https://firstround.com/review/credit-karmas-ceo-built-a-sexy-brand-in-an-unsexy-category-with-no-pr-firm-and-a-tiny-budget-heres-how/

“Three Early-Days Exercises”

“1. Survey your founding team to find out who you are, not who you want to be.”

“What personality traits do we all share?

What words describe how we interact with each other?

What beliefs are keeping us here, working on this idea?”

“A brand is not something you can craft out of thin air. It has to reflect reality.”

“2. Don’t copy the brands you love — use them to position your company more precisely.”

“Seizing on the elements you really love about other brands can quickly lead you astray. Everyone in Credit Karma’s early team was enamored with Apple, and its obsession with perfection in particular. “We thought of course we should be like them,” Lin says. “But perfection works for Apple in a way that made no sense for us. We’re a company that always needs to be moving the ball forward rather than getting every single detail right. We need to be more accessible than Apple, and we have customers that expect us to always be iterating and improving.”

If I have one piece of advice for someone just embarking on branding, it’s to not strain yourself trying to mimic other companies you think are ideal.”

“Instead, use these other brands as foils to decide what makes sense to emphasize about your company, and what doesn’t. Maybe you want to convey Apple’s same emphasis on clean UX, but you need to iterate more. Maybe you love Amazon and want to project the same image of convenience, but your approach to customer service is different.”

“Create three columns on a piece of paper. In the first, put the name of a brand you admire. In the second, write the adjectives that you want to borrow from them. In the third, place the attributes you don’t want to embody. By running this exercise, you can use your favorite brands to more precisely position your own company without mistakenly following in anyone else’s footsteps.”

“3. Put your branding “don’ts” upstream of your other priorities.”

““Too often, talking about brand is punted in favor of tasks perceived to be more important like design and manufacturing,” says Lin. “This is misguided because your brand should inform every decision you end up making to set up your company. Knowing your brand will make sure you remain true to yourself as you navigate these other choices, make hires, build teams, grow.””

“Run exercises 1 and 2 listed above as early as you possibly can before you make other critical decisions. At the same time, make a concrete list of the choices you will never make at risk of compromising, changing or betraying what it is you stand for. These convictions will become your guardrails. “Write them down and never cross them,” says Lin.”

“The Habits of ‘Courageous Branding’

When Credit Karma launched in 2008, credit score companies weren’t just unsexy — they were loathed. Too many of them falsely promised free reports only to spam people who signed up. To break through this noise and differentiate themselves, Lin’s team had to venture far from their comfort zone in their brand messages and behaviors. These actions, taken together, defined a branding strategy that took serious guts.”

“Track down and reward your champions.”

“There’s a category of users you want to endear yourself to over time — you’ll know them because of their high NPS scores, their engagement with sharing and referral tools, and their penchant to write glowingly about you on forums and in blog comments. They’re people who will tell many others about your product without you even asking. It’s worth the effort to look for them and make contact when you do. “Your super promoters drive irreplaceable value for your business,” says Lin. “They buy more, go out of their way to provide feedback, stay longer, and refer their friends. Deepen their loyalty by bringing them into your community.””