Coda β #BrandsWeLove π©
Spotlight on Coda's brand strategy
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. You can click the heart button π above or below to share some love. And you can reach out to me anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. Iβd love to hear from you.
Links that are worth your time:
Interesting fact: 30% of executive searches are to re-do a failed executive search
Free Product-Led Growth fundamentals certification π a must for new PLG marketers
Hi there π
Constantly I am coming across really cool brands in the tech world, and Iβve been wanting to share these examples with you. Hereβs my first crack at it, featuring the Google Docs disruptor, Coda. Iβd love any feedback that you have and any ideas for how I could make these more valuable or useful for you. Thanks! Youβre the best.
Wishing you a great week,
Kevan
Brand Spotlight: Coda, the rebel document app
π Kevanβs brand strategy playbook
My Coda brand journey: I originally heard about Coda a couple years back from a friend at Zapier. My immediate reaction was disinterest and disaffection for yet another collaborative document tool β it was too much. (See below for how thick Codaβs competition is.) I hadnβt given much mind to Coda since then, but the other day a Coda ad popped into my Instagram feed. I was wowed. The ad borrowed creative from the Coda website, seen above: vibrant colors, sharp photography, silly and snarky creative design, and copy that was quick-witted and catchy and a little bit inappropriate.
What a unique brand presence for a document tool, right?
Letβs take a closer look β¦
About Coda
Codaβs narrative
Your entire team can work in one document. Finally.
Coda is a new type of doc that blends the flexibility of documents, the power of spreadsheets, and the utility of applications into a single new canvas. Thatβs Coda. It lets non-technical and technical folks alike make a doc as powerful as an app.
β
Coda is a new doc that brings words, data, and teams together. It starts with a blinking cursor on a blank page and can grow as big as your team's ambition. Coda comes with a set of building blocksγΌlike pages for infinite depth, tables that talk to each other, and buttons that take action inside or outside your docγΌwhich anyone can combine to make a doc as powerful as an app. People have made Coda docs that do everything from launch products, to scale small businesses, to help them study for tests. What will you Coda?
β
Coda is a new doc that grows with your ideas.
β
The way others describe Coda:
Codaβs brand strategy (according to me)
Brand purpose
Brand purpose tells the story of why you exist in the world. I use a framework from the Ogilvy agency called The Big Ideal, which places your product at the intersection of a cultural tension and your brandβs best self. The Big IdeaL seeks to complete this sentence: βCoda believes the world would be a better place if β¦β
Alternative:
Coda believes the world would be a better place if our documents worked for us, not against us.
Brand positioning
With positioning, I use a mad-lib, fill-in-the-blanks positioning statement, borrowed from .. well, Iβm not sure who came up with it originally. (Arielle Jackson is my favorite source.)
Hereβs the template:
For [target customer]
Who [main pain point or challenge]
[Your Company] is a [product category]
That [key solution your company provides].
Unlike [competitors and alternatives],
[Your Company] is [differentiated in these ways].
β¦
And hereβs my take on what this statement might be for Coda:
For digitally-native teams
Who are held back by βdumbβ docs
Note: Another path that Coda could choose is to lean into a βcollaborativeβ positioning. Many digitally-native teams feel the pain of working on a project across dozens of docs. With Coda, all that work could be done in a single doc.
Coda is a collaborative document tool
That blends documents, spreadsheets, and apps into one infinitely powerful & flexible tool.
Unlike Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, and MS Word,
Coda makes docs that are as powerful as apps.
Note: Thereβs likely another set of competitors / alternatives that Coda competes with: The new wave of βsmartβ all-in-one tools like Notion and Airtable. The key differentiator for Coda vs. Notion / Airtable is likely Codaβs strength as a collaborative project space for teams, whereas Notion is a wiki and Airtable is databases.
Brand personality
βIf you met your company at a party, how would you describe it?β
This question proves very helpful for voice and tone. You need look no further than Morning Brew or Wendyβs to see what a strong and unique voice can do for building brand loyalty.
Hereβs how I would answer the personality question about Codaβs brand:
Bold
Clever
Dynamic
Coda vs. the competition
Brand matrix
Codaβs main competition is Google Docs, Word, Paper, Quip, Notion β basically anywhere that you create an online, shareable, collaborative doc.
Whatβs interesting about this space is how traditional the competition can be. Word has been around forever .. it seems like Google Docs has, too. Dropbox Paper and Notion are much more modern in their brand appeal, but I wouldnβt place them as vibrant, bold, or dynamic in the same way that Coda comes across. (Thereβs definitely room for debate here, when you think about, say, Dropboxβs bold brand refresh from a few years back.)
Side-by-side
Hereβs a look at some of these products side-by-side:
For a look at the overall competitive landscape for document creation tools, check out this screenshot from G2 Crowd. Itβs a lot!
Codaβs brand in the wild
Social media ads
Video
Website
https://blog.coda.io/ (runs on Medium)
https://coda.io/for/product-management
Thoughts:
Coda has a very rich visual language that ties all their pages and assets together in a really compelling way. The website is simple β a lot of it is built in Coda. (Turns out, pages like Enterprise and Careers donβt really load all that well, which might be a bit of a brand risk assuming people figure out the pages run on Coda.)
Their marketing assets in particular are quite striking and a solid blend of photography, collage, and graphic design. They definitely stand out as high-quality, unique, and original, especially compared to competitors like Google Docs and Word.
3 lessons from Codaβs brand strategy
1. You win with differentiation
A key component of your brand strategy should be considering the rest of the market: alternatives, competitors, consumer trends and more. Please do not create your brand in a vacuum. And please do not create a brand that looks and sounds just like everyone elseβs.
This is especially tempting in tech where you see a lot of similar style and design. If you look at Codaβs competition, theyβre mostly blue. Codaβs colors and designs stand out, and their key messaging is unique and risky.
(One final note on their main messaging: βEnough of this sheet.β Itβs unique and risky, yes, but it also anchors Coda as a spreadsheet alternative, which isnβt exactly true to what it does.)
2. Positioning with more than one path
Often times, youβll be faced with multiple routes for positioning. In Codaβs case, should they be a powerful, all-in-one doc of the future, or should they be a time-saving collaborative space for teams? They chose the all-in-one doc (I believe). When faced with these types of decisions, itβs important to :
Dig into customer research and get to know the pain points of your customers today. Layer in some market sizing so youβre positioned to attack a problem that has scale to it.
Weigh the future direction of your company. You can have one positioning for today and another for βtomorrowβ (whenever your product value matches the ambition).
3. Own an existing category vs. create a new one
Thereβs a lot of competition in the document space, so it appears that Coda may be on the cusp of some new category creation. After all, they have a document tool that functions as a DIY app. They are half-Google Docs, half-Airtable. They are Notion but not a wiki. Thereβs really no category that accurately describes what theyβre doing right now, so theyβre likely to be on a path to making their own.
In the meantime, before that category is created, they have plenty of room to take market share from the existing category. Creating a new category takes time, so while youβre creating, might as well be owning slices of existing categories the best you can.
About this newsletter β¦
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy whatβs in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.π
About Kevan
Iβm a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Polly (weβre hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer and Vox.
Not subscribed yet? No worries.
I send a free email every week or so. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Already subscribed? Youβre in good company β¦
Iβm lucky to count thousands of subscribers as part of this list, including folks from awesome tech companies like these:
Thank you for being here! πββοΈ