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As a technology brand, you’re always breaking new ground. That’s a tough enough task in itself. Before long though, another brand is breaking the ground you’re currently standing on. This is the circle of life in the startup, scaleup and enterprise world, and it requires some nifty work from marketers to create a strategy that doesn’t get swallowed by the shifting landscape. 

This is the last article in our series on brand challenges in the technology market – and in case you missed them, you can sidle over to our thoughts on how to market complex technology and how to do it in a fast-moving industry.

Right now though, we’re going to dive into what makes this market so precarious: you’re disrupting or you’re in danger of disruption. And for brand marketers, this means you’re facing a tricky set of challenges. 

Challenge 01: Disruptors need to change the rules of engagement

If you’re a disruptive business, you’re not just trying to improve the way things are done, you’re trying to fundamentally change them. That could be as simple as switching the standard of social media content from curated pictures to scrappy 30 second videos, or it could be as complex as changing the way enterprises procure and pay their supply chain.

If your onboarding process takes minutes, and if there’s no cost or a negligible one, you have an advantage here: you can take people straight to proof of concept. 

That’s definitely not the case for every brand though. What if your disruptive technology requires a minimum investment of £20,000? Or if onboarding is going to take several months? Or if your users are going to need to upend their techstack? 

Here you’ve got your work cut out for you. You can’t rely on people trying your product to see that it’s so much better than the way things used to be. So what can you do to change the rules of engagement?

Solution 01: First convince people a new idea is true or possible

Behind every disruptive product lies a disruptive idea, such as:

The trouble is that in technology this premise is often far more complex:

Yes, there is a small subsection of the universe that will get it at first glance. They’ll probably be your early adopters. But the rest will need to understand the context first (why is mobile QA tooling broken? What are the limitations of closed loop systems?) 

You might be able to communicate what you need with a single, ingenious line. Like the 2014 campaign “Slack replaces email in your company,” or UiPath’s “We make robots so people don’t have to be robots.” Or, to take a favourite one-liner from our client Weavr: “We help cloud accounting apps move cash, not just watch it.”

That’s rarely enough on its own though. Some of your audience will need more detail before they’ll believe a new idea. Our client BaseKit wants to help big businesses understand that micro businesses need better access to new technology. To drive that premise home, we created an 8,000-word report with original research, interviews and stories.

Challenge 02: You’re reaching the disillusioned or neglected

Disruptive technology rarely starts out by targeting the mainstream. It usually goes after the outliers, the excluded, and the underserved, who either feel overlooked or actually are overlooked by the current products on the market.

That’s an opportunity, but it’s also a challenge. As an example, your audience of small businesses and sole traders might not have had a reason to care about accounts payable and receivable technology before – they couldn’t afford it and they didn’t have the time to learn to use it. Historically your product would be totally irrelevant and out of reach. You have to convince them they’re now included.

Alternatively they might be a disillusioned or disengaged audience – for instance, a Gen Z employee, an entrepreneur from a BAME background, or a team of developers who are tired of using catch-all platforms like Google Firebase to build products. Your task is to show them you relate to their pain and you have the beginnings of a cure. 

Solution 02: Show empathy before you sell 

In some ways this is marketing 101 but sometimes the simplest principles are the toughest to execute on well. 

Particularly in technology, it’s easy to get straight to the features, the metrics and the bottom line benefits. First though, it’s best to take a moment to talk like a human. That’s ultimately what will cut through the disillusionment or alienation that your audience is currently experiencing. 

Storytelling is your biggest ally here. We’re talking real stories from real humans, ideally talking from the heart. It’s a great opportunity for:

For instance, one of our clients wanted to shine a spotlight on the transit system of California. In that state, it’s typically only the poor that travel by bus. Our client wanted to serve that community while creating a payment system that attracted new riders, so that the whole transit system could become a better funded, green alternative to driving in the region. 

It’s not just the riders that felt disenfranchised here, it’s the bus agencies too. One glance at a neighbouring big city’s metro system tells you “this has funding”. But the rest of the region was stumbling along with antiquated or non-existent technology.

To set the stage for a new norm, we created a campaign, full of stories, interviews and real world examples. All of these showed how a new, accessible, affordable technology changed everything: these poorly-funded bus agencies could create a transit experience that rivals the big cities.

Challenge 03: You can’t build forever on a foundation of disruption

The truth is, you’re never a disruptor brand for that long  – in tech, everything simply moves too fast. 

You may start at the low end of the market but to expand you’ll need to appeal to premium or enterprise customers too. Or you begin by helping one community but pretty soon you’re trying to help many communities. Now you have investors, client expectations to meet and newcomer competitors who are right behind you. 

Although they’re often held up as an example, Uber is no longer disruptive. They’re being chased down by the carbon neutral Bolt, the VAT-paying Kapten and community-focused brands like the woman-exclusive London Lady Chauffeurs. Uber has to stay ahead by providing more features and better quality control – and whether they’ll succeed, only time will tell. 

If you’re going to defend your position, you’re better off finding the stories and parts of your feature-set that appeal to the emotional makeup of your audience.

Likewise, Slack once summarised their offering rather elegantly in the phrase “Slack replaces email in your company.” It was disruptive and interesting at the time but now there are plenty of solutions that replace email. So the company’s current campaigns focus on discounts, big feature lists (“over 1800 integrations!”), and a confidence vote from other established brands like Spotify. 

This might not be the ideal way to do it but brands do need to grow up a bit eventually. As Deloitte put it in their 2023 tech trends report: “Startups often embrace the mantra ‘move fast and break things.’ It’s easier for them to be disruptive because they’re definitionally starting from zero and don’t yet have a legacy to protect. Established organisations, on the other hand, very much do.”

You can’t build on a foundation of disruption forever, so what do you do next?

Solution 03: Find the heart of your brand and keep it fired up

It’s a natural fact of life in the startup to scaleup world: your brand must evolve. Your last campaign is no recipe for the next one, and your core brand message might no longer resonate with your new target audience. You need to stay relevant while staying in touch with what made your company special in the first place.

For instance, new Slack-like SaaS platforms such as Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are taking on the juggernaut by staying open source – a point that instantly endears them to developers and sets them apart from incumbents like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

The trick will be, once every work platform is eventually open source, to know what their differentiator will be then. They could join the feature/discount/price race and try to live on historic gains in brand recognition. This does work for some, after all. But “more, better, cheaper” is a tiring message to keep up, and it’s one that’s vulnerable to the more emotionally-resonant messaging of new competitors.

And there is an alternative and more compelling option. If you’re going to defend your position, you’re better off finding the stories and parts of your feature-set that appeal to the emotional makeup of your audience. 

For instance, one of our clients has created extremely sophisticated software that’s years ahead of other brands. Even though there are new digital-native offerings out there now, the newcomer software is scrappy to the point of being non-compliant and incomplete. Meanwhile our client’s solution is watertight – so they double down on this in all their messaging, bringing home the sense that they are the smarter brand.

You can’t always play the scrappy startup game. You can’t focus on your MVP’s single feature for all time. But you can stay distinctive – you just need to engineer your brand at the right time.

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Technology is defined as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. And in some fields, all those aspects are constantly on the move – the knowledge, the application of it, and the purpose behind it. 

You might be in an emerging field like generative AI, an established industry like martech that’s constantly competing for the next edge, or a reactive industry like cybersecurity that’s constantly evolving to meet the next threat. Either way, you’ll probably be selling the future, commenting on what’s next, and trying to keep up with everything that changed yesterday. 

It’s a challenge to market in such fast-moving industries. How do you present a consistent brand when you need to constantly evolve? How much do you say about your product roadmap when it’s always shifting? And how do you convince the world you’re still one step ahead of your competitors?

Challenge 01: The industry is changing

You wake up, and suddenly aluminium-sulphur batteries exist. New neural-implants are viable. And, although plenty of companies haven’t finished the build of their last closed loop payment system, open loop solutions are everywhere. 

Many of the technology industries move as a kaleidoscope moves. It’s part of what makes these sectors so interesting to work in, and it’s also what makes life so challenging for marketers. 

As Deloitte wrote in their 2023 Tech Trends report: “Before the economic landscape of the metaverse changes from fluid to concrete, pioneers will need to make their moves.” That is just as applicable to the fields of XR, embedded finance or haptics as it is for the metaverse – both on a business level and a brand level.

It’s not always about changing your product pipeline today. Sometimes it’s enough to show you’re aware you might need to change it tomorrow. If you’re a mathematical forecasting company, for instance, your brand content might need to address quantum computing. Or if you’re in open payments, you might need to be talking about future government regulation and how your SaaS platform will be ready for it.

The danger is that in an attempt to seem ahead of the curve, technology companies can overreach. Everyone wants to talk about the next big thing so they can catch the attention of those scanning the horizon. But you’ll want to stay within the boundaries of your expertise, otherwise customers with a better understanding of the emerging technology will see through you.

Solution: Talk to your subject matter experts

This is an area where siloed marketers are a bad idea (though to be honest, are siloed marketers ever a good idea?). Marketers are often the ones with their finger on the pulse but they rarely understand the circulatory system of veins and arteries beneath that pulse. 

If marketers can work with the experts in their company, and extract their perspective on an emerging subject, they’re much more likely to talk to an audience with the right level of depth, nuance and cautious optimism. In our experience, data scientists, CTOs, and product leads are also more aware of when they shouldn’t comment on a topic at all.

Challenge 02: Your products are changing

You’re used to selling a journey to a destination you haven’t finished laying the rail tracks to. The build might not be locked in, there’s still end-to-end testing to be done, but you have to market what you’re building next – because everyone else is too, and you need to show that you’re ahead.

Of course, this status quo comes with its fair share of high profile vapourware products. Whether it’s Google Stadia simply promoting features they were never able to release, or the extreme 80’s case of Ovation’s office suite programme, which was advertised with a fake demo to try and gain the funding the product team finally needed to finish it (they never did).

Overpromising isn’t an option, but neither is under promising. For a number of our clients it’s a constant balancing act: knowing when to say a feature is  ‘coming soon’, using the future-facing words investors want to hear (did somebody say blockchain?), and holding fire when a feature just isn’t ready to be talked about.

Solution: Sell the future but don’t speculate

Marketers here need to keep two hands on two pulses – your audience’s needs, and your product team’s ongoing struggle to build, test and fix according to schedule.

There’s one senior product marketer we work with who is particularly skilled at doing this. As a result they’re very adept at knowing the nuances of when, how and at what frequency to advertise a feature or benefit. At times, we’ve seen them put the hard brake on the company’s content or advertising, and there have been occasions where they’ve suggested winding down the selling of a product altogether.

In our conversations, it’s been important for us to listen to their input but it’s been equally important not to hit delete on a claim unless we had to. Often it’s been a matter of suggesting alternatives and tweaks that position the messaging exactly where it needs to be. That way the brand could still sell the essence of what they’re building towards without slipping into speculation.

Challenge 03: Your customers are changing

Tech is affected more by trends than almost any other industry, with perhaps the exception of fashion. The difference is that in the fashion industry, at least historically, people make impulse, almost-instant purchases. Whereas in the technology industries, product purchases can take months, or even years to complete. 

This means that the B2B technology you’re selling when you complete a sale is never exactly the same product as when you first pitched. You need to catch your addressable market’s attention now but you need to anticipate what their wants and needs will be next year. Or possibly the year after, if you’re selling to an enterprise.

A different but related issue: your audience might shift entirely. 73% of technology startups pivot to a different market over time, and even if you stay the course in a single sector, almost inevitably the size and maturity of organisations you’ll be targeting will increase.

Sometimes this change needs to happen suddenly for tactical reasons. One brand we work with has recently switched from just targeting new challenger companies, to targeting long established organisations in the energy market, based purely on new activity of these companies’ sales reps.

Solution: Keep evolving your brand intentionally

Recently, in preparation for a brand voice and messaging workshop with a scaleup, we combed through several documents that detailed the company’s customer personas and brand strategy. Even though they were created in the last 9 months, we were told they were already out of date.

No brand can remain static, and in fast-moving technology industries, you’ve got to be even quicker on your toes. As we explored in our roundtable discussion on how much should brand evolve, your messaging needs to hit the sweet spot between brand consistency and brand relevance. And to do this, you need to be constantly revising your customer personas and reevaluating your brand strategy to match.

Sometimes this is about crafting vertical-specific messaging that speaks directly to the up-to-the-minute ambitions of specific target markets. But you’ll also want to step back occasionally to reevaluate your overall brand and content strategy to make sure it’s going to resonate with your audience as a whole.

The trick is to be intentional. We’ve seen fast-moving technology companies evolve their brands unintentionally – which is a natural outcome of hiring, scaling and trying to swim in bigger ponds. 

Maybe the company starts using the same tech-normative language as their new peers, or possibly their values fade into the background as they focus on selling their technology’s bottom line benefits. At this point they often need intentional brand engineering.

In case you missed it, check out the first blog in our series on marketing challenges in the technology industry: Clear as nanocrystal: How to market complex technology.

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Sell the benefits not the features. Sell the lifestyle. Simplify. That’s the marketing advice you might have followed before you started marketing complex technology. Then you hit a brick wall. Or possibly one made of plasma.

That classic marketing advice has its place – but it doesn’t always work when your company has a chief science officer, or your target audience includes CTOs, or when 50% of your audience doesn’t understand what your industry even is. 

Here we outline the challenges of marketing complex technology, why traditional marketing advice doesn’t always suit, and what alternatives actually work.

Challenge 01: Your audience is often confused

It’s not just innovation that can get complex, it’s often the context too. Cybersecurity products provide nuanced solutions to multifaceted threats. Biotech addresses gaps within disease detection that impact a sprawling NHS infrastructure. Embedded finance solves money flow issues that most businesses don’t even know exist.

Audiences don’t always see the wider picture. Sometimes it’s like starting in the middle of a Christopher Nolan film and expecting a new audience to understand why solving that equation on Michael Caine’s blackboard really matters. Or why it’s a bad thing to die when you’re in a dream within a dream.

If people don’t really understand the problem, they’re not going to be won over by the solution.

Solution: Don’t just simplify; make people curious

Simplicity works. To a point. While you can’t afford to distract customers with superfluous detail or technical language that won’t resonate, you also can’t afford to simplify your product or service’s true value away.

Instead of aiming for simplicity, aim to capture attention. If you can find the one line that will disturb your audience’s status quo, they’ll become interested enough to grapple with what you have to say. And if you can make someone curious enough to learn about their problem, they might become interested in your solution. 

This is a challenge that one of our clients, Weavr, is taking head on. 

Their emerging industry of embedded finance is full of brands offering solutions that appear almost identical. All seem to offer digital cards, a better payment experience, and so on, but the blurred lines around compliance are causing some buyers to invest in the wrong technology for their business. 

As a result, Weavr are doing everything they can to communicate the difference – smart messaging, thought leadership, and strategic content campaigns. While they don’t burden their audience with every detail behind how embedded finance works, they’re very good at getting you to care about the next thing they have to say, so that buyers can make an fully-informed decision.

Challenge 02: Your audience is sceptical

Complex technology in the B2B space usually falls into one of two categories:

Noise and unfamiliarity both breed scepticism – not in everyone, but enough to make it tougher once you’ve run out of early adopters. That scepticism is fuelled by the habits of some technology marketers, who are determined to make a multi-faceted product or service sound as simple as possible. 

The oft-touted argument is that people don’t need to understand the combustion engine to buy a car. But this is often a flawed comparison. First, the car is a proven concept, and your technology might not be. If you were to step into a self-driving car in London traffic, you might want a bit more explanation about how it keeps you safe first.

Second, most car manufacturers are also known quantities. People don’t need as much context when they already trust a brand, which is why when Google released their Pixel phone, they could just advertise it as ‘The Google Phone’ with no additional copy. People understood the brand, so they understood the value of the product. 

Too many marketers act as though they have this luxury when their brand hasn’t earned it yet. Over-explaining features used to be a flaw of the technology industry, but now too many of us have swung to the other extreme, relying on hype language and presenting a company’s technology as if it’s a magic show. 

You can do this once you’ve got an expert reputation, but when you’re relatively new in the market, or the market itself is new, you can’t afford to dish out too much hyperbole. Particularly in B2B. Hype never works on the sceptical – in fact it puts them off.

Solution: Don’t offer hype; make the technology human

It’s easy to lead with hype, which is why so many brands do it, recycling adjectives like ‘adaptable’, ‘state of the art’ or ‘innovative’ until they all sound like generic keys to a vague future. 

Instead of hyping up your product or service, drill down into your audience. What do they care about? What are they already doing that your tech reimagines? What will be their experience of your product on a human-level? 

Libeo’s accounts payable SaaS platform does this brilliantly, without falling into the trap of so many automation-led products, which usually say things along the lines of ‘less paperwork’, ‘no admin’ or the most cheesy line in all B2B marketing, ‘We take care of X, so you can focus on what you do best.’ 

Instead Libeo, who we worked with on a series of customer-focused blog posts, plays to specific verticals in their small business audience, talking to hospitality with phrases like “wait on your tables, not for your invoices” or speaking to e-commerce: “sell in a single click? Then pay that way, too.”

Stories are complex tech’s best friend – real accounts of real people experiencing your product, working behind the scenes of your organisation, or taking the lead through your services. If you’re interested, you can see how we did this for one multichannel sales tech company.

Challenge 03:  Your audience is sometimes expert

Some technology companies are lucky: they have one customer persona – expert or non-expert – and they can pitch their product or service at this exact frequency.

This is rare, however, particularly for B2B technology that requires purchasing sign-off from multiple departments, some tech-fluent and others not. We’ve often had to tailor a tech company’s messaging five ways – between startup level CTOs and CEOs, as well as enterprise level CSOs, CIOs and CEOs.

Alternatively you might be skipping a tech audience altogether but you still might be talking to experts of another kind – ecologists, HR directors, civil servants. Here you need to translate your technical expertise, not so anyone can understand it, but so a specialist in another field can appreciate it.

The danger here is your content marketing can easily come across as patronising, or ill-informed. The number of HR-tech platforms with blogs offering basic HR advice – sometimes generated by AI – to seasoned HR professionals is surprising, since it’s the kind of content that would make a potential customer think a brand’s technology is beneath them. 

Solution: Don’t silo the marketing dept; build your brand together

Since your audience is likely to have many faces and facets, you’ll want your messaging and comms to be as complete and rich as possible. 

That means you mustn’t silo your marketing team. Gather members of your wider team to help define your brand, and create messaging pillars that will resonate with every level of your audience. Check out our Brand Roundtable discussion on ‘Defining your brand: who should be involved?’ to learn more about how to do this.

The same applies to content. Your team is full of specialist understanding, so mine their expertise and showcase it if it’s relevant to your audience. Get your marketing team to interview external experts when you need to talk beyond your remit, complete original research if you can, and – whether your team is full of data scientists, technical advisors, or mathematicians – keep them talking to your marketing people. 

Having interviewed a plethora of technical authorities over the years – from algorithm auditors to penetration testers and leaders in fintech – we’ve learned they’re the ones who can often pull out a new conceptual model on the fly, or drill down into the nuance of a subject. 

They might want to say too much, sure. And you might need a copywriter to arrange what they say on a page, or hone it into a video script for your audience, but your experts’ input is what gives your brand the depth and authority it needs. That’s what enables you to begin a lasting conversation with your audience, one where they’ll listen long enough to see why they need your complex tech.

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It’s been a long time since anyone really needed to sell the benefits of creating content for marketing purposes. In fact, if anything, it’s so popular that there’s far too much content out there these days. Blog posts, whitepapers, social posts, podcasts, videos, reels… The challenge now is not creating content but creating content that gets results.

The problem is that all too often, the focus is on the deliverables. There’s a pressure to create something tangible, to see results as soon as possible. But to rush the thinking in order to accelerate the doing is ultimately to position yourself as the hare in that old children’s tale. 

Winning comes from taking the tortoise’s approach. Here’s what that entails when it comes to content, and why it’s better for business in the long run.

You need to understand what your content is for

This is a really important question and one you need to be able to answer clearly rather than in general terms. The word strategic is bandied about far too much in business circles but in this case it’s appropriate. Strategic means, in a nutshell, instrumental in achieving the aims of a wider, longer-term plan. 

We’re not just talking about a marketing plan here but the broader business aims that take into account your sales team’s goals, your product team’s pipeline, and the ambitions your C-suite have, which go beyond lead generation and closing deals. 

For instance, if you’re a service-based company, one of your wider goals might include:

If you’re a product-based company, one of your wider goals might be to:

When your content strategy is aligned to a specific wider goal like one of these, it enables you to switch gears from the generic good practices of marketing – generate leads, build community, support the sales funnel, etc. 

Instead you can drive the most important priorities of your organisation. And you can do it in every content decision, from the type of content you produce and what topics you cover to where you share it and how often you release it.

What is your audience interested in?

As important as it is to know what you’re trying to achieve with your content, it’s even more important to understand what your audience is trying to achieve. 

Are they stuck on a problem and need help exploring it and discovering what solutions are available? Are they completely unaware that disaster is round the corner and therefore in need of a wake up call? Are they a bit hazy about a trending topic and looking for a well articulated overview so they can sound smart in their next board meeting?

You may already have customer or client personas but the chances are these have not been developed with a view to content creation. So go back to them and think about what your audience might engage with. 

Better still, dig into the data and see what they are already engaging with. What are they commenting on or reacting to on LinkedIn? Which of your blog posts or emails are getting the most views or opens?

How are people going to find your content?

Much as we’d all love to create content that goes viral, spreading by word of mouth because of its sheer brilliance, the reality is that’s highly unlikely to happen in all but a very small handful of cases.

There are three main ways to get your content in front of people. First, you can share it where they are – social media, YouTube etc. In this case, your content needs to be eye catching and engaging, hooking your audience quickly. It’s likely to be shorter and more visual, enticing them to take the next step, whether that’s clicking through to a longer form piece of content, visiting a website or making a buy decision.

You can also catch people in search mode. This is where SEO comes in, which means doing work on SEO strategy. Yes, more strategy. Because plucking a few keywords out of the air isn’t enough to drive results. You need to understand everything from search volume to search intent – and that’s before you get into the technical side of SEO.

Finally, you can send your content to people, having built up your email and contacts database. From the simplest of newsletters to personalised relationship-building emails to nurture sequences designed to convert for a specific product or service, there are many ways to use the contact details you’ve collected to deliver the right content exactly when it’s needed.

What do you want your audience to do next?

It’s totally acceptable to count someone reading, watching or listening to your content as a win. They are now aware of your brand, and have hopefully formed at least an initial impression of it as being helpful or disruptive or fun or whatever it is that you’re trying to establish.

But ideally, you want them to take action after engaging with your content. What that action is will depend on where they are in their buyer journey. If they’re near the top of the funnel, getting them to engage with a second piece of content could be enough. Or you might want them to download or sign up to something so that you have their contact details, or follow your account on social media so you can stay in front of them.

As you move down the funnel you may want to direct them to case studies, product or service pages, or blog posts that hone in on the features and benefits of what you offer. And finally you’ll have sales collateral, which should also form part of your content plan, where the CTAs will focus on starting a free trial, booking a demo, contacting the sales team or making a purchase.

Campaign-thinking

Ideally you’ll string different pieces of content together to create a campaign that includes the ‘how they get to it’ and ‘what they do afterwards’ bits, linking the whole thing back to those business objectives. 

For instance, when one of our clients asked us to create a case study for them, we pushed back and told them no. 

Creating a case study wasn’t enough. To achieve the wider goals they had in mind, we needed to design a campaign that would maximise the number of people reaching the case study by creating an awareness journey – not only a case study but two related blog posts and a series of LinkedIn posts, which would educate and nudge a readership towards a place where they cared to read it all. 

The LinkedIn posts worked their magic, generating click-through rates that were well above industry averages. And as a result, Hotjar analysis of the case study showed that engagement with those that reached it was very high – 61% of visitors read to the halfway point, with 50% staying engaged until the ‘outcomes’ section near the bottom of the page. 

Check out the full case study to read more about how we helped PSI to engage a highly specific audience. Or if you’re ready to take a more strategic approach to your content creation, get in touch or visit our content strategy services page.

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This is the conclusion to our five-part Brand Roundtable series, based on a conversation between experts with rich experience of creating and curating brands from startup to scaleup, and from idea to acquisition. Here they ask whether brand can be engineered or should emerge naturally – and how you can harness brand either way.

Not every organisation follows the same lifecycle. Many are bootstrapped by first-time business owners, some have funding out of the gate, and others are launched by larger parent companies. Some companies grow one person at a time, others 50 at a time. Some are led by their founders their whole existence, others are entirely reimagined when new leadership arrives.

With such different starting points, and so many directions to evolve in, how do you harness brand? Should you define your brand at the beginning or wait for it to emerge over time? Can a brand be engineered? And if so, how should you go about it?

We took these questions to our roundtable contributors, who teased out the issue:

Can a brand emerge naturally over time?

It’s rare for a brand to be fully formed early in a business journey. Instead, as we explored in our conversation on how much should brand evolve?, it’s worth starting off with what Tristan Gillen described as a ‘minimum viable brand’ – a basic framework that can be flexible while you’re likely to iterate and pivot.

“Throughout your early growth journey you’re going to have to be a little bit reactive with your brand,” says Tristan. “The only solution is to keep your finger on the pulse – always asking: does the brand reflect the stage the business is at.”

At RH&Co, for instance, it took us several years to go from a relatively generalist copywriting agency – writing lots of different types of copy for lots of different types of business – to one with a defined audience and expertise niche.

Today we’re confident in our value proposition – we help expert-led businesses to stand out as authorities in their field – but this emerged gradually because the company itself was still forming, storming, norming, etc. and we couldn’t have taken a shortcut.

However, while brand can emerge over time, there’s no guarantee that it will. Nick says his first engineering business, Motion Media, grew over six years to be worth £270 million, but he attributes this number to the dotcom boom rather than the strength of their brand. Knowing what he knows now, Nick says they would have been a lot more successful if they deliberately refined the brand experience of their product. 

Lauren describes how brand can so easily get lost: “If you’re trying to juggle performance, delivery, customer satisfaction, raising cash, hiring and so on, being intentional about your brand across every element of a business is actually really hard to do.”

Can a brand be engineered from its inception?

Caroline says that you only need to look at British Gas and Hive to see that a brand can be heavily engineered – designed from the ground up not to embody the vision, mission and values of a growing team, but to capitalise on a market opportunity. 

A similar trend can be seen in the finance sector, where companies like NatWest are launching new brands like Mettle to compete with challenger banks. Or in the telecom space, where new alt-nets like Gigaclear and Ogi need to come out swinging to win public trust fast.

This kind of heavily engineered brand still can’t be designed entirely ‘from the top’, however. Eventually, you’ll need to bring more of your people into the brand creation.

“If you don’t involve people in the brand creation, the engineered brand has a shelf life,” says Caroline. “It has limitations because it’s been designed in a way that leaves out the human touch of the people behind it.”

When does a brand need further engineering?

As we explored earlier in our conversation, brand is far more than a visual identity and a strapline, and a lack of brand definition has a very real effect on the kind of customers, employees and investment they can attract.

At RH&Co, we’ve worked with a number of SMEs that have managed to muddle through with a relatively vague brand, but eventually they reach a crux point where their messaging becomes too ineffective for their growth goals. At that stage, they need to refocus and complete some intentional engineering work on their brand.

Brand building is a continuous process but at different times you’ll want to focus on different areas depending on your growth stage and your focus for the coming months and years.

1. When to work on the customer-facing brand

The customer-facing brand is the one that gets you business, the one responsible for lowering your cost of acquisition (CAC) and raising your customer lifetime value (LTV). It’s also what will help you to occupy a new market or penetrate a saturated one.

During the early stages of a company’s growth, especially before product-market fit, you’ll want to work more on your overarching brand – defining and communicating vision, mission and values. This will help your product find early adopters, crowdfunders and those who will become the strongest advocates of your brand. 

You need to set the culture and get good people in your organisation at the early stages because the first 10 will set the culture for the first 1,000

Lauren (Stewart) Tack, Founder and CEO of Invigorate and angel investor

Later on in the company lifecycle however, you’ll want to invest more in product and verticals branding, which will ‘grow up’ your brand. Faye describes how UltraLeap achieved this: taking their overarching vision, mission and values and working out how to make this translate to their three verticals – XR, touchless experiences and automotives – and subsequently to their audience. 

“Product brands need to filter down from the overarching messaging so there’s consistency,” says Faye. “That’s important for UltraLeap because if you take automotives, we’re trying to get our haptics into cars, but our XR products could also help build those same cars – so it all needs to feel part of the same narrative.”

At RH&Co we went through a similar process with the impact investor BBRC. Their mission, vision and values were already refined but, after six years of growth, they needed to ensure these resonated with the three distinct audiences they had acquired – ESG investors, businesses with a strong purpose, and charities/social enterprises. 

So we worked closely with the BBRC team to translate their core messaging three ways: 

2. When to work on the employer brand

Companies inevitably need to invest in employer brand before scaling since it will help reduce cost-per-hire and attract the best talent. However, brands can’t afford to wait until the scaling stage before they begin engineering employer brand.

“You want a snowball effect to take place,” says Lauren. ‘You need to set the culture and get good people in your organisation at the early stages because the first 10 will set the culture for the first 1,000 – and great managers will hire great people.”

Employer brand will either be upheld or undone by a company’s culture and values – and vice versa. If your employer brand is effective enough, it help you attract people capable of upholding your culture and values – and you need those people right from the beginning. 

You might not invest in the assets at that stage – flashy recruiting videos and so on – but you do need to invest some thought. And that thought needs to continue down the line. A long-standing reputation can help but you can rarely afford to rest on your laurels. You need to keep evolving the brand you’re representing – because the talent market is evolving too.

“When I was learning to be an engineer, an apprenticeship at Rolls Royce was the start to the Rolls Royce of careers,” says Nick. “But then the industry changed, and the company did nothing to change their brand, assuming people would still aspire to work for them based on their history – but a couple of years ago from a talent attraction point of view Rolls Royce was struggling.”

3. Engineering the investor-facing brand

Brand influences investors. To begin with, a minimum viable brand might be all you need to attract the angel investors and seed funding you’re looking for. But as companies enter later funding rounds, they sometimes need to grow beyond their original startup identity.

Lauren says, “When they want to attract investors, startups often need to translate their consumer-facing brand into a more grown up brand. They need to balance their quirky coolness and their innovative edge with having all their ducks in a row – and having bigger conversations in traditional boardrooms with traditional businesses.”

The same goes for brands looking to be acquired – but growing up for investors doesn’t mean losing their identity. Investors are likely aware of the scrappiness that lies beneath any image of sophistication.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” says Abeed. “Startups and growth businesses have to be scrappy and commercial and/or agile. They need to make money and they will effectively do everything they possibly can do to try and make money. On the surface, they might try to look like gliding swans, but underneath the surface they are scrapping.

“So when it comes to finding that balance – presenting a good brand to investors and consumers – that’s where having the right advisors on board can help, they can help you to have those bigger conversations with investors while maintaining your edge.”

And that’s a wrap on our brand roundtable series. If you’re interested in diving deeper into brand and brand building, check out our thoughts on brand building vs. lead generation or how to explain a complex value proposition in a nutshell. 

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This article is the fourth in our Brand Roundtable series, based on a conversation between experts with rich experience of creating and curating brands from startup to scaleup, and from idea to acquisition. Here they dissect who should be involved in that brand creation and curation – and to what extent.

As we’ve unpacked in our roundtable discussions so far, we’ve seen that brand informs a team’s sense of identity, it influences customers and investors for better or worse, and it can have a deal-breaking effect on a company’s future. 

That’s an awful lot. So – who should be responsible for it? The brand’s founders? The marketing department? The product team?

No doubt, the answer to that question changes depending on whether you have a team of six, 60 or 600. Brands need to evolve with time, and so do the people involved in curating it – but how do you determine who they should be?

We took the question to our roundtable contributors, who have all been a part of creating and advising on brand throughout different stages of the growth journey:

The role of founders and external specialists

Vision, mission and values are the first areas you need to define if you want a strong foundation for your brand. Artificial brands do exist, but more than ever before, brand needs to be grounded in a real culture and values. 

These issues are primarily defined by the founders – although that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t involve other people. Tristan explains how, in the early days of Growth Division, they brought in a branding specialist to help them create their initial or minimum-viable-brand.

“They helped us to define our why – our vision, mission values,” he says. “We were challenged to question why we’re building this team in the first place? What are we trying to achieve? Why are we in business?”

Aided by their branding specialist’s external perspective, Tristan and his business partner Tom were able to land on a set of values that would stand the test of time. 

“So many of the decisions we still make – from who we work with to what we say online – all of it can trace its roots back to the first session that focused on vision, mission and values.”

You need to get some distance from the brand

Even with external support, founders will inevitably create a brand that’s founder-centric – and sometimes they’ll do it unconsciously. Lauren, for instance, told us how a coach has helped her reflect on her personal values and how closely it has informed those of her latest startup, Invigorate. 

“I think founders don’t realise how much they are subconsciously imprinting themselves – and how they want to see the world – onto their brand,” she says. “The challenge is to take several steps back and ensure it exists beyond you.”

That’s a challenge Caroline has faced time and again when working with tech companies. For the sake of their product’s success, some team members often need to put their personal opinions about the brand to one side.

“The engineering team, for instance, is very, very close to the product,” says Caroline. “The product is their baby but the brand ultimately needs to resonate with the people who will buy it. If it doesn’t, you’ve not got a business.”

What you can’t afford – and I’ve seen this a lot – is a technical team that is completely at odds with the marketing team.

Nick Sturge MBE, portfolio NED and strategic adviser

The role your team should play in defining the brand

At RH&CO we work with companies to clarify their brand message, and we’ll involve a number of people – from CEOs to commercial directors, heads of delivery, senior engineers or science officers, and sales people.

Throughout the project, we might see that a few team members need to put their personal opinions to one side, and we’ll challenge them on it, but we usually find others have their finger on the pulse.

“One or two individuals in a team might be on the money,” says Caroline. “And that’s because they’re giving voice to something that goes beyond their core opinion – articulating what they feel is right for their audience.”

Nick adds, “It’s about translation. It’s about finding the 20th bullet point on the product feature list that is the real winner. That information is usually with the CTO or the founding CEO but you’ve got to translate it. You’ve got to find a way of pulling that information out and putting it through another lens.”

You need to translate brand internally and externally

This translation is often essential if you want to win over your audience but it’s also a risk and one that needs to be handled carefully. If a key team member is very passionate about the product, and has strong ideas about it, you need to get that person’s buy-in. 

“What you can’t afford – and I’ve seen this a lot – is a technical team that is completely at odds with the marketing team,” says Nick. “That leaves you with no coherence. So what you need to do is translate the brand internally as well as externally.”

This careful negotiation of messaging becomes vital when an organisation reaches a key juncture such as a post-acquisition or -merger. Or when announcing a new partnership.

When Ultrahaptics acquired LeapMotion and became Ultraleap, says Faye, the company thought hard about the kind of story it was telling.

There were also some fine lines to tread for their employee brand – they wanted to stay a proud Bristol company while becoming a global company, and to continue to attract a core of talent from Bristol while not isolating their Silicon Valley-based team.

“It’s not an easy task and it’s not a one-and-done task, especially when you’ve completed an acquisition,” says Faye. “There’s always an opportunity to rethink the brand for the better and there’s a constant need for communication.”

For more insight into creating and curating brand, see our roundtable discussions on what is brand and how much should brand evolve. Or stay tuned for more conversations from our brand roundtable. 

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This article is the third in our Brand Roundtable series, based on a conversation between experts with rich experience of creating and curating brands from startup to scaleup, and from idea to acquisition. Here they interrogate what brand actually is and why we underestimate its influence. 

Whether you’re curating a legacy brand or engineering a new one with a new team, it’s important to know what you’re working with. So how should we define brand? How does it influence people in your organisation and outside? And what about the different types – customer brand, employer brand, investor-facing brand? 

We took these questions to our roundtable contributors, who shed the light of their expertise on the issue:

Brand is culture, values and public perception

Brand could arguably be defined as the public part of your organisation, product or service, but as Tristan explains, that goes far beyond visual identity, market positioning and PR statements:

“Brand is a customer’s interpretation of everything that builds up your business,” he says. “It might include the logo, the website, that time they spoke with you, something they saw online, the product they tried – all of this combines into brand perception.”

Nick expands on this: “It’s not just about the branding per se. It’s also about behaviour – how the company behaves, and how people behave to bring the brand to life.”

Culture and values play a crucial role in the brand, since they are effectively the ecosystem that defines how the company behaves and speaks, internally and externally. As Abeed makes clear, this is increasingly important for every stakeholder.

“Culture and values are what customers buy into,” he says. “They’re what talent buys into, and they’re what investors buy into. I’ve seen them play a bigger and bigger part in every M&A transaction.”

However, there’s a difference between the culture and values you choose and the culture and values that are ascribed to you. The measure of brand could be what customers or employees say about you when you’re not in the room, and, as Caroline points out, that is often defined by how you deal with problems and trials when they arise.

“The manifestation of a brand is holistic over all touchpoints,” she says. “If your product runs into a problem, it’s how you deal with that issue, and your values either rescue the situation or cause it to fall even more.”

The different types of brand

Consumer brand (B2C)

Consumer brand is what your customers and potential customers perceive. Nick says that here brand often depends on performance, consistency and meeting customer expectations e.g. if I open this can of Heinz beans, will I get exactly what I expect and nothing less? 

That said, culture and values are also becoming important for consumer products. 

“These days people can research more easily than ever,” says Caroline. “UK customers can see what people in Finland feel about a particular product or see how a company has acted through its history. So the values and ethics of a business are coming way more into play.”

More and more consumer products encourage people to make a values- or personal identity-based choice rather than a safe issue, especially as sustainability and social issues become more deal-breaking. Think Patagonia, Vans or Snag Tights vs Ben Sherman or M&S. 

When asked about B2C companies that are nailing their brand, a number of our roundtable contributors highlighted brands disrupting the market this way:  

“I don’t know what it is but we’re being talked about a lot more.” If I could measure that quality in metrics it would surpass anything and everything.

Caroline Macdonald, CEO and PR and marketing specialist at OggaDoon

Client brand (B2B)

In the B2B environment, brand plays a similar role but the emphasis is different. 

“The B2B environment is really a people’s business,” says Lauren. “People sell to people and buy from people. It’s also interesting how much more personal B2B business has become in recent years  – there’s more space for showing empathy, valuing the voice of the customer and sharing personal employee stories.”

Even with B2B products, such as SaaS, the team behind it matters more than with a typical consumer product. That’s often because, in the B2B world, the expertise behind the product feeds greatly into a customer’s perception of it.

Tristan recommends Weavr as an example of a B2B company with a strong brand with laser targeted positioning. They take every opportunity to promote their team’s embedded finance expertise through interviews, events and articles, and the company is emerging as an authority in their market. 

RH&Co has been working with the team over the last couple of years to create this expert-led content, and it’s been fascinating to have a frontrow seat to Weavr’s success.

Employee brand 

Faye defines brand as “a company’s story, the journey they’ve gone through and where they’re trying to get to.” 

When it comes to employee brand, it’s about creating a story – grounded in your culture and values –  that talent will want to be a part of. That’s not just a concern for larger businesses with aggressive hiring strategies, it’s an issue for any company that wants to attract values-led talent.

Among his roles, Abeed lectures at universities and says, “A lot of the graduates I see would sacrifice £10,000 or £15,000 in salary if it means they can go and work for a business that aligns with their sense of purpose.”

Investor brand 

Investors know that brand will have very real effects on consumers, clients and employees. And they know that will translate into the company’s cost per hire (CPH), their cost of acquisition (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV). So they’ll be on the lookout for companies with a compelling story and the culture and values to back it up. And when it comes to acquisition targets, they’ll be looking for alignment here. 

They’ll also be looking for governance. A company’s brand might be scrappy and irreverent in classic startup style, but Lauren and Abeed say they also need to grow up so that they can have bigger conversations in traditional boardrooms and with traditional businesses. 

For more thoughts on investor-facing brand, make sure you read our last roundtable discussion on the subject – how brand influences investors.

Peer-to-peer brand (P2P)

Brands can have an influence that goes far beyond products and services. If you curate a brand well, with the right values and culture at the core, it won’t just attract customers,  investors and employees… it’ll draw other attention as well. 

When Covid hit, Ultrahaptics turned their attention to their verticals – to create more focused messaging around XR, touchless experiences, and automotives. You could say they were focusing on their consumer and client brand. 

“Later we realised we needed to come back to our corporate story,” says Faye. “Because we’re not just our three verticals – we’re so much more. That’s why we’re headed back to CES. It’s not an event that addresses our verticals but it’s our chance to show who we are and where we’re going.”

When people see a brand improving their community or industry in a way they want to emulate, that’s powerful influence. If you can build this kind of reputation, it’ll have a domino effect on your how people perceive your company – investors, customers and talent. And it might ensure you leave your industry in a better state than when you entered it.  

Brand is often intangible but its effects are concrete 

Considering how broad the subject of brand is, you might wonder whether it’s worth dissecting at all. If you can’t point to brand and say ‘there it is’, how do you begin to address it? That said, the reward of effective brand building is very easy to see. 

“Brand enhances the value of the business as a whole,” says Lauren. “It affects your ability to attract talent, customers, investors, leadership and so on. Brand is an intangible asset, but it’s so vital.”

A few years ago Caroline and Nick were collaborating to promote the work of the Engine Shed in Bristol, and about four or five months after they began working together, Nick turned to Caroline and said something that stuck with her: “I don’t know what it is but we’re being talked about a lot more.”

Caroline replied, “If I could measure that quality in metrics it would surpass anything and everything.”

That’s the reward of building a strong brand. Brand has culture and values at its core, is built through company and employee behaviours, is made recognisable by its visual and articulated identity – and then word of mouth amplifies it beyond what a marketing or sales campaign could ever achieve alone. 

And as you move towards that goal, you might find yourself saying, as Nick did, “I don’t know what it is, but we are being talked about a lot more.”

For more insight into brand, see our roundtable discussion on how much should brand evolve and how brand influences investors. Or stay tuned for more conversations from our brand roundtable. 

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This is the second article in our Brand Roundtable series, based on a conversation between experts with rich experience of creating and curating brands from startup to scaleup, and from idea to acquisition. Here they unpack the ways in which brand can influence investors.

When it comes to brand, how much do investors care about? The question might seem moot to some. Surely they’re not interested in what font you choose for your typography, or the colour palette of your product packaging – and do they really mind what brand tone of voice you use? Surely it’s all about having good CAC, LTV and burn rates? 

Well, if you didn’t catch it already, it’s worth checking our first roundtable article on how much should brand evolve in the startup to scaleup journey? From our conversation there, it was clear that brand is about far more than visuals and marketing – once you reduce it down to the essentials, it reveals the essence, heart and potential of a company. 

So yes: investors do care about brand. But how much are they influenced by it? And how can you curate your brand to reassure and resonate with them?

We put this to our virtual table of brand and startup/scaleup experts:

Angel, VC and seed investors are looking at your brand holistically

“Brand is everything that a company wants to portray – everything they want to look, feel and sound like,” says Faye. “If you do brand well any employee, partner or customer will be able to tell your story to anyone else.”

That story is crucial in the early stages of seeking investment. In the past we’ve interviewed both angel and venture capital investors, and one thing they agree on is that the founding team doesn’t just need to have a good plan, they need a story they can buy into – even if, in the case of VCs, that’s a story backed up by financial forecasts.

Lauren, an angel investor herself, says, “Businesses attract investors when they spend time articulating a strong narrative which helps the investor understand their vision – and they resonate with the founder.”

For every way in which founders can strengthen a brand in early funding rounds, they can weaken it later on. Not all founders are a good fit for C-suite roles in a scaling company, particularly if they don’t have experience of running a larger organisation. 

There’s one company Lauren’s invested in that had a particularly strong brand. It spoke to her partly through the founder’s attitude, partly through the visual experience, and partly through the core messaging.

“The business’s first product is a multi-vitamin designed to boost brain productivity. The founder has been careful about how he’s brought together science, psychology and nutritional experts into the conversation,” Lauren explains. 

“The brand focuses not only on a single product to improve your health but rather a holistic approach which is represented in the brand. It encourages customers to find better mental health through a variety of approaches.”

That overarching perception is important. Investors might not care about the brand typography or the styling of a social post but they will care about the brand as a whole. 

Caroline’s PR and digital marketing agency OggaDoon has helped cyber, proptech, healthtech and eco-focused companies build towards this point, and gain the right kind of recognition – including in the crowdfunding space.

“You can’t look at the brand narrowly, you’ve got to be holistic,” she says. “Whichever areas you’re not so interested in or cause you pain, you’ve got to give most attention – because investors are savvy to all of it.”

To outgrow early-stage investment, be taller than your founders

The part that the founders’ personal brand plays in the early stages of investment can’t be understated. Nick has helped take a number of startups and entrepreneurs through the first few miles of their journey, and has seen the pull a founding team can have time and again.

“The expertise and the profile and the credibility of the founder is a real value,” he says. “So you really want to make use of that to grow the business and get investment – especially when the business is mission-driven.”

When it comes to angel and seed funding, investors are usually putting their faith more in the team – their perceived expertise, values and vision – than in the product. After all, until the product finds product-market fit, it might pivot completely.

“Particularly with B2C companies, investors will look more at engagement metrics. Effectively everything that can measure the attention on your brand. That is difficult to measure, but there are technologies that are making this possible.”

Abeed Janmohamed, M&A advisor and founder of Volando

Abeed brings his perspective as a growth consultant: “Early funding rounds are decided on a few key points – the people have a very clear vision, a presence in the room, and a direction of travel that is as clear as it can be at the early stage. And culture and values is probably the most important part of it all.”

However in later funding rounds the founders’ value can flip if the brand becomes too dependent on them. For every way in which founders can strengthen a brand in early funding rounds, they can weaken it later on. Not all founders are a good fit for C-suite roles in a scaling company, especially if they don’t have experience of running a larger organisation. 

“Often investors will say, ‘For the next stage, we need a different person leading this business’,” says Nick. “And if the business is too dependent on the founder’s personal brand, it becomes toxic and value-diminishing, and a smart investor probably won’t invest.”

How investors will measure brand

In the later rounds, gathering hard metrics becomes a rightfully obsessive part of investment preparation. So you might be forgiven for thinking that brand has a softer role to play in the conversation. However, the brand might be more measurable than you think, and certainly when it comes to employee brand.

Abeed has been an adviser in many M&A transactions and says, “Glassdoor used to be a bit like TripAdvisor for potential employees but today it’s often a defining factor in M&A transactions. People ultimately buy people, and if a company’s rating doesn’t reach a certain threshold, some buyers won’t look at it because the integration risk is too high.”

There are other metrics besides Glassdoor, and even if they aren’t quite as deal-breaking, they can still tip the balance. 

“Especially with B2C companies, investors will look more at engagement metrics,” says Abeed. “Effectively everything that can measure the attention on your brand. That is difficult to measure, but there are technologies that are making this possible.”

When Caroline helps companies going for investment raises, whether that’s with Kickstarter or multimillion pound investors, she tells them to prepare anecdotal and auxiliary evidence alongside their hard metrics.

“This could be evidence of what people are saying about you on social media or on employee feedback forms,” says Caroline. “An investor can look at these if they’re really interested in you, and it’ll add strength and colour to your brand – but you’ve got to do the work for them.”

Brand is not just an outward projection, it’s in dialogue with the people who choose to work with you – whether they are employees or clients. When you can evidence what they think, it can provide a more concrete manifesto of what your organisation stands for. 

Lauren says, “Particularly in the B2B or enterprise space, businesses should put eyes and ears across their sales cycles to listen closely to what their customers are saying. This qualitative feedback gives a business a good sense of how the brand resonates in the market.”

Investors won’t read the intangible – so write it down

Your investor brand is a culture-values issue that starts at the heart of the organisation, involves key stakeholders, and results in communication and, crucially, written assets.

“If you don’t write this stuff down it reflects back on you – particularly when it comes to M&A,” says Abeed. “There are a number of people that will say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got a set of values.’ But when I say – ‘Great, where is it?’ – it’s not written down or it’s buried in a PowerPoint somewhere.”

That’s not only an embarrassing situation to be in. If you don’t have an adviser like Abeed who can rescue you at the last minute, you risk damaging your company’s future.

“You might have been building a business for 10 years and finally you’ve got someone excited to buy you,’ Abeed says. “But if they then ask for X, Y, and Z and it’s not there or not there quick enough, the value of that deal gets eroded.”

For more insight into building a brand that draws investment, make sure you catch our last conversation on the startup to scaleup journey – how brand should evolve. Or stay tuned for more conversations from our brand roundtable. 

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We’re kicking off our Brand Roundtable series, based on a conversation between experts with rich experience of creating and curating brands from startup to scaleup, and from idea to acquisition. Here they answer a question: in a constantly changing business, how should brand evolve?

Nowhere outside the world of startups and scaleups do businesses change so intensely. Over time, products launch and iterate, teams reshuffle and multiply, and, as research by EPFL university reveals, 73% pivot to a different market.

With such change on a business, product and team level, it’s no surprise that brand, too, must evolve. The catch here is that consistency is a cornerstone of brand narrative. Change too much, too often, and you risk a disconnect with customers, employees and investors. Evolve too little, and you risk the same.

So where do you draw the line? How much should a brand evolve on the startup and scaleup journey? We opened up this question to a virtual table of brand and startup/scaleup experts:

Begin with audience before product

Faye describes brand as “a company’s story: the journey the business has gone through and the place they’re trying to get to.” And with businesses on the startup to scaleup journey, that narrative is constantly on the move. 

At the start, however, that journey is determined almost exclusively by the founders. Their history informs their vision, mission, and values. These then form the reason why the business exists, and what it could be for customers, team and the wider world – in other words, the brand. The product itself, if there is one, is secondary.

Problems can emerge when this hierarchy is flipped. Caroline says, “When I’ve worked with pre-startups, startups and early post-startups, there’s often a lot of focus on the engineering or the product – because that’s usually in the founding team’s comfort zone.

“But you have to consider brand from the start, because otherwise you haven’t got the initial awareness. You can have a fabulous idea but unless you present it in a way that’s going to mean something to your target market, you’re not going to progress much further.”

When a business is dependent on a founder, management-wise or brand-wise, it can be a red flag for investors. Even if a company has no plans to replace a founder, it will be seen as a risk.

This is certainly what investors will be interested in, even early angel investors and seed funders. Abeed sheds light on this: “Some products are essentially solutions looking for a problem,” he says. “Everyone talks about product-market fit but I like to flip it the other way – market-product fit is what investors will be looking at.”

Growing from a minimum viable brand

Although brand is the bedrock of a new startup, this doesn’t mean you should go ‘all in’ on it before you’ve validated your product or service. Instead, Tristan says you just need to have your ‘table stakes’.

In the early stages, he says, you need three things:

This forms a kind of ‘minimum viable brand’ which, like a minimum viable product, you can iterate as you go.

“Startups work by iterating and pivoting,” says Tristan. “Your target audience might change, or your product might, so your brand needs to be a bit reactive – and might have to change fundamentally.“

At RH&Co, this was a challenge we had to address when working with Housecure before the launch of their proptech platform. They needed a brand that could outgrow the product they were currently creating, so they settled for a strapline that spoke to their ambition as well as their launch offering: Stress-free property transactions. Broad enough so they had room to manoeuvre without needing to rebuild their brand capital from scratch if they did so.

Financially, Lauren says to be mindful what you spend on brand at this point – you don’t want to dash to TV for your hero moment if your product is still finding its feet and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to deliver on key features.

Instead, in the early stages, most of your spend will go towards the thinking behind the brand – the messaging, the audience, the problem-solution fit – and beginning to have a conversation with your audience.

“The hero moment can come later,” says Lauren, “once you can convert that publicity into a promise you can deliver on.”

Scaling and reaching new audiences

Little advice applies forever in startups and scaleups, however. You can start quite scrappy but at some point in your growth journey you’re going to need to move beyond a minimum viable brand. The original vision, mission and values might still apply but they’ve likely matured, along with the audience and the arenas you’re playing in. 

“There’s often a tipping point when you hit product-market fit,” says Tristan. “The brand you started with might not be good enough to scale with. Or if you’re hitting new target audiences, you might need to clean up the brand for them.”

At this stage you might need to think more internationally about the brand that potential investors and employees see. Your customer audience also might become split into more nuanced personas, in turn requiring more nuanced communication. This is the time to revisit vision, mission and values, and invest more intentionally in the visual branding, the employer value proposition, the brand narrative and voice, and up-to-the-minute messaging.

Future-proofing your brand for investment and growth

Towards the beginning of a startup’s life, the founders have a, well, foundational role to play in shaping the brand. But as the business builds, team member by team member, financial year by financial year, the role of the founders should evolve like everything else. 

Nick experienced this first hand when he was growing Bristol’s innovation hub, Engine Shed. If the founders stay as the crux of the brand for too long, Nick says, it begins to get risky. 

“The profile of the founder is an asset,” says Nick. “But a growing venture needs to manage this well. There were times when Engine Shed seemed to be more about me than about the place, and it was fine to use that for a while, but there comes a point where you need to wind that back so that the business isn’t completely dependent on you.”

When a business is dependent on a founder, management-wise or brand-wise, it can be a red flag for investors. Even if a company has no plans to replace a founder, it will be seen as a risk. To future proof your brand, it has to live beyond the people who first dreamt of it.  

Future-proofing a startup or scaleup brand is impossible to achieve entirely. Markets can become volatile, audience attitudes change, and competition can disrupt your approach. But at a minimum, your brand should be future-proofed in line with your five-year business plan. 

“Whether I’m advising B2C or B2B companies, I tell people to think about where they want to be in five years’ time,” says Abeed. “If it is in more than one country, for instance, the brand needs to translate across cultures. So they need to build the business and the framework for that point, and not just for what they can see right in front of them.”

For more insight into building a startup or scaleup brand, see our thoughts on brand building, lead generation and the 95-5 rule. Or stay tuned for more conversations from our brand roundtable. 

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Why do so many marketers think of completely different things when they think of story? And why do so many get confused and miss the point? Our #EditorInResidence, Sam Whitlock, untangles the knot and shows you how brand narratives, anecdotes and tales can help you resonate with an audience.

Let’s start with the inevitable anecdote…

Approximately four and half years ago, I was dead set on joining a copywriting agency. No one was hiring in Bristol or anywhere near it, so I had to send some speculative applications. And because I was basically emailing people to pay me to write, these emails had to be damn well crafted, right?

How did the speculative email I sent to Rin Hamburgh & Co begin?

The first line started thus:

To the team at [name of RH&Co competitor]…

I was off to a flying start.

It was a copy-paste email with word-tweaks. I had sent something similar to another dozen agencies but the only email with an error on it – with one crucial word-tweak missing – was sent to RH&Co and addressed to someone else.

I noticed the error the moment I sent it, and I wrote the application off as a loss.

In the next week, only one of the dozen agencies got back to me. Rin wanted to have a chat. And a little while later, I found myself working as a copywriter at RH&Co, which was then barely a year-old company.

It was like getting away with murder but perhaps without the same level of blood guilt. Didn’t they notice I addressed my application to the wrong company?

A few months go by… I’m at some entrepreneurial award event or other, with the RH&Co gang – there were just four of us back then – and Rin turns to me, wine in hand, and says, “So… you know you wrote the wrong company name on your first email to us?”

There was a moment… and then we both burst out laughing.

In her words, all that mattered to her was that my application was “well-written”, so she decided to give me a chance – and a ribbing months later.

End of anecdote

What’s the purpose of me telling you that story? To show that we don’t take ourselves too seriously at RH&Co? To show that we value good writing over perfection? To show that we’re human?

If we made that anecdote into a video, we’d probably be unlikely to end it with a RH&Co logo and our strapline: You don’t need many words, just the right ones. Unless we were being very ironic.

I’ll tell you what it’s not: a lead gen narrative or an advert. It’s not an analogy and nor is it a precursor to a pitch that everyone needs an editor (although they do). And in case you were wondering, I don’t have any tech to sell that will stop you from making dumb mistakes in your emails.

What it is, is a story. And many brands have forgotten what that means.

The myths of storytelling

In the marketing and business world, almost everyone has a take on storytelling. Usually people speak of story as some kind of blend of common sense and neuroscience, and they sometimes elevate marketing to something bordering on mysticism.

Here are some of the lines you can stumble across out there.

Depending on who is making the case, they’ll usually throw in the thought that we’ve been telling stories since the dawn of time – back in the good old days of sitting around campfires, eating wild berries and looking for inspiration to hunt the next mammoth. 

Someone will probably say this means stories are the primordial way to do inbound marketing. Eventually someone, either a marketing guru or an ex-producer from the BBC, lays down their ace: Stories make us human.

Which is all fine and well. But then marketers draw the wrong conclusions…

Great delivery with no self-disclosure and people still won’t feel connected to you. Too much self-disclosure without the right delivery and you’ll simply sound like you’re oversharing. 

Brand narrative and storytelling are not the same

Many marketers talk about story but usually they’re talking about something else entirely.

They often talk about:

Which sounds like solid marketing practice, you’d probably agree. 

All the same though, this sounds pretty different to the kind of stories I grew up reading. In fact, I think they’re describing a different beast altogether. 

Brand narrative. 

Marketers, brand builders and consultants frequently use the term brand narrative interchangeably with story, and it gets pretty confusing.

Now, before we move on… let’s agree that brand narrative is essential for brand building. It’s core to both your consumer value proposition and your employee value proposition. If you do brand narrative really, really, really well, it can even help you disrupt a market or, as some leadership consultants tell us, transform the culture of an organisation.

But… contrary to what people on the internet might tell you, this is not the kind of storytelling that ‘makes us human.’ It’s not the kind of tale that traces its roots to the pre-neolithic age, and it doesn’t work neuroscientific-magic on the brain (at least not the kind people usually cite). 

While brand narrative is an important part of clarifying and communicating your message, no consumer or business audience worth their salt is going to lower their guard enough to let brand narrative impact their heart and soul.

Here’s why.

Stories are the property of humans, not brands

The Cambridge Dictionary definition of a story is “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events.” And as far as I can deduce there’s two types of ‘descriptions of events’ that fall into quite a different category to brand narrative.

  1. A human account

The first type of story – a human account – is someone’s personal, true experience of events. This is what fuels many journalistic ‘stories’ and feature articles. These are the kind of personal stories that friends exchange when they haven’t caught up in a while, or that pass down through familial generations, or that CEOs publish in memoirs. 

This type of story is powerful because it’s real. It gives an audience a glimpse of a lived experience, which in this post-modern era can often speak louder than statistics.

A human account is made more or less powerful by two factors: 

Great delivery with no self-disclosure and people still won’t feel connected to you. Too much self-disclosure without the right delivery and you’ll simply sound like you’re oversharing. 

Say the right things at the right time, like a comedian who has honed their routine, and you’ll achieve higher levels of ‘interpersonal neural synchrony’ – associated with quality communication and leadership in a group.

A brand is not a person to feel socially connected to, a brand cannot self-disclose anything that’s not good PR, and audiences are fully aware that most of the time, when a brand starts telling a story of tension, they are being sold to, subtly or not. 

  1. A story of tension

The second type of story is characterised by friction, uncertainty, and a sense that something hangs in the balance.

This is the preoccupation of novels, bio-pics, and stage magicians like Michael Weber, who first said “whoever tells the best story wins.” It’s the kind of story that has characters or players, and a conflict that propels its audience forward to find a sense of catharsis. 

A story of tension is the kind of tale that works magic on the brain. A narrative with a dramatic arc can actually release oxytocin, the same chemical that is released when your brain tells you ‘this person can be trusted.’ It’s why we can, time and time again, feel so deeply and empathetically for the fictional characters we get to know.

Really, this is the domain of art, media and entertainment, not marketing, PR and business growth. For a tale of tension to work, there needs to be a sense that something could go wrong… not a sense that a product could be revealed. 

Some companies do pull it off though. For instance, Xbox’s docuseries Power On takes you blow by blow through the good, the bad, and the ugly history of the company in a startlingly unfiltered fashion. Likewise, Salesforce’s The Shift pulls back the curtain on a few high growth companies as they try not to crash on the hairpin bends of market change. 

Here’s the thing: stories of tension are always, always, always about people. Or an animal, alien or anthropomorphic creature that an audience projects personhood onto. They’re not about ideas or products or even putting a hypothetical customer at the heart of the story (great for brand narratives, rubbish for tension), and so we come to a sticky point. 

Why brands fail at storytelling

Maybe stories do make us human but no one is going to mistake your brand for a human. 

A brand is not a person to feel socially connected to, a brand cannot self-disclose anything that’s not good PR, and audiences are fully aware that most of the time, when a brand starts telling a story of tension, they are being sold to, subtly or not. 

The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer UK report reveals that 60% of people believe businesses only make commitments to support their marketing efforts, and their perception of the arc of your story is going to be similar. 

The presence of brand will likely create a halo effect that reduces the ability of an audience to get lost in the story and be affected by it.

But not all is lost! 

The same Edelman report shows that trust in people (including technical experts and subject authorities) is high, and that has major implications.

There’s an opportunity here for:

Individuals have the most trust right now, and they’re also the ones who sit at the heart of effective stories. They can present real lived experiences and true tales of tension, and if you can put these in front of your audience’s eyes, you’re far more likely to see emotional resonance and dramatic results.

That’s not to say you can’t give the straight sell or the brand narrative drip feed, and it doesn’t mean you can’t throw your logo and strapline up at the end of a high budget ad. All these things still have their place… but if you want to see the kind of audience connection that marketers have been trying to create with stories for years, you need to pull back a second.

Behind your brand are people. They’re the ones with a story your audience might want to listen to… it’s up to your brand to not get in the way.

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