MiNeeds Blog

I’ve been writing about branding and positioning for a while. In this post, I want to mention an important component of branding : the emotional engagement.

In marketing, any effective and successful message does have an emotional component to it. It’s simple: people act on emotions. Among the emotions that engage the people the most and trigger action, “fear” seems to be the most exploited one by the marketers. I won’t be judging the ethics of advertising messages here but if you look at car and insurance commercials you’ll know what I mean. Even baby diapers and tissue paper is sold on fear as we all are familiar with the usual pattern of a disaster scenario in commercials, followed by a solution offered by the feature of the product.

From a branding perspective we thought of ways to create the right emotion with MiNeeds. We went through a lot of iterations on what kind of emotion we’d like to evoke with the brand. We were designing an internet service company for the consumers and the focal point of any emotional statement of the brand would be on the website itself.

Expressionism & Branding:
Back in school, I took several classes on aesthetics and history of art. It was my way of getting my mind off of heavy logic and math exposure from computer science. What stuck with me during those classes was the usage of emotions in expressionist art form.

Expressionists were opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in Europe at the time and they emphasized artist’s subjective emotion, which went beyond the actual appearance of things. The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted or altered. To evoke intense emotional expression, violent colors and exaggerated lines were used in paintings. Expressionists were trying to pinpoint the expression of inner experience rather than the objective reality.

Take a look at “The Scream” from Edvard Munch, Norwegian painter who was a major influence on German expressionist movement. Such a masterpiece…I have always been fascinated by the power of this painting to express and create emotions.

We wanted MiNeeds to evoke the right emotion and were in fact inspired by the expressionist art forms to communicate it in a composition using the web site as the form. You’ll see the elements of expressionism on our new design with hand drawn elements and vivid colors. There are some conflicting goals of designing an intuitive, high performing, fast loading site versus using colors and images to do the emotional-engagement part right. In my experience, that was the most challenging part

This is only one of the ideas went into branding MiNeeds to make an overall and unique brand statement. A unique way to shop local services, a unique business model, with a unique, highly differentiating and expressive user interface. Did we reach our goal? The market will tell. Actually it has been telling us for a while. With the feedback we’ve been receiving, we’re in the process of making a few enhancements on the design of MiNeeds. Will it move it a bit away from the expressionist theme? Perhaps in the sense of vivid color usage and heavy emphasis of hand drawn elements. But in the core sense of heavy emotional engagement, it will be even better positioned.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of Http://www.MiNeeds.com - a new way to shop local services

On the background, I am hearing the inspirational and victorious music with high strings. The sun is rising on the still hot battleground in this misty morning. Yes, we’re alive! MiNeeds is live! Now, you have a new way to shop local services.

We’ve been working really hard in the last couple of months on the next version of MiNeeds. Raed and I have been sharing some of the challenges we’ve gone through during the development cycle in this blog. After thousands of re-prioritizations and tough calls on both technical and marketing problems I’m glad to finally announce the all new and superior MiNeeds.

So much thinking, brain-power and pure sweat went into this release and there’s nothing like the feeling of a great achievement after a long stretch. We applied a lot of branding and positioning elements to the new site. The flow is much smoother and the experience is much cleaner with the new site.

Check it out and if you have any comments to make, please send me an email. If you are looking for a service or have a service to offer, try the new version of MiNeeds and let me know about your experience. After this point, our journey will take a turn into a stage where we focus more heavily on marketing and engaging with our customers.

Best,
Deniz Erkan - co-founder of MiNeeds.com - A New Way To Shop Local Services

Brand performance is an interesting concept. The performance of a brand starts with the name of the company, supported by the tagline, messaging of the main specialty and differentiating aspect, and delivering on the same idea flawlessly, in harmony, through the customer interactions.

Picking a name is so important and not an easy task. It has to shine and has to be supported in unity with the rest of the branding elements. Picking a name is really a combination of art, marketing and consumer psychology. There’s a list of principles to abide by when picking a good name, among them are : Is it easy to pronounce, does it hint at the specialty, is it ownable?

Look at the story of eBizJets: Such a great name isn’t it? Without the tagline, slogan or the logo you get a sense of what the company does. eBizJets was an “aggregated charter”, a unique specialty as an answer to “fractional ownership” jet companies like NetJets. eBizJets would search thousands of affiliated charter operators to find the best deal for its business customers, promising them a value through better rate and flexibility. The business grew into a leading player with this model. Soon after, they faced a trouble. Somebody else claimed the ownership of eBizJets trademark, filed a suit and won. After that, eBizJets changed their name to “Sentient”.

Now, just imagine that you saw this name on a billboard or heard about it from your friends. What does that name mean? It’s not Sentient Airlines or even Sentient rent-a-jet, but just Sentient. It definitely violates the top three principles of a good brand name. This case study was covered in Bill Shcley’s great book on branding “Why Johnny can’t brand”.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder MiNeeds.com - A new way to shop local services 

There’s the concept of a message losing its power to reach out and stick in the market, the more it is diluted. In every aspect of branding, you say the most by saying the least. You go further by being leaner. Bill Schley and Carl Nichols in their fascinating book “Why Johnny can’t brand” call this the Universal Paradox: the narrower you focus, the wider your message goes. All the feedback we’ve been processing on MiNeeds so far has been in line with what the theory and basics of branding suggest.

I like backing our empirical data with what the theory suggests and after this my partner Raed and I were even more determined to lean down to one single muscle of MiNeeds to be the branding message. The core of what we do. The message we’d want to stick and be remembered with.

MiNeeds is a big platform targeting to enhance the interactions in between local service providers and consumers. It has a powerful search engine as well. But the core of what we do is really to introduce a new way to shop local services, where consumers post their needs to receive bids from local service providers. It’s a paradigm changing phenomenon that instead of consumers doing the search, they are actively searched by interested businesses.

That was what our vision was to begin with, but along the way, since we built way too much technology to make it happen, we were trapped in the positioning paradox.

It’s like putting the pieces together in the triangle paradox. The way you arrange the components in the below triangle leaves extra space. Where’s that one extra square coming from?

Well, I’ll leave it up to you to point to the source of this apparent paradox in the above picture, but for us it was too many components speaking out too loud.

I’m glad to say that we did a great iteration on how we brand MiNeeds. Our main page tells the story clearly with animated characters now. If you’re interested in how we got out of the positioning paradox, check out our new page.

Of course, it’s just an opinion until it’s tested and approved by the market. For those of you closely watching the evolution of MiNeeds, I’m greatly interested in what you think of our all-new sharpened up branding. Comments and questions are welcome.

I’ll write more about the principles of branding and what we’re doing to apply them to MiNeeds in my upcoming posts.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds.com

After the silent launch of MiNeeds 2 months ago, we’ve been testing the idea and services we offer in the market from a variety of angles. There are channels of information flowing from existing customers (both consumers and service professionals), interactions with people in the industry, competitive analysis of the market, mentors, investors, friends, etc…the list goes on far enough to include my mom!

Clearly, we had to do one thing much better: positioning and branding of MiNeeds. As the founders, Raed and I both had a very strong “technology angle” when we originally conceived the idea. We did a lot of research in the market but we didn’t really focus on branding too much. We believed in the potential of what MiNeeds is capable of, but communicating it in the market was a challenge.

Branding, which is a function of positioning in marketing, is such an important concept that without done properly, any great product or service can easily be doomed to be lost in the ever cluttered markets of today. Focusing on branding, we did an iteration on MiNeeds to really sharpen the focus and the message we’d like to communicate. There are great resources on the topic of positioning and branding. During the holidays I was in NYC to spend time with my family and it was a great time to do more research on the topic. I also went to Boston for a couple of days and continued on my research in Cambridge. The popular bookstores of Barnes and Noble as well as Borders both have a different allocation of subjects in their physical stores. The bookstores in NYC are definitely richer in the subject of economics and investment strategies and lighter on technology compared to the selections of the same stores in Seattle. At the bookstores right next to the Harvard campus, there’s a whole aisle dedicated to books from Harvard Business Review. It’s actually fascinating to see how different the content of the same bookstores in Boston, New York City and Seattle are.

Branding books are really fun to read. I read about 8 books and perhaps shuffled through another 10 during this time. While the principles of branding is pretty much the same across most of these books, they really vary on the language, case studies and the way the material is presented in terms of arguments and structure. “Brand it like Beckham” by Andy Milligan was definitely a fun read to see how the principles of branding was applied to David Beckham as a commercial property which I picked as the title of this post.

What we went through with MiNeeds, in theory, was what is called the Positioning Paradox. We did an iteration over MiNeeds to break out of the paradox and I feel pretty strongly about it now. Next post: What is the positioning paradox, how we deteceted it and what we did to get out of it.