Adam Taylor is a multidisciplinary designer, illustrator, and educator with more than 15 years of professional experience in Utah, Michigan, and Seattle. Throughout his career, he has worn many hats within the ever-evolving world of design, but his strongest affinities lie in strategic brand development, UI/UX, and illustration.
Adam also serves as a remote Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Michigan State University, where he teaches courses on design tools, theory, and brand identity development. Outside of work, he’s an occasional exhibiting fine artist, a novice dungeon master for a very patient group of friends, and a small-time local musician.
Josh Dougherty:
Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing in the healthcare space. But more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered, and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands' success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in.
Well, welcome to the show today. I'm excited to be joined today by our senior designer, Adam Taylor. Hey, Adam, how's it going?
Adam Taylor:
It's going really great. How are you doing today, Josh?
Josh Dougherty:
I'm doing great. I'm excited to chat because one of the things that we talk a lot about internally here is how do we help early stage startups with their brand? And especially in the health tech space as they're moving fast. There's a lot of action going on there right now, specifically in the space of How do we leverage AI in an ethical and impactful way in the healthcare space? And for these early stage startups, a lot of the time there isn't that much emphasis placed on brand. They're really focused on their product. Founders and their teams are focused, justifiably, on How do we refine that product to a point where we can tell a good story about it and we're ready to pitch? And then they're thinking about three things, fundraising, selling, and scaling.
And a lot of times when they've gotten started—whether they have venture funding or if they have no funding and they're bootstrapping at the beginning before they get any funding—there's really this sense that we’ve got to move quickly because we have a finite amount of money and therefore time to be able to spend on before we can get more money raised and the ability to kind of further build out the idea.
So there's this sense that if they focus on the central thing, the product, they're going to be good to go. But I think we have a slightly different opinion that's focusing a little bit on your brand can also help accelerate your product and the story that you're going to tell.
Adam Taylor:
Yeah, it can help a lot. I think that it's easy to understand why companies in this position might overlook brand at the beginning. It's common, I think, especially outside of the design industry to think of a brand as just a logo, right? But really, your brand is that perception of your company, your services, and your products that live in the mind of your target audience. So if you're a founder and you're focused on the product at the beginning, having no brand is still a brand, because you're not necessarily shifting that perception in your audience. And, really, what you want to do is be able to craft the narrative around this product and really help people understand what it is and why it's important. Because if you're not communicating that, you're still occupying space in your audience's minds, but just not the space that you want or maybe no space at all.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And I think talking about your audience in a vague way is really helpful to understand why people maybe don't emphasize brand as much because, think about someone, they may have a couple anchor clients, but their audience is some sort of investor. And, so, we think about brand and we think about something for the public and it's like, well, investors don't care about that, but they're as much of an audience as the general public. Just different needs, I think, in how they are going to look and evaluate your brand.
Adam Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. Your brand, if we're thinking about brand as perception or memory of your company, and you're thinking about potential investors, you want them to have the right image of your company. You want to build that trust and that credibility that you're somebody that they can invest in and that you're real and that you exist out there in the world. And so it's just as important for that audience as any other audience you might be considering if you're in this position as a founder.
Josh Dougherty:
No doubt. And I think that's a good segue into talking about how a brand can help you fundraise better. But I think the only other thing I'll say before we make that full jump is because we're trying to curate a memory, because the memory or that unique idea about your brand exists in your audience's mind more so than in yours or in your marketing materials, you've really got to have a deep understanding. So as we talk about each of the audiences—I think here, the investor audience for fundraising, the potential customer audience for selling, the general public, maybe, as well as future employees and customers as you're talking about scaling—it's really important to get inside the mind of those people and understand them as much as possible to know what's the context that they live in day to day? What are the things that they're thinking about? What does success look like for them? Because I think it looks wildly different for each of those groups. And then, also, what do they want to get from you? What do they need? And what's going to keep them from believing you?
All those things are core questions that we ask in any branding exercise, whether we're dealing with positioning or visuals or even some sort of brand activations like a website, et cetera, but it's important to separate those out. And I think that's a perfect segue for us to jump into fundraising, which is this unique sort of marketing because it's very one to one. It's about conveying the unique value of your product and the vision of what it could be, the path for growth for building the company into something that's successful. And I think brand can be helpful in a number of specific ways. But I'd love for you, Adam, to speak first about maybe the visual identity and how can a strong visual identity, maybe not as built out as if you're like a $500 million company and have more resources, but a strong, thoughtful visual identity can help present the right foot forward to an investor.
Adam Taylor:
It's an important component because if you're working with the right team who understands your audience, your company, your product, and where you're going, like at A Brave New, we aren't just designing your brand for where you're at currently. We're designing your brand for where you're going to go in the future. And having a well-crafted brand like that helps people that you're trying to fundraise to, investors understand what the future state of your company might be because your brand isn't static. It gives them this window down the road of like, Yeah, this could be something great. I want to get in on this.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And I think I maybe jumped ahead because probably the place we start with positioning or should be positioning, not just visuals, right? Because positioning, which if you aren't familiar with that, I think many of our listeners will be, is around those things like what is the brand essence? So what is the core idea at the center of the brand? What is the promise that you're making to customers? What is the personality that the brand has, the core attributes that the brand inhabits? All those things should be flexible as a brand develops. And so a lot of people think about, Oh, I can't nail down my positioning yet because my product might evolve. And I think when I hear that and I'm talking to a founder, I'm like, Yeah, it better evolve over the next 12 months because you're just in those early stages. But the brand positioning, that essence of what you're trying to accomplish in the unique way you do it shouldn't evolve. It should be broad enough to allow for evolution within it.
And then to use that unique perspective, that unique memory as a way to craft the narrative and a pitch to an investor and in a way that is compelling and maybe more compelling than just saying, "We have this AI product. It slots into this market segment and it solves this specific problem." What do you think about that, Adam? Where have you seen positioning be really valuable in that way?
Adam Taylor:
I mean, it goes back to that core memory that people are going to have about your brand. You're positioning yourself in their minds about how you're distinct, how your product is going to solve this problem that they're looking at you for, and why it might be something that's useful investing in. So if you're thinking about core components of a brand in terms of your visuals, and thinking about what I mentioned earlier about designing into the future, it gives you this kit of parts that really helps you communicate visually to your audience that everything is cohesive. We know what we're doing, we're competent, we know where we're going as a company, this is a ship that's worth getting on board. Because if those things aren't connected and they're not consistent and they're not in relation to your positioning, something is going to feel sort of inherently broken to somebody that's looking at it.
It's sort of like typography. If you've seen a really bad sign in front of a building, you sort of understand at a glance that there's something wrong with it, but you might not be a typography expert, but it still just sort of looks wrong. I think that if you don't have the key components of your brand, your positioning, strategy, all of that wrapped up when you're thinking about pitching and fundraising, it's going to just look wrong to your investors.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. What do you think about someone who might be saying, "Yeah, I believe all this from a philosophical perspective, but I ain't got time or money to do a ton of this." So if you were to advise someone on, I would say from a positioning perspective, the work that I do, it's like you need to have your brand essence styled. What is that core idea? You probably need to know what your personality is and you probably need to know the promise you're making to your customers and to your investors. From a visual perspective, what are those similar things? What are kind of the core elements that you're like, focus on these things if you don't have time to build out a huge in-depth brand identity and style guide?
Adam Taylor:
Yeah. One of the core elements and the key element I would say for a lot of brands is just the logo itself. This could be a logo mark, so like an icon, a visual that's sort of tied into a typographic mark, but you want this key component, that's the face of your company. And we see this everywhere, right? You think about Coca-Cola, you think about healthcare brands that you might consume, apps. There's that key component that's the face of your company, and then everything sort of evolves off of that. Sometimes these systems get so complex that that system begins to affect that core element, but if you're looking at the foundations of your brand and where to start, you want to have that dialed in because that's going to help you get a color system, that's going to help you get typography, and maybe even a few supporting visuals to begin with to help you sort of relate to your audience, to relate that to your positioning, to have everything begin to create this foundation for you to build off of into the future.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, because ideally you want to have a logomark that when someone's like, "What does that mean?" It isn't so on the nose that it says exactly what you're doing, but it does, there's meaning imbued behind it. There's a bit of a story you can tell about it, right?
Adam Taylor:
Yeah. Yeah. Humans are very narrative-driven creatures, right? We want to understand a story and we want to be able to connect with the brands that we consume in a human way. And so if you're able to connect all of those things and build out that narrative, that's something that can really help you as you're sort of scaling forward and building these pitch decks and trying to reach the right audience.
Josh Dougherty:
So another thing I thought about here as you were talking was about color scheme. We get into the conversation a lot about color in the healthcare space and people will be like, "Well, everyone's blue, purple, violet, light blue." There's a color scheme that is accepted amongst, I think both the healthcare space, a little bit less in health tech, but there's familiar colors. What is your philosophy about being a little braver with the color and how do you meet expectations in an industry of, this is kind of how companies look, but also build differentiation using a palette?
Adam Taylor:
I think it's always important to understand what's happening in the visual landscape of the market space that you're working in, that you're trying to position yourself in. So it's good to know about the blues, the violets, the reds if you're in the diabetes space, et cetera.
Josh Dougherty:
Or in the heart space, probably too.
Adam Taylor:
Or in the heart space. We have all these niches that we go into, but I think it's worthwhile to be able to step away from that a little bit and to maybe dive into some palettes that might be adjacent, but not living in the exact same space as your competitors. It's tricky because it's important to balance novelty with familiarity to some extent here. It's like if we think about our desktop, a lot of desktop computers have a floppy disk icon to save. There's a massive amount of users that don't understand what a floppy disk is or how that relates to saving.
Josh Dougherty:
We are the last generation. We're the last generation.
Adam Taylor:
We are. Yeah. As elder millennials, we're shepherding it in. But if you take that away, that's such a recognized symbol now that people might not be able to save, there's a segment of the audience that's going to suddenly be lost. And a part of that audience might be people that don't really understand what a floppy disk is. And so color and sort of creating distinction in a market space is similar in that you want there to be some level of connection and you want to balance that with novelty so that you're stepping forward in the right way strategically. So that goes back to really understanding your audience too, because even those little details about their day-to-day pain points, how they're coming to you, who else they're looking at, all of that helps you understand how to approach your color and the areas that you can specifically be bold in and be strategic about to build a color palette that feels right in your market space, but also creates a distinct space for you to position yourself.
Josh Dougherty:
Nice. I agree with all of that. I think to bring it back then to kind of close the loop on the fundraising side of things, right? So you get your essence, maybe your personality or core attributes, maybe color, type, and logo put together. All of a sudden that pitch deck, which to investors, which has a format that's kind of similar, you have your problem, you have the solution, you have the unique value that your product brings. You talk about your go-to-market, you talk about the plan over the next few years, then you talk about the specific raise you're asking for. You get those components that have to go into most pitch decks, and then you layer on top the uniqueness of the, this is how we tell the story, this is how we look at the world differently. And this is visually how we tell the story in a compelling and cohesive way.
All of a sudden you have something powerful that can communicate and has to be matched by the charisma and the communication of your team, obviously, as they're selling to investors, but it gives you a new set of tools to, I think, win that funding that you need, whether you're going for initial venture funding or series A, series B, whatever, what have you.
I just think that ability to layer on this is our uniqueness and these are the needs of the investors that we're pitching to, and let's figure out where those two things meet is really hugely valuable.
Adam Taylor:
I agree. I mean, in that moment, that's brand building, right? You're carving out that unique space in that audience right there. You're going to stand out and be much more memorable than anyone else that was coming to that meeting with just a PowerPoint deck or something like that that's using something kind of templatized.
Josh Dougherty:
Yep. Awesome. So let's talk about selling now because that's the next thing people need to do, right? You're going to raise money, but then once you've raised money, and probably while you're raising money, let's be honest, you're sprinting to sell and get to either prove viability by the number of customers you can acquire or to get to profitability if you're in a later stage. And let's talk about how systems and a thought-through brand can help with selling. I can talk a lot. I mean, I think some of the really practical outpourings are like as you're building out a website, as you're building out pitch decks, product pages, a lot of these startups are sales focused first. They maybe aren't doing a ton of marketing. They're doing mostly sales-led growth, which is totally fine and makes sense if you need to target like, Hey, we have 30 accounts that if we could get these 30 accounts, it would be amazing. Let's focus on selling to them.
But when you've put together your positioning correctly, you can build a messaging platform that talks about like, Here's how we talk, here's who we are, here's what we do, here's why we're important, here are the principles of how we want to communicate, here's how our tone of voice should be. Having those pieces all of a sudden allows you to build out the messaging across all your touchpoints in a really intentional way that's cohesive. And I think probably you'd say the same with visuals, Adam, as you're going.
Is it similar? Do you need to build out more elements at this point as you're starting to build out the ecosystem beyond just a deck and things like that?
Adam Taylor:
Yeah. I think that that's kind of a key moment to start thinking about how else you can evolve your brand out. If you've done the work at the beginning and you have those key components that we identified and that's relating to your positioning, your strategy, it should give you a pretty clear line of how you're going to begin to expand things out. What other visual assets are you going to need? I like to think about brands as people walking down the street, and there's the way that somebody looks as they're approaching you to talk to you, the way that they're dressed, the way that they appear, the way that they carry themselves, and then there's also the way that they think. So that's sort of the positioning and the strategy rolled into the visuals, right? So there's the initial perception that somebody gets when they see you walking up, and then there's what you're going to say, how you're going to act and how you're going to carry yourself.
So if you're thinking about your brand as a person, your positioning, your strategy, your content platform, the way you speak, that's all that sort of internal bit of strategy and information that's going to be sort of expressing itself out, but you still have the visual component. That has to be important. If you're going to listen to somebody to trust what they're saying, to be convinced by them or be persuaded by them to buy something or to invest, all of that needs to be tied together in a way that makes sense and that feels right to that particular person, that target audience.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And I think I'll pick on websites a little bit here because we look at a lot of health tech websites in our days kind of walking through. Looking different doesn't mean that ... I mean, you can use a template to build out your website. I will not use shade about that, but looking different does not mean having the same hero with some people that are mildly sketched and some data points over the top. There's a very rote way of representing, I think, early stage startups like, okay, we know that it works to have a homepage that has some iconography of people with some stats over the top, and then we're going to show some logos, and then we're going to show some boxes as we head down this site. And I think I would really encourage people to think about, great, if you're going to use that template, that's fine, but what can we do that will make that handshake feel different than everyone else in your space?
Because I mean, as someone who's gone through hundreds of health tech sites, there's a lot of people that feel exactly the same. Even if their messaging is really, really good, you have to win me over with the, Oh, this is interesting. And then I might read.
Adam Taylor:
Yeah. You have to have something that pulls somebody in. You have about a 50% to 60% bounce rate from audiences on average on any website that don't scroll beyond that first impression that you make right there. So if you're doing something in your hero area or with your content, that first thing that you're going to say or that somebody's going to see, if it looks the same as everybody else that they've been looking at, or if it looks broken or wrong, you're going to lose that person pretty much immediately. So even within a template, you still have to find an opportunity to differentiate yourself—to shape that perception of who you are as a company and to do so in a way that doesn't feel just like every other health tech company this person's looked at.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And I think the other thing I would say is this is where that messaging platform, where you're really thinking intentionally about how do we talk about who we are and what we do is really important because another challenge that people often face when they're going through this process is that they don't know how to talk in six or eight words about here's who we are and what we do in a differentiated way. So you get this gobbledygook in an initial headline, and then it's hard for someone to connect in and see like, Is this for me? Is this worth a second look? Because that's all I'm trying to do with a headline. I think about a good headline for me, and it's relatively functional, but this is ... I'm going to have Brianna Miller on next week on the podcast from Cohere Health talking about her brand and they have, I think, the front headline on their site is “Clinically Trained AI to Streamline Payer and Provider Collaboration.”
It's functional, but immediately I understand what it is. It shows me that there is some care being taken to, or at least conveys to me that there's some care being taken to make sure that the AI is trained well. It tells me who it's for, and it tells me kind of what they do. It's that they're streamlining things. And so that gives me the sense that I can either identify for myself. If I work for a payer or a provider, I can identify and say, "Oh, this might be for me." Or I can say, like me as a brand, or I might say, "Nope, this isn't me. I don't need to look at this again." But it gives me that chance to identify, understand quickly, and then choose whether I want to keep reading. And I think that's a good key approach to take as we're working on a site.
Adam Taylor:
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it sounds like that is a very well crafted headline that has their audience in mind, right? I think that it's an easy trap to fall into if you're in the founder position to sort of speak to yourself, sort of like looking in the mirror and writing the headline as you want to see it, but that might not be what your audience needs to hear. So structuring things in a way that helps somebody understand the who, the what, the why at a glance, Is this for me? What is it that they're doing? Why is it important? And doing so with their audience in mind is always going to make a big difference.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And then with messaging, I'm always thinking about how I want to pull the positioning into real messaging that's like boilerplate messaging that people can literally copy and paste and take and start using places so that we're building that memory of interaction that people are having with us. Because we know we have to repeat things to someone 7 to 10 times before they start remembering something about us and having what we call unaided recall in the business. But what are some kinds of cheats or hacks to start building that library from a visual perspective as well? I think there are ways to set up your system so you can work efficiently if you have one internal designer and you're trying to get a lot done.
Adam Taylor:
Yeah. I think it's important to think about your hierarchy. What's your hierarchy of information? What's the most important thing? And then to structure things visually around that. If you're thinking about those boilerplate messages, the really important key ideas, building your design system to surface those in a way that's going to be easily understandable and obvious to your audience and keeping that consistent throughout is going to be something that's going to be really important. And hierarchy when I'm saying that, I mean, where do you want somebody to look first, second, third? What's the structure of importance in your messaging as you're getting that out to your audience?
Josh Dougherty:
Awesome. And then we talk about scaling. I don't know if there's a ton to say here, but if you built out the foundation and you have the foundation of messaging, the foundation of visuals, you're obviously going to be able to scale as you expand what you're doing. Maybe a startup that's in its early stages starts with a website that's simple and then sales decks. But then, it's like, we're going to expand into video and we're going to do webinars and we're going to do some content and maybe we're going to host some events. All of a sudden, by establishing a foundation that can be grown over time, you're able to kind of take both the visuals, messaging, the positioning, and use them across all those applications without having to rethink it each time, which is I think the key to scale, a system that I don't have to think about that is still intentional, allowing me to get a lot more done. Any thoughts there on your end?
Adam Taylor:
Yeah. I mean, if you are starting the process intentionally like we've been discussing—from the very beginning when it's just a logo and type and colors, and as you're expanding that through to your pitch decks, to your websites—and then things do begin to scale and you're looking at different ways to express your brand out to your audience and to be more strategic about it, you should find yourself in a situation where you're not having to change the system. You might add onto it, modify it slightly, but you're not having to go all the way back to the foundation and completely change things. So that's why it's important even in the early phases to spend time to really think about who you are as a company, what your goals are, how you're going to position yourselves, and then tie that directly into those key foundational components of your brand, the visual components.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And we've been talking a lot about messaging and visuals. The important thing to realize is brand is about everything. It's about how you show up as a company. It's about how you sell. It's about how you do your work. So we like to say that a brand strategy feeds into a brand experience, which is like how people feel when they interact with you. It feeds into an expression, the logo, the visuals, feeds into a process. It should inform how you go about doing your process. And it also feeds into your culture as a company and all that leads to trust and affinity with your audiences. And so I think if we expand a little bit outside of the visuals and messaging side in the scale, one of the things that's going to really help and that you should be able to do effectively is as you're building out a growth strategy, when we're doing brand positioning, it might be time to think of a tool called, we call a brand filter.
This is like a five question, simple set of five questions oriented around your brand attributes and your brand essence that you can ask whenever you're making a decision to see if a decision is on brand or not. And so as you're building out your growth strategy, I think you can use that and say, because we think about the areas we're going to focus on in our growth strategy, the type of marketing, the way we're going to show up if we're doing marketing, you can use that brand filter and ask, Does this match our brand essence? Does it align with our personality? Does it align with the core attributes of our brand? And that can help you influence and, again, make a more branded experience throughout. And then the only other thing I would mention for scaling is a lot of times when we start scaling, there are multiple product lines or products that start getting launched.
And I think that having your brand nailed down and a visual system nailed down allows you to start expanding the brand architecture to think about, Okay, if we have products that are going to be sub-brands or be endorsed brands or whatever, how are we going to intentionally build the brands of those products underneath our overall brand as well, both from a visual and a strategy perspective? And knowing who you are, what makes you unique, the unique memory at the core of your brand, and then how you express that in visuals and messaging is going to allow you to do that in a more intentional way than just being like, You know what name I like? I don't know what the name is. I can't think of something clever right now, but that's what I like and I want it to be red because I like red. That should not be how you're deciding to expand things.
Adam Taylor:
No, no, it's completely separate from your audience. And I think if you approach it that way, you're going to have a visual-facing component of your brand that looks broken very quickly. And that's when you run the risk of beginning to lose people in terms of your audience. So if you think about a brand as like a person walking down the street, humanizing your brand and those brand filter questions are directly related to this, just think about that. Is this something that “blank” would say if you have a name for your brand archetype, is this how they would act? Is this how they would step forward or is this them sort of tripping on the sidewalk and falling over? So I think that being able to sort of expand your architecture consistently and evolve it in a way that feels and keeps in mind the core story, the core perception, the core memory of your brand is very important.
Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, Adam, as we kind of close out the conversation, if we're thinking there's any founders that are listening or at least startup employees and they're thinking, Yeah, we probably should do some work on this, but we don't have much time. How much time do you think is needed to do some of this basic work? I think from a positioning perspective, we say in a month we can get pretty far if we're doing something basic. What about from a visual perspective?
Adam Taylor:
Yeah, I think from a visual perspective, about a month is about right too. We want to have time to really understand the company, the goals, where it's going, because again, we want to design to that future state, not just where a company's at presently. So it's important to try and do it quickly. I can understand the urgency, especially in the healthcare startup space, but at the same time, if you approach that timeframe strategically and allow yourself a little bit of room to explore, the result you're going to get is going to be much stronger.
Josh Dougherty:
No doubt. And I think the other thing I should put a plug in that we're not talking about really here is there needs to be some research to inform this typically. So it's good to talk to some customers if you already have them before you dive into this, or to at least have done some competitive look across your space that you're coming into to know how to inform what you're doing so you're not just working off of a blank slate without any external inputs. So that's probably a topic for another time, though, to talk about how to do that. So I think we'll close out here. Thanks for listening if you've been on. I hope if you're an early stage startup leader, founder that you have been convinced a little bit that maybe focusing on your brand is going to be a really important thing as you're thinking about how you can fundraise, how you can sell, and how you can scale. And yeah, Adam, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom to the rest of the audience.
Adam Taylor:
Yeah, thanks for having me and for those out there that are listening, hopefully we get a chance to work together in the future.
Josh Dougherty:
Awesome. Cheers everybody.
Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a branding agency in Seattle, Washington, that crafts bold and memorable healthcare brands. Our producer is Rob Gregerson.