What are the best practices for submitting an application at one of the large global branding firms?

Most customer service jobs are going overseas, but this is a great website with only remote jobs that might be useful: https://www.remoterocketship.com/?page=1&sort=DateAdded It's a relatively new site, but they're doing a great job.

Your strategy should encompass at least four components: (A) Complete Visual/verbal/social/technical audit to find/create needed assets for transition: know which assets need to be retired or replaced and what transitional assets are needed to bridge the gap. Prioritize: not everything always needs to change at once and the more you have the longer it will take or cost. Plan to convert brand book concepts/guidelines into tangible or digital deployables: how much "stuff" do you need?; vendor selection; budgeting; designing production files; ordering; quality assurance etc... (B) Internal (team) awareness & asset deployment program and monitoring compliance. (C) External publicity plan: aimed at existing clients & prospects, and any other stakeholders: social networks, media, affiliate partners, etc... Timing should be coordinated with industry / sector calendar (trade shows, if applicable), and major app update for maximum effectiveness. Do you need specialized short term PR/AD help? How can you leverage your 10K+ users to buy in / get the word out? (D) Technical migration & Monitoring Plan: seo strategy & tracking including all affected url redirects, landing pages, email changes, whatever is affected. Monitoring & analytics to see how effective the transition is (compared to old name stats) and when transitional assets can be retired.

As former CMO of Expedia I can tell you that being focused will trump any theoretical upside of having different names. To this day there's a struggle to build daylight in meaning between Hotels.com and Expedia's core hotel business - and there have literally been billions spent on trying to do that over the years. Get clear on who you're for, the problem you solve, what insight you are building against and your positioning against that. There's enough work there on its' own - believe me. Good luck.

This is a good route to take and the same one I took after leaving undergrad. An MBA is for the birds, anyways ;) First things first, take credit where credit is due! You're a founder now it sounds like, and you're working on your first MVP I'm guessing (hoping?) as well. At the very least, get together some sketches, etc... as well. You'll definitely want a prototype in order to feel "whole." So, more importantly, just list this startup's name as a part of your career in your resume as you would when working for any other company. When asked, be completely truthful, and let your exuberance and fascination with being a self starter shine through. These few factors alone will signal to any future employer that you would be a valuable asset to have on their team, but you may find that you enjoy working for yourself a bit too much before then ;) Have you setup a corporation or LLC yet? Or are you using a partnership (assuming this is all U.S. based)? Once you have your business' infrastructure in place, things will definitely feel more official as well. Also, be sure to incorporate NOW rather than later to avoid any major legal headaches. Feel free to message me any time if you'd like to chat further. Cheers, Lara

Several things to consider when coming up with your product's brand identity: 1) Who is your customer? That will drive the look and feel, as well as the language of your brand. 2) Who are you? If at a gut level, you and your company(employees) are rednecks making the highest quality broadheads for elk hunting, you aren't going to button up your brand in a shirt and tie or develop an artsy-fartsy website. (See Duck Dynasty) 3) What specific aspects of your product and/or service are different than the rest of the market offerings? Ie. Why are you special? These 3 questions, answered candidly, begin to make up your brand story. The most powerful brands have learned that their messaging, packaging, sales process and customer experience delivery is less about what their product or service DOES, and more about how it makes the customer or user FEEL. Branding a product or service is about carefully crafting a story(or a promise), that you are confident you can deliver on once they choose to buy. In other words, branding is the discipline of aligning what you say about your product, service, team... with what customers actually get on the back-end. Once you get really clear on these big picture questions, then the tactical stuff becomes rather easy (what should our website look like, colors, advertising channels, promotional pricing, referral programs, warranty language, etc, etc, etc.) Of course you may be smart to hire a specialist to help you brainstorm and execute on this stuff- but the actual decision making becomes pretty obvious: which option in front of us best reflects who we are?