“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”—Flannery O’Connor, American novelist
Have you ever experienced the overwhelming vastness of a blank page? Maybe it was in a creative writing course in college or maybe just for your company blog. And even though you’ve read lots of blog posts and plenty of books, the words just didn’t seem to flow when you sit down to right.
It seems like the two activities, reading and writing, would be closely related. That experience with one would lead to more abilities with the other. But it turns out that, though they’re similar, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.
Similarly, just because we eat food every day doesn’t mean we understand how the body turns that food into energy.
In my mentoring and office hours with startups, I’ve noticed time and again that founders make a similar assumption that experiencing lots of brands will make them experts at creating brands. But that’s just as dangerous as thinking the reading stories will give you the superpowers to write like an expert author.
To be sure, as a writer, I can tell you that intentional reading is definitely part of honing the craft of writing, but reading Harry Potter won’t make you J.K. Rowling.
When it comes to brand building, it’s easy for founders to lull themselves into the comforting idea that branding will be simple and straightforward, especially when compared to writing powerful code. But as we’ll see, this fallacy will only result in pain and frustration.
To make matters worse, most of the advice about brand building focuses on global companies or highly successful later-stage startups, rather than providing tangible steps for early-stage companies.
Starbucks is a perennial favorite in branding books and presentations, as are Airbnb and Dropbox. Sure, we can learn lessons from those giants, but it can be really hard to translate their experiences, with million-dollar budgets, massive teams, and tons of customers, into actionable steps for startup founders.
There’s a principle at work here that I call the baby pigeon problem.
If you’ve walked around any large city, you’ve no doubt seen pigeons walking around everywhere. They’re ubiquitous, and they’re not really scared of you.
But have you ever seen a baby pigeon? I’ve lived in San Francisco for many years, and have visited cities around the globe, and have never seen a baby pigeon in the streets or in the parks. Where do they come from? How do they grow into the grumpy pigeons hobbling around underfoot?
Here’s the thing: almost all of the brand books and marketing experts teach the lessons of adult pigeons—the large companies that are already massively successful. Those lessons are interesting, but they require a lot of translation to be useful for founders at the early stages.
Not to worry, though. I’m here to talk to you about tools and tactics you’ll need to start from a place of strength, and maybe someday grow into a big mean grumpy pigeon yourself.
What Is Strategy?
This book is about strategy. But most branding advice is centered on execution. What’s the difference and why does it matter?
You might have noticed that the term “strategy” often gets thrown around a lot by people wanting to sound significant. In fact, strategy often feels like nothing more than a code word for “important.” “We need to hire a strategy consultant to craft a strategic plan with strategic thinking.” It’s also used heavily in the context of military history and grand strategy, describing the movements of armies and the fates of nations.
In that light, strategy probably seems overwhelming and, ultimately, not helpful for a startup founder. But the truth is that a strategy is simply a set of choices you make to focus your time, energy, and effort on a specific outcome.
Time and money are both limited resources, so you naturally have to choose to do some things rather than others. Whether you realize it or not, those kinds of decisions are all strategic in nature. But how do you do strategy?
The Kernel of Good Strategy
In his book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters,1 professor and consultant Richard Rumelt describes the three aspects every good strategy involves:
- A diagnosis
- A guiding policy
- A set of coherent actions
The diagnosis describes the nature of the challenge and simplifies the massive complexity by distilling the situation down to its critical parts. The process of working through the Brand Strategy Canvas will help you clarify and communicate your diagnosis.
Your guiding policy
captures and communicates your approach to addressing the challenges described in your diagnosis. As you make choices throughout the canvas, you’ll begin to create things like a positioning statement and a message map that will help direct your team’s efforts.
The third part of a good strategy is a set of coherent actions that will bring the guiding policy to life. Together, these coordinated actions will provide clear actions for you and your team to implement on a daily basis in service of overcoming the diagnosis and applying the guiding policy.
By the end of the book, you will have diagnosed your specific brand-related challenges, created a set of tools to address those challenges, and set forth a plan that will enable your team to implement the strategy daily.
How to Apply Your Strategy
Strategy comes to life when you and your team can easily apply the choices made in setting your strategy in the daily operations of your company. It’s not practical to reference complicated documents or diagrams for every decision, so you need shortcuts for applying your strategy in real time. What you need is a heuristic.
Heuristic
sounds fancy but is an immensely practical idea. As a field, heuristics are studied by cognitive psychologists, philosophers, attorneys, and even artificial intelligence researchers. For founders, heuristics simply means something like “a rule of thumb.” But your branding rules of thumb won’t be based on mere guesses or gut-level reactions. Rather, they’ll be based on deliberates choices founded in market realties.
“Heuristics” are rules of thumb that will empower your team to apply your strategy in a daily basis.
Once you’ve built your brand strategy, your team will have plenty of useful heuristics, or rules of thumb, for making decision in real time, without having to consult with you personally or with complicated planning documents.
The ultimate goal, then, is that your brand strategy should provide you with a shortcut for making strong decisions that carry out the mandate of your guiding policy. By the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll be able to make brand decisions with confidence, instead of guessing or just “going with your gut.”
What kinds of decisions are we talking about? When it comes to brand, you’ll face plenty, including: How do you know what colors to use on the web site? What should your homepage headline say? Should your name be funny or serious? Is the tone of your blog playful or corporate? Should your Twitter account tweet the meme du jour or focus on sharing relevant industry news? What types of events should you sponsor?
These are just a handful of the questions you’ll face when building a company, and each one has dozens of possible answers. The potential combinations of those choices are practically infinite. Have you ever seen an ad for a burger place that says something like “More than 10 million possibilities”? It seems absurd, but it’s just simple math.
To determine the number of possible combinations of a set of items, you calculate the factorial. Remember those? It’s the number followed by an exclamation point, like 4! That simply means you multiply 4 x 3 x 2 x 1, and that equals 24. Factorials get big fast. If you’re making a burger, and the list of ingredients is 10 or 15, all the possible combinations really are in the millions.
And this math is why brand strategy is so important. Every decision you make matters, and the number of choices are near infinite.
And that brings us to execution
. These decisions all relate to the tangible aspects of a company’s brand, including name, logo, URL, web design, tone of voice, and any other element that customers can experience. Executing a strategy is what brings a brand to life, and execution should be based on strategy. See Figure 1-1.
Figure 1-1
The difference between strategy and execution
The foundation, justification, and point of departure for all external brand artifacts are found within your brand strategy. Name, logo, creative direction, URL, web design—these things should all emerge from this common place.
But here’s the thing: most startups skip strategy and go straight to execution. What’s the result of that order of operations? Basically, you have to reinvent the wheel every time they need to go somewhere.
Without strategy-based heuristics, startups will reinvent the wheel each time they create marketing and messaging.
Since you have no strategy-based heuristics to rely on, each brand decision is just tacked on to whatever choices were made before. Not only is this approach dilutive to a brand story over time but on a practical level, it means that each time a team makes a decision about these things, they find themselves wasting time discussing every detail over and over again.
Not so with a brand strategy. Once you’ve developed a brand strategy, decisions about logo design and art direction are all based on a common, well-reasoned foundation.
It’s a lot like deciding to build a home. You start with the big picture first, like where to lay the foundation and what style of home you want to build. That way, all your decisions later about finishes and flooring and paint color will be consistent. You’d probably want to avoid something like putting wall-to-wall shag carpet in an industrial concrete loft. But in a sense, startups make a similar mistake all the time.
If brand strategy is the structure of a building, the execution is the paint and the shutters. Therefore, designing a logo or building a web site without a brand strategy is much like choosing handles for cabinets in a home that doesn’t have a floor plan.
That’s why brand strategy is worth the effort, and that’s what this book is all about.
The Impact of Brand Strategy
If you’re an early-stage founder, brand strategy may seem like something that can wait till later. You might feel that with so many other priorities, brand should take the backseat to product and engineering considerations. This kind of thinking is a trap.
Without careful consideration and internal alignment, failing to develop a brand strategy will cause countless hours of frustration as you begin to scale your team and your brand. It never seems like a problem until it’s a really big problem. I’ve seen it firsthand.
A lack of brand strategy never seems like a problem until it’s a really big problem.
I once worked with a C-stage startup that originally launched as a crowdsourcing platform. Crowdsourcing was important for their brand early on, and the word “crowd” was literally in their name. Over time, though, the company pivoted toward data science and machine learning, and the crowd became less relevant.
But while the pivot went well, the company never updated its branding to reflect the new company strategy, and by the time the CEO went to raise a fresh round of funding, the crowdsourcing fad was all but gone.
Unfortunately, this change in environment meant he had to spend the first third of every investor meeting trying to explain why his machine learning company had “crowd” in the name, wasting time and diverting attention from the big picture.
He ultimately closed the round but later said the crowd-centric brand was so distracting it actually hurt their valuation. Needless to say, they rebranded soon after.
This company’s business strategy had changed so fast their brand strategy couldn’t keep up. As a result, the execution of their strategy—name, logo, web site, etc.—wasn’t only irrelevant, it was distracting, and it undermined them in tangible ways.
The Cost of Brand Strategy Debt
This gap between business strategy and brand strategy is common among startups. Without attention, that gap grows, compounds, and becomes harder to correct. It can be tough to spot, though, because the gap widens slowly.
There’s a real cost to this gap, but not all are immediately obvious. Here are a few of the more common negatives you can expect if you haven’t developed a brand strategy:
Brand Drift
No one seems to be able to describe what you do in any consistent and accurate way—not employees, customers, investors, or the press. Over time, these outdated perceptions of your brand persist in the market, and even though you’ve updated your brand, you’ll have to work hard to reeducate the market and correct those misperceptions.
This course correction down the road means you’ll have to spend more time and more money reeducating the market, instead of creating new value for the company and your customers.
Duplicated Effort
As your team creates content, each blog post, tweet, landing page, web page, or marketing will require your team to start from the very beginning, discussing not only the execution but the presumed underlying strategy as well. What kind of GIF would we include? Do we do funny emoji or not? You’ll have to rehash these fundamental questions every time.
Unfocused Activities
All those repeated
discussions mean your team spends a substantial percentage of their time rehashing decisions that should have already been made.
Diluted Word of Mouth
Your key messages become weakened the further they spread from you, rather than self-perpetuating like a dividing cell. That self-perpetuation is a key benefit to a strong brand, but without a clear strategy, no one will know how to talk about your company.
Reactive Posture
You spend time redefining yourself, often in light of a competitor or peer, rather than leading with high-impact messaging that emphasizes your vision, values, and key differences. You might find yourself saying things like, “We’re similar to X, but what’s different about is…” or “Yeah, our name is a bit misleading, what we really do is….”
Inefficient Advertising
Solid click-through rates (CTRs)
are essential to efficient online advertising, but without a clear message, you risk poor CTRs. As a result, you spend more time and money getting the flywheel spinning, losing out on momentum and leverage while attracting unqualified leads.
Individually, each of those issues might seem insignificant. But in aggregate, what is the total impact on your team’s productivity and your company’s revenue? It might be tough to measure, but it’s real.
Lewis Carroll said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” It’s also said in advertising circles that if you don’t have a strategy, any campaign can take you there. Same thing with branding.
Brand strategy matters for startups because it’s what keeps the team aligned and focused on a high-impact story, avoiding brand drift along the way.
The Benefits of Investing in Brand Strategy
What are the benefits of investing early in brand strategy? You can expect several positive outcomes, including the following:
Clarity
All of your marketing materials, like web site, blog, social assets, and campaigns, will deliver the same key message consistently. You’ll know what to say and how to say it.
Alignment
Everyone on your team, from full-timers to interns to contractors, will be supplied with those clear messages and equipped to communicate them in their work, whether that’s an ad, an email, or UI microcopy.
Efficiency
Since everyone is aligned around clear and powerful messages, you no longer have to spend time thinking about and debating what your communication should look and sound like.
Customer Loyalty
Because you’ve taken the time to understand your audience, your positioning, personality, and messaging resonate deeply with your customers, endearing them to your brand.
Differentiation
You’ve assessed the competitive situation and discovered an undeserved opportunity in the market. As a result, you deliver clear messaging to your customers on how you’re different.
When to Focus on Building Brand Strategy
It’s clear that brand strategy matters, especially for startups. But at what point should it become top priority? Founders have to juggle a ton of concerns—I know, that’s an understatement. You’re dealing with product, testing, hiring, legal, and financial matters and keeping the board and investors in the loop. And those are just a few large buckets that have to be managed.
I’ve seen many founders avoid strategic brand thinking for those reasons. But here’s the good news: using the tools in this book, several hours invested early will pay off exponentially over time, as you and your team build smart strategy into every decision you make. In this way, implementing your strategy will become second nature.
Once you’ve made a handful of key decisions about your strategy, your team can apply the resulting heuristics daily.
That said, there are a handful of inflection points when you might consider a deeper dive into brand strategy, particularly as your brand begins to scale. What does that look like?
In the early days, you, the founder, have been the face of the company and the de facto face of the brand as well. You go to customer meetings, answer emails, and likely tweet and blog and run support. That’s as it should be.
But as you approach product-market fit, the brand will begin to outgrow you. That’s because you won’t have the chance to speak with every customer, and ideally, user adoption is growing far beyond what a single person could drive.
Reporters and bloggers will start writing about you. You may begin experimenting with paid advertising
, like AdWords or Facebook Ads. In general, the machine is starting to work.
At this point, brand strategy really begins to matter. Without a strategy, how do you ensure all those different channels are aligned to tell the same, powerful story? It’s no longer something you can micromanage or brute force.
As you scale, there are a few common inflection points that drive the need to invest in brand strategy:
Growth
You’ve achieved product-market fit, and you’ve decided to focus on user acquisition. At this point, the team has been heads-down for months, gathering feedback, iterating, building, selling, and just trying to hold it all together.
As a result, no one has taken the time to discuss your brand choices in months, and the last web site refresh happened well before you nailed product-market fit. Your product is good enough that it’s growing organically, but your brand is proving a hindrance to faster growth, rather than a catalyst or a force multiplier.
This is a great time to step back and integrate all of your learnings into a cohesive strategy.
Shift in Audience
This scenario is similar to the prior example, but the key difference is that, through your customer discovery, you’ve learned that that the audience you were originally targeting is no longer your primary market.
This is fairly common in B2B and developer products. For example, your API might have gained traction among a niche developer community early on, but you’ve learned that the larger markets, and larger budgets, are next door in the marketing department.
In this case, the existing developer-centric brand strategy no longer applies, and probably gets in the way. This is an excellent time to step back, review your strategy, and determine what aspects of your current brand can be preserved and what has to go.
Ongoing Pain
Sometimes, a brand will cause problems regardless of stage. Maybe your team has trouble articulating your value in less than a paragraph, or people says things like, “I love their features, but I’m not really sure what they’re all about.” Again, it’s time to take a look at the strategy.
I’d add one nuance to this discussion: if you haven’t achieved product-market fit,2 I can’t in good faith advise you to spend time refining your brand strategy. Your primary branding goal for now is simply to not look or sound distracting. Just focus on learning from your customers and building something they love.
But there is one important caveat to this piece of advice: if your name or logo or web site is just awful, even in the very beginning, you probably are stacking the deck against yourself, since distracting brand elements might cause trouble with customer discovery or getting useful feedback.
In that case, advisors are likely to spend time suggesting web site edits or ideas for new names, rather than providing feedback on your business model or its underlying assumptions, which is exactly the kind of help you need at this stage.
If that describes you, do your best to course correct for now, and use the tools in this book to start making smart decisions. Focus on the Audience and Competition boxes of the Brand Strategy Canvas, as the research and analysis you conduct for those sections will aide your customer discovery and will be helpful regardless of your final brand strategy.
You might also spend some time on the Values box further down the canvas, since company values exist independent of the specifics of your product or solution. In my experience, it’s never too early to begin having values-focused discussions with your cofounders and early team members.
But at this point, beyond collating your initial research and exploring values, I’d recommend against spending tons of time and money on executing a brand strategy.
That’s because until you’ve reached product-market fit, you’re still gathering insights about your customer and your market. And in reality, there are probalby several pivots standing between you and growth mode.
I can’t count that times I’ve seen startups spend time and money on brand execution, then realize they need to pivot, rendering all that work completely irrelevant.
So if you’re pre-product–market fit, prepare for the future by reading this book and internalizing the thinking; but primarily, just try not to be terrible for the first little while. That’s the long and short of your strategy at this point.
Conclusion
Okay, consider your bases covered! You now have a definition of strategy that you can apply to your brand and to other parts of your business. You’ve also seen how the kernel of your strategy will translate into heuristics that your team can leverage every day to ensure your messaging resonates with customers and helps you avoid brand drift.
In the next chapter, we’ll explore the key aspects of the Brand Strategy Canvas to understand how you can begin crafting a strategy of your own.