Ory Ozömena · Follow
7 min read · Feb 6, 2019
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Introduction
For many entrepreneurs, it’s a dream to become the next billion dollar company. However, only about 1% of startups become unicorns. There are many reasons these startups become unicorns, but a common denominator these unicorns have is a strong brand. A strong brand is determined by a well designed brand identity system, which is the collection of all brand elements that a company creates to portray the right image of itself to the consumer. To design a great brand identity system, a brand strategy is required. We are going to breakdown how
Airbnb’s journey lead the startup to seek a brand strategy to develop three prominent brand elements of its identity system; the value system, personality, and positioning, which helped create the strong brand that has greatly impacted Airbnb’s success today.
The Journey
Before Airbnb became the massive company it is today, it was a journey of rough patches and bad ideas for the three founders. In 2007, two roommates and RISD graduates, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, were struggling to pay rent in San Francisco. They decided to fit three air mattresses in their apartment with the promise of breakfast to entice any prospective roommates to help pay rent.
An opportunity to attract new roommates came when a design conference was scheduled in San Francisco and the local hotels for it were completely booked. Gebbia and Chesky created the website, airbedandbreakfast.com, to advertise their touring and hosting services for the visiting conference attendees. Their first guests were two men and a woman. Each of them paid $80 for a mattress.
From this experience, Gebbia and Chesky realized they had a big idea. They got together with their old roommate Nathan Blecharczyk to turn their idea into a business. However, for various reasons, they ended up shutting down the company twice. They relaunched the company a third time at SXSW, but still failed to gain traction. By the summer of 2008, they tried presenting their ideas to 15 investors; eight rejected them and seven completely ignored them.
During the DNC convention, they re-launched for the fourth time. To keep the business running, they started selling custom made cereals named Obama O’s and Capt’n McCain’s, which were essentially repackaged Honey O’s and Quaker’s Puffs, for $40. They made $30,000 from it. Paul Graham, venture capitalist and co-founder of Y-Combinator, noticed them and invited them to join Y-Combinator.
From their experience at Y-Combinator, the founders launched an ambitious project to get their hosts to love their company. They visited all their hosts in New York to personally stay with them, write reviews, and take professional photographs of their places. In 2009, they officially changed their company’s name from Air Bed & Breakfast to Airbnb. A month later, Airbnb picked up a $600,000 seed investment from Sequoia Capital.
In 2014, Airbnb decided to do a brand redesign with the digital agency, Designstudio, and font foundry, Dalton Maag, to develop a new brand identity. We’ll focus on the brand strategy used to develop three elements of Airbnb’s new brand identity.
Brand Strategy
Brand strategy encompasses a lot of thing, but, today, we are going to analyze how Airbnb designed its value system, personality, and positioning and what purpose each element serves in developing its brand.
Value System
Airbnb has four core values that embodies its company:
Be a Host
Airbnb encourages people to care for others and one way of caring is by being a host. Being a host allows you to take in a guest and make him or her feel as if he or she is apart of your family or local community, giving them the feeling of belonging.
Champion the Mission
The company wants to be a changemaker in its community, wherever it is. It not only want to build a positive relationship with its hosts and customers, but also in its hosts and consumers’ communities. For instance, in 2014 New York City threatened to ban Airbnb and fine every host because it was illegal to rent out your unit without being present for less than 30 days. In response, Airbnb tried to work with New York to keep operations running and host safely by collecting hotel taxes and paying the taxes to the city. Also, Airbnb pledged to give the city some of its data as part of a “community compact.”
Be a Cereal Entrepreneur
It, Airbnb, wants to champion resourcefulness and original thoughts. This value alludes to the early endeavors of the founders, selling cereal to establish the company. As with Airbnb, knowing how to be resourceful with what you have will help you achieve the outcome you desire.
Embrace the Adventure
The company encourages embracing the journey in the pursuit of growing towards any goal. There will be ups and downs, but waking up everyday and being grateful for being on the journey is what matters the most.
Personality
Airbnb, with the help of Designstudio, developed a new look for its company that visually represents its company’s values. It began with the Airbnb logo; it’s an abstract mark, named “Bélo”, that was designed as the visual representation of the concept of belonging and to be easily recognizable and reproducible by Airbnb’s global customer base. As confirmation, 80,000 Airbnb customers designed their own versions of the logo, depicting the global sharing of Airbnb’s values amongst its customers.
The primary color scheme is red and white. Red, possibly, representing the familial love a guest feel when arriving at his or her Airbnb. White, possibly, representing the security or cleanliness the company wants every guest to feel during their stay. With the simplistic and open designs, the iconography also reinforces the idea of being relaxed while staying in an Airbnb.
Airbnb also has a custom typeface named “Cereal”, designed by Dalton Maag. The purpose of the typeface was to create a font that could be legible in both print and digital media. The name Cereal is a homage to when cereal “saved the company,” so Airbnb wanted a typeface that is playful and open, yet had a quirky touch.
Positioning
Airbnb’s market is the hospitality industry, specifically the accommodation sector. In this arena, its competitors are hotels, motels, resorts, and bed and breakfastses. While most hospitality services base their businesses on selling rooms, Airbnb differentiates itself by providing a “home away from home” experience by allowing its customers to live in a local’s home during a vacation. After identifying its unique positioning, the company then developed the mission statement, “To make people around the world feel like they could belong anywhere.” Defining the company’s purpose for itself and the customer.
Brand Effect
Since the 2014 redesign, Forbes estimates Airbnb to be worth at least $38 billion. It made more than $1 billion in revenue during Q3 2018. The company is on track to be profitable for the second year in a row and has increased its listings from 3.5 million in 2016 to 4.2 million in 2017; expecting to grow to 5.3 million by the end of 2018. The company’s guest arrivals grew from 80 million in 2016 to 115 million in 2017, increasing the average guest arrival from 22.9 guests to 27 guests in 2017. Average rent increased from $157 in 2016 to $174 in 2017, which may be due to an increase in the average duration of stay by guests and a higher proportion of more expensive lodgings. In 2016 Airbnb’s share of the gross rental income was around 13.5% in 2016 and around 13% in 2017, likely due to lower service charges to attract more guests and hosts.
Conclusion
In summary, Airbnb found a brand strategy to help create a strong brand that propelled the company to the multi-billion dollar evaluation it has today. Part of the company’s brand strategy was identifying its value system, personality, and positioning in the market. As a result, we can conclude that Airbnb, as a brand, desires to curate an experience of belonging for their guests by encouraging its hosts to create a relaxing and safe local’s experience, allowing their guests to feel as if they are apart of the hosts’ local communities. A lesson that any new startup can learn in order to develop a strong brand is to understand what makes you different from the competition. Is your company trying to solve a unique problem or another problem in a unique way? Clearly defining where you fit in the market is one of the first steps in becoming the next billion dollar startup.
