From MVP to MVB (Minimum Viable Brand)

Everyone in startups understands the principles behind Minimum Viable Product. But how about Minimum Viable Branding?

Branding has a bad reputation for being slow and expensive. And for people new to this ‘strange-new-world’ that is marketing, it can feel like agencies just don’t understand your business.

At Brick, we specialise in branding for startups, so we saw the need and opportunity to change the way new businesses build their brands by stripping the process of branding down to its essentials—stand-out design, easy-to-use toolkits, practical assets and adaptability for the future.

The result is an MVB, Minimum Viable Brand—low-cost, quick to implement, and designed to grow and change with your business.

Basically, MVB takes the principles of MVP and applies them to branding. Creating a brand with the minimum amount of assets required to support your product or service as it is developed.

Minimum Viable anything is a tension between resources (money and time) and viability (strategy and quality). We specialise in finding that balance.

These early stages are often the hardest time for founders. Your future rides on how well you can sell your product and vision to investors and customers. MVB can help you with this.

Do we need branding, though, really?

In a word, yes. These days, people don’t buy products, they buy brands. Brand is king—even in the early stages. A great brand is necessary to do your great product justice. It opens doors. We often hear comments like, “I already have a product to develop. Why should I spend on my brand?”. But having a strong brand in place makes everything else easier and cheaper: sales, hiring, customer retention, raising… the list goes on.

An effective brand isn’t just a ‘nice to have’; it does some serious heavy lifting when it comes to operational and financial performance. Which actually makes MVB one of the highest-ROI services you can spend on.

Am I ready for MVB?

MVB is for early-stage businesses with no existing brand equity (if your current brand isn’t cutting it but you have some brand equity already, you will need to consider a rebrand instead - we can help you with this).

And how does it work?

The same way you do: in agile sprints, driven by milestones, and tailored to your resources.

Choose the direction

We pin down your market position, then establish a direction for your brand and pull out key ideas for it to communicate.

Go at it, full sprint

We create an essentials-only suite of assets tailored to your requirements, from a name to a logo and the fundamentals of a visual identity, to a tone of voice that captures what you’re about.

Build out as needed

Later, we can build on an MVB to support new opportunities for activation or content. But for now, it’s all about being lean.

We don’t just talk the talk—we can walk the walk and brand the brand, too. If you want to talk MVB for your business, then get in touch.