Growing a brand in any industry is no easy feat; you must secure a special spot in your consumers’ minds to compete effectively.
However, a brand like Notion achieved this, gaining over 100 million users in 2024. Notion is an AI-powered workspace where users can take notes, share documents, manage their projects, collaborate with teams, and automate tedious tasks.
Though Notion has seen many highs & lows since 2013, they stick to their brand values and have built a tool that helps millions in their lives. Notion is actually “LEGO for software,” which helps create customized workspaces and applications from modular building blocks.
A great product isn’t enough. You need to build your brand’s unique identity based on your company’s core principles. And you need to tell your potential customers what makes your product unique, why you made it and how it solves their problem. You can’t do this randomly.
Branding is what actually helps Notion reach millions of users, as it defines how consumers perceive your brand and differentiates it from other products in the market.
So, what makes Notion branding so magnetic? Let’s explore Notion’s branding strategy that makes it more than just a tool.
1. Value-driven Mission & Vision
Notion clearly outlined its mission and vision: the purpose of the brand and the change the brand aims to create in the world.
Other than that, the brand defines a clear message, tone of voice, along with visual identity and uses it consistently to make it recognizable.
“Our mission is to make toolmaking universal. We want everybody everywhere to feel empowered to personalize the software they use every day to their exact needs.”
They are on a mission to shape the tools for everyone who shapes their lives. Besides the mission, the brand clearly presents its vision—their long-term goals and what they aspire to be in the future.
“To be the primary driver that leads the latest technological breakthroughs to propel our society toward the perfect blend of science and art.”
Notion’s core values mainly revolve around empowering its users by providing an all-in-one workspace. Also, their values are
- To dive into their mission
- Be a pace setter
- Be a truth seeker
- Be kind and direct
Meanwhile, Notion brand mission, vision and core values reflect on every brand decison.
2. Minimalist visuals
Regarding visual identity branding, Notion created a cool and minimalistic aesthetic, a simple, elegant, and recognizable style.
Logo
Notion introduced its logo in 2016, featuring a three-dimensional cube shape drawn in thick black lines with a white background and a capital “N” centred.
The closed space of the cube symbolizes the core function of Notion, which enables users to perform and organize tasks at a single, unified interface. Meanwhile, the “N,” serif letter in the centre of the cube, with clean lines, adds a minimalist and contemporary feel to the logo.
Font and color
Notion’s brand uses the sans-serif font Inter, which is easily readable and user-friendly. As far as colour, Notion uses the default black colour text and white background colour that provides strong contrast, readability and a minimalist canvas.
Other than that, Notion uses blue, yellow, and red in designs that stimulate creativity and productivity.
Blue represents productivity and calmness, while red is associated with urgency and important tasks, whereas yellow radiates positivity. If you want to learn more about the impact of different colors on brand logos then read Lucky color for business logo: The Psychology of Colors
Illustration
Notion designs a distinct illustrator character to visualize the idea of building a workflow that is different for everyone.
These are designed to stimulate the flow of a thought. The illustration reinforces a sense of playfulness and progress in each zone.
3. Consistent Global Messaging & Voice
While branding, Notion uses a calm, friendly, direct, and encouraging tone of voice. The important point to note is that brands avoid using buzzwords. Meanwhile, it gives the message to empower its users to build thoughtfully at their own pace.
The brand communicates its message through design, illustrated characters, and storytelling. Notion has a broad audience, so they tailor their message by dividing it into segments (startups, students, teams). They illustrate the abstract concept in visuals to communicate, as they believe in “show, don’t tell.”
“Think it. Make it” is the brand tagline for Notion, as they convey a message to free your mind to do great things.
4. Comparative positioning of the tools you know
Notion adopts a branding strategy that challenges competitors openly, replacing all explanations of their product at a glance. Competitors have already raised awareness and made the audience understand what they get. This helps them as the target audience doesn’t have to do mental gymnastics to know what the brand does. They differentiate the brand to position it as a one-stop workspace for everyone, for anything.
- For team wikis, it’s Confluence and GitHub Wiki
- For project and task management—Trello, Asana, and Jira
- And for notes and documents—Google Docs and Evernote
Even Notion fits into the workspace that users are already comfortable using. Like you, do you use Slack? Notion performs nicely with Slack. Want to use Google Suite entirely. Notion integrations work with Sheets, Docs, and Drive.
Notion removes the need to switch between different tools, as you can keep all your tools in a single workspace.
5. Community-led strategy for growth.
Notion adopts a problem-solving mindset to meet the needs of its consumers. Notion shapes a brand around a strong narrative that builds a loyal community. The brand barely does any paid advertising; it’s a strong community that they build, which helps them grow.
When Notion was introduced, it only had 30 templates for users, which were generated by their team. Then, later, they bring flexibility; people can customize the current one, create their own, and share their templates with other users. This template strategy brand is a strong pillar that builds community and drives growth. Many people share their template for free, while some make it paid in their
- Gumroad shop
- Newsletters
- YouTube channels
This empowers the community to generate and manage their content and share on social media.
By no means can Notion create a template gallery as big as it is today, built by its community members. It’s word-of-mouth reference by the community that takes Notion’s current valuation to $10 billion.
Not only that, but Notion also ensures that it involves its community as much as possible. Notion organizes “Campus” events at universities and “City” events for the community. And these events are hosted by Notion Ambassadors, who give them the freedom to be leaders and host an event or webinar.
In addition to that, community-hosted forums gather thousands of users to answer questions, share tips, meet online, and share their content. Notion listens to its community and users, prioritizes their needs, and uses the feedback to update the product.
6. Evolve to scale
You can’t have the same product features and strategy for years and win. Over time, with advancing technology and changing needs, the brand must evolve, just as Notion does. For instance, AI is rapidly advancing in the digital world, and Notion recognizes its importance in updating its tool with the latest AI features.
AI meeting notes, enterprise Search, users can directly chat with the latest AI models and even more tools. Meanwhile, the brand offers a blend of power and simplicity in its unified workspace.
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