We’ve been talking to some really interesting and inspiring start-up and scale-up businesses this week. It’s been absolutely brilliant to listen to people who are full of passion, energy and vision. But start-ups face very particular challenges when it comes to articulating and communicating their brands. So we thought we’d share our thoughts on start-up branding and communications challenges – and our ideas on how to recognise and deal with them.
1. Focus
Start-ups are often founded and run by people who go through life at a million miles an hour. They’re ahead of the curve. They’re looking at new opportunities. They’re fired up by solving challenges and they often see the world in quite different ways.
But this can make it difficult for their organisations to focus and double down on getting a core proposition nailed. This can be particularly true for technology companies. Because when the tech could potentially be put to many, many different uses, it can feel counter-intuitive to only concentrate on one or two of them.
What to do?
Remember that if you want to become known for something, you have to decide what that something is – and then you need to keep telling the world about it. If you jump around from one subject to another, you’re potentially making it difficult for potential customers and investors to properly understand what you do. Make sure your start-up branding is focused.
2. Looking inwards
If you’ve spent months or years of your life bringing a new company, product or service into the world, it’s only natural to become a wee bit obsessive about it. But you have to remember that if you’re going to be successful in selling your product, you have to be able to see it through the eyes of a customer. And customers generally don’t give a fig about your XYZ processor, or your ABC process. They just want to know what your product or service will do for them.
What to do?
If your product was a shampoo, would it be describing itself as “a blend of sodium lauryl sulfate and a co-surfactant cocamidopropyl betaine”? Or would it be telling potential customers that it “makes hair shinier”? Shiny hair is what’s in it for the customer – and you need to find what your equivalent of shiny hair is too.
3. Very clever teams
This seems a bit counter-intuitive. Why would having very clever teams be a challenge? Well, it’s because people with MBAs and PhDs often communicate in very academic ways – and they can approach brand and marketing like it’s a university essay. In fact, anything that doesn’t sound like a university essay might feel wrong to them (especially if they’ve ever been criticised by a supervisor for sounding “too journalistic”). But here’s the thing: When you write a thesis or a response to an MBA assignment, the role of your writing is to show people how clever you are and how much difficult thinking you can fit in your brain. Brand and marketing communications need a very different approach, because their role is to get even the most difficult ideas across easily and interestingly.
What to do
If you feel your organisation’s comms and approach to brand are making your offer feel far too much like hard work for your customers and potential investors, then consider getting some training – or bring in full-time or outsourced marketing support. Even if your customers believe in you because of your Oxbridge research background, they need your start-up branding to be about them, and to be interesting.
4. Thinking of brand as a “fluffy” nice-to-have, rather than as a business-essential
The word “brand” just raises hackles for some people – especially in B2B environments. It makes them think of people who are daft enough to pay extra for a T-shirt because it has a different logo on it. So they decide that “brand” is for companies who are selling directly to consumers – and they get on with the “business” side of things. Quickly, however, they get stuck in a position where they’re finding it difficult to even describe what they do – and where competitors with lower-quality products are snaffling up their market share.
There’s a view that marketing is dispensable – and a lot of start-up advice out there tells you not to pay for it. Well here’s an idea, don’t invest in accountancy, research, HR or legal either – and you’ll bootstrap it all the way to… absolutely nowhere.
What to do
If you don’t like the word “brand” and think spending serious money on logos and fancy websites is a waste of time, try to think of it in a different way. Think instead about creating a framework for articulating all of the intangibles in your organisation that have great value both to internal teams and external customers and investors. These intangibles include your values – your moral compass. They include the kind of relationship you have with your customers and teams. They include the ethos or philosophy that drives your thinking and the way you act. Codifying all these things is important, because it helps you to be consistent – and it helps you to explain to the world not just what you do, but why you do it. It helps you to be known not simply for what you do (which can be copied, or become obsolete) – but for why you do it.
5. Your marketing team might be small and young
Start-ups often love the energy and social media know-how of young marketers, so they hire people fresh out of university, who are champing at the bit to make a difference. But sometimes, this young professional might be the only marketing resource in the company – and they may have an awful lot on their shoulders. Being a marketing team of one can be thrilling. But it can be daunting too – especially when you have no-one to learn from or bounce ideas around with.
What to do
The energy of newly qualified marketers is fantastic. But don’t write off the notion of hiring a more experienced team member because they seem expensive or they’re not a digital native. Experience can go a long way – and it can be well worth the money. But you know, so can youthful energy. So if you like hiring straight from university, think about providing coaching or mentoring for your marketing team of one. Start-up branding can be complex, and getting founders to commit to a unifying narrative can take a thicker skin and greater levels of confidence than it’s reasonable to expect of a recent graduate.
5. Your brand and culture are completely driven by the personality (or personalities) of your founders
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But if the personality of your founder is exactly the right brand personality for your organisation (like, say, Virgin or RyanAir), you need to make sure it’s scalable and that your team has the tools and confidence to communicate even if the founder isn’t around to rubber stamp everything.
What to do
First, be sure that the personality of the founder is the right personality for your brand. It might be – which is great. But it might not either. For example, your senior leaders might all be men of a certain age and education who are reserved and scientific. But the platform they’ve developed targets active social media users who are under-30, who turn out to be mostly women.
If you’re in the Richard Branson/Virgin situation (where the founder personality is good match for the brand personality), then make sure you set out how the brand works, so that your Richard Branson doesn’t have to be around to create or approve all of your communications. If the founder and brand personalities aren’t a match made in heaven, then work to articulate your brand as a separate entity.
Remember, it’s never too early to articulate your brand and align your culture and communications to it. Because company identities have a way of emerging all of their own accord – and if you don’t take control of your identity as soon as possible, you may find you have to go through a rebranding process a couple of years in, simply to be able to attract fresh investment. You’ll end up with start-up branding by default, rather than by design. And it’s often way more difficult and expensive to rein this situation back in than if you own your start-up branding from the get-go.
And of course, if you’d like to talk about your start-up branding and communications, you know where we are.
You might find these posts useful too:
Things to bear in mind when you’re naming a brand
Will content marketing transform your B2B brand?
The different types of strapline your organisation could use