers’ emotions and behaviors. It’s not a coincidence that nearly a third of the world’s most successful brands include blue as the primary color in their logos.

That’s not to say that your logo should contain blue, look at the Komards logo. However, it does illustrate that a color’s impact goes way beyond personal preference. Here’s a quick rundown on the common perception of what colors mean:

• Blue: Calming, trustworthy, mature
• Red: Passion, excitement, anger, loud
• Green: Versatile, but often associated with money, nature, or life
• Orange: Playful, energetic, invigorating
• Yellow: Friendly, cheery, youthful, affordable
• Purple: Luxurious, feminine, cutting-edge
• Pink: Feminine, modern, cool, youthful
• Brown: Rugged, masculine, earthy, handmade, rustic
• Black: Slick, contemporary, luxurious
• White: Youthful, affordable
• Gray: Classic, serious

Your brand will likely incorporate 2 or more colors in its scheme, but try to keep things simple.

Try using a tool like Colors.co to find colors that work well together. You can play around with the different color harmony rules (analogous, complementary, monochromatic, etc.) to find the perfect combination of colors.

Then, use a tool like Web Accessibility Guidelines to check how ADA compliant your colors are when paired with each other. This tool will let you know if a color combination is hard to read and which similar colors may work better.

Typography

Your font will need to complement your logo, assuming there are textual elements to your logo. It should also be an extension of your brand. Most brands will have several complementary fonts for different uses: headers, secondary headers, body copy, etc.

We at Komards NFTS are in the process of designing our font in order to carry on the message of strength, perseverance, and honor, with a hint of Orc, lol.

However you’ll need to be strategic about which fonts you use and pairing them together to represent you in the manner you are looking for..

Searching for a font can lead to an endless tin foil tunnel as there are literally thousands of fonts, with new ones created and made nearly every day. Try to narrow down your options from the beginning with these basic font categories:

• Serif fonts: Serif fonts contain the tiny decorative lines at the end of each character stroke. These fonts are classy and easy-to-read.
• Sans serif fonts: Sans serif fonts don’t have the tiny decorative lines. This makes them a little harder to read, but they carry a more modern, stronger aesthetic.
• Slab fonts: Slab fonts use blocky letters, making for the perfect old-school logo or tagline.
• Script fonts: Script fonts look like cursive. They’re stylish but sometimes tricky to read, making them impractical for paragraphs of text.
• Decorative fonts: Decorative fonts are all about style, but that style often comes at the expense of legibility. Ever receive a wedding invitation that took you minutes to decipher? Well, it was probably using a decorative font.

WHY BRANDING MATTERS

Consumers interact with thousands of companies around the world across a variety of channels on a daily basis. From our morning commutes to our email inboxes to our favorite lunch spot, we are bombarded with branding and messaging from companies around the world, practically 24/7.

With so many brands and interactions, most consumers don’t have time to shape their perceptions of each business proactively. Their opinions and judgments are formed passively through each mention, glimpse, ad, email, interaction, and purchase. That’s why it’s critical to create a unified brand that stays consistent across borders, channels, and even languages.

Here are a few eye-opening statistics that’ll give you a sense of branding’s power:

• Consistent brand presentation across all channels has been shown to increase revenue by up to 23%.
• It takes 5–7 brand impressions before a consumer will remember your brand.
• 82% of investors see brand as an important factor in the companies they invest in.
• Color can improve brand recognition by as much as 80%. Research suggests that 85% of purchases can be attributed to color.
• 50% of job candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad brand reputation—even for a raise.
• 89% of consumers are loyal to brands that share their values.

Effective branding moves the needle; it’s as simple as that. You’re in complete control of your business’s brand. Every design decision, marketing strategy, press release, and color choice shapes your brand’s identity in your consumers minds.

Before you can transform your brand, you need to know your brand’s core identity—or what you’d like it to be.

BENEFITS OF BRANDING

Recognition

Recognition is not something that any business should ever take lightly. After all, if your business is solely recognized by a niche audience, then how will it ever be as successful as its competitors?

Businesses that have done a good job on branding and being consistent do much better than those that are unbranded. Your business needs strong branding, without it you will find it much harder to achieve success or the goals you have for your business. Remember we all have our own perception of what success is.

Your business must have numerous distinct qualities, such as your logo, your color pallet, what you offer, and everything in between. The goal here is to differentiate yourself from the competition and thus stick out in people's minds. This will enable the general public and people your brand is targeting to see it in a positive light and your branded business can gain a lot of recognition.

Build Trust

Trust is critically important. If your target audience and consumers trust you, then your business can truly prosper. We generally do not conduct business with brands, companies, or organizations who have not established some level of trust with us as consumers.

So, how can you build trust with your targeted audience and consumers?

Start by asking questions like:

• Would you choose a business that seems trustworthy, offers simple solutions, and seems friendly?
• Would you choose one that seems to make things unnecessarily complicated and hard?

We all would choose the first option because that's the one that has clearly put more thought into their...