Startup brands as a strategic asset

When you start a company, life’s hard but it’s also, in some ways, easy. Small teams running hard to get a product to market, seamless communications, real-time feedback loops.

As companies grow, complexity increases. As you hire more people, you’re changing the DNA of your company in subtle ways as you add a different set of viewpoints and experiences. You might also recruit a big cohort of people from a single company, as often happens when employees follow an influential leader, and you can get a wholesale infusion of what can feel like a foreign culture thrown upon you.

The distance grows between the people doing the day to day work of designing, building and selling the product and the founders who started it and often hold the original vision and soul of the company, its true north.

We can summarise good execution as a mixture of setting the right strategy, turning that into the right operating goals and steps, and assembling a team of people to execute on that vision. In startup land, we have to do this in the face of fast changing market and competitive conditions and a continual race against technology obsolescence or baggage.

Yet competitive advantages are fleeting.

In the face of what we can best describe as chaos, the ability for an organisation to communicate its vision, priorities and objectives clearly and consistently both internally and externally becomes a key pillar if you’re looking to sustain great execution.

I’ve come to the view over the years that the most elegant way to encapsulate all of this into one concept is to the think of it through the lens of brand.

Brand is not about a snappy tagline, colour palettes or logos.

Brand isn’t a siloed discipline executed only by marketers. It cuts through everything you make, say, do or provide — from code to comms, product to partnerships, culture to commercial strategy. Brand is part of everyone’s day job. The most successful brands are coherent, consistent and create serious cut through - Katy Turner, Multiple

How's that for an iconic brand ?

Think of brand holistically as the elegant embodiment of:

• Your purpose as a company, the mission you are embarked on, and the vision of the world you contribute to;
• Your value proposition to the market and to your clients, as well as to society at large;
• The set of values and behaviours that you operate by or aspire to;
• How you communicate all this across all mediums and cultures.

If you think about brand as a strategic asset, it will deliver clarity internally and externally on your reason for existing, enable alignment, allow team members three steps removed from you to communicate almost as effectively as if they were a founder.

The benefits of a great brand compound massively over time.

Over the past hew years we have partnered with our friends at Multiple, Gabbi Cahane and Katy Turner, to help our companies through an accelerated journey of deep brand work. Done well, it’s intense, it can be uncomfortable but it forces a company to go through a set of self discovery stages and really ask itself with absolute clarity: why are you here? Why should anyone care about you? Why should customers buy your products? Why should anyone want to work here?

A brand at work: Pipedrive doesn't sell CRM - it sells results.

We reconnected with our history, refreshed our values, reframed our vision and refined our unique point of view” — Laurence, CRO Pipedrive.

Designing a great brand is hard. Yet I think it is one of the most high leverage activities a company can undertake. Because great brand work forces companies to ask themselves important fundamental questions and relentlessly hone the answers until the answer is crystal clear.

The resulting clarity of purpose is one of the most enduring assets early stage companies can build, and build on.