Building a brand from a blank page: the Pranaah Electronics story

Some projects come with an existing brand to reference. This one came with ideas, theory, and a lot of enthusiasm. No logo, no colours, no reference points. Just a vision — and the question of how you turn that into something a customer can see and feel.

Pranaah Electronics was one of my favourite projects from the internship, and looking back, I understand why. It was the purest test of what brand strategy actually is — because there was nothing to start from. No existing identity to iterate on, no competitor to react against, no established audience to speak to. Just a founder’s imagination and the task of giving it a visual life.

The product? Smart Rings and Smart Glasses. A tech brand with serious ambitions to scale.

The first thing that happened on this project was not a design brief. It was a conversation — a long one, full of strategic questions.

Who is the target customer? Where do they live, what do they do, what do they aspire to? What does this product solve for them, and what alternatives are they considering right now? What’s the price point, and what does that say about the brand’s positioning? What market is this entering, and who already owns that space?

These felt like business questions, not design questions. And that’s exactly the point. Brand strategy begins with understanding the market, not with aesthetics. The aesthetics are the language you use to communicate the strategy — but you have to have the strategy first.

One of the most useful frameworks I encountered through this project was the Red Ocean / Blue Ocean concept.

A Red Ocean market is crowded. Many competitors, established rules, hard to differentiate. Everyone is fighting for the same customers. The metaphor is apt: the water runs red with competition.

A Blue Ocean market is one you create. A space where the competition is irrelevant because you’ve identified a need or a segment that isn’t being served. You’re not fighting for existing customers — you’re creating new ones.

For a brand like Pranaah Electronics, operating in smart wearables — a space that globally has massive, well-funded players — the question becomes: what gap exists that we can credibly occupy? Where is the Blue Ocean for this specific brand, in this specific market, at this specific moment?

Answering that question is not a design decision. It’s a research decision, a market decision, a strategic decision. And the design work follows from it — because once you know where the brand lives, you know what it needs to look like.

You’ll hear the phrase ‘pain point’ mostly in UX and product design conversations. But it’s equally important in brand strategy, and it’s often overlooked there.

A pain point is the thing your customer is frustrated by, limited by, or underserved by in the current market. It’s the gap between what exists and what they actually need. Identifying it precisely is what gives a brand its reason to exist beyond simply adding one more option to an already crowded shelf.

For Pranaah Electronics, understanding the pain point meant understanding what tech consumers at a certain price point in India were currently settling for — and what they would actually want if it were available.

Once you have the strategy — the market position, the audience, the pain point, the ambition — the brand identity work begins. And now every decision has a brief.

Imagery: what visual world does this customer already inhabit? What references signal intelligence and sophistication in their context?

Packaging: how does this product need to feel in your hand before you’ve even opened it?

Logo: what mark immediately communicates precision and modernity without looking like every other tech brand?

Tone of voice: is this brand a guide? A peer? An authority? How does it want to make the customer feel about themselves?

Emotion: what is the one thing you want the customer to feel every time they encounter this brand?

Each of these questions has an answer — and the strategy gives you the framework to choose between options. Without the strategy, every design choice is equally valid. With it, you know immediately what fits and what doesn’t.

A brand isn’t a logo with a colour palette. It’s a position in a market, expressed visually. Figure out the position first. The visual expression is the easy part.