[DFTF] Building the Brand

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Building a brand helps your team to be recognized in your school, in your community and at competition. When seeking sponsor money or fundraising you need to have people scratch their head and say "Oh! I know you. You are the kids with that robot thing. Sure I will buy a box of candy." You want students in the school to see the T-shirt and think "maybe I should join those guys. It looks like fun."

[Tom Bottiglieri]

The best way to build a brand is to win. I think the brand association is a side effect of increased exposure.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

The best way to build a brand is to win. I think the brand association is a side effect of increased exposure.

That being said, a few things I can think of:

• The easy teams to find at competitions are the ones with unique uniforms, like Wildstang or the Killer Bees
• Unique names are better. Killer Bees vs. "Insert school name here robotics".
• Short form logo and long form logo. Basically the difference between what you see on a ball cap/shirt breast vs. the bigger logo which has the name in it.
• Consistent coloring. This is just a part of good design in general. Pick 2 offsetting colors and run with them.

[Brandon Holley]

Branding is huge, especially for rookie teams. As team numbers become larger and larger, it becomes much harder to identify teams simply by team number.

The older teams are obviously at an advantage because:
A. They've had years to build their brand and
B. They have a nice low team number which is also easily identifiable.

As Tom said, I definitely think theres a bit of a chicken and an egg type conundrum when looking at the "big brand" teams of FIRST. All of them are successful on the field in some fashion, so did the winning come after the branding, or was the branding easily done after winning?

I think it's important as a rookie team going in to come up with your identity now, and try to stick with it. I see many young teams who change their identity on a yearly basis. While this may be fun in the short term for the team, it is very difficult to track for other FRC teams.

When creating your brand try to stick into the minds of fellow FIRSTers by any means necessary. Coming up with a creative team name, cool looking uniforms, an interesting color scheme or nice team giveaways are all ways to help stick out.

Good luck!

-Brando

[1986titans]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

That being said, a few things I can think of:

• Unique names are better. Killer Bees vs. "Insert school name here robotics".

To help out with that, here's a list of every single team and the name they used last year: https://my.usfirst.org/frc/scoring/i...?page=teamlist. (It looks a lot better pasted into Excel as Unicode Text.)

[Mark McLeod]

Jenny asked me to post this:

2011 Team nicknames

It's just a sortable spreadsheet of the 2011 FIRST database entries 1986titans linked to earlier.
One of the sheets has sortable team nicknames if you want to check your potential nicknames to see if anyone's already using it.

[NickE]

Once you figure out your brand, you might consider developing identity standards to help clearly define and govern your brand.
Example: 254's Identity Standards