Brand Development Archives

You just closed your Series A and you’re ready to share your story with the world. You built revolutionary technology that will be better, faster, cheaper—or all three—than anything else in the market. Now you need to hire top talent, build brand awareness, and equip your sales team to drive revenue. You know how innovative your technology is and you’re ready to create a new category.

With customers in beta and limited clear competitors, you’re likely tempted to focus solely on your product and how much better your product is than anything else on the market. But a strong product vision, budding features, and benefits aren’t enough to cut through the competitive space, lure top talent, and enable something more important to build. Leading solely with your product—even the most disruptive—is a mistake. We’ve seen this approach fail, time and again.

You’ve got to give people something bigger to believe in.

If you want to connect with your customers, partners, and prospective employees, you need to differentiate yourself with a well-developed brand. Lead with this brand and then punctuate with your product.

Positioning Beyond the Product

Positioning, the first step in branding, is about the space you carve out in the market. Great positioning communicates the one thing you want people to know about your brand and explains how you are truly differentiated, relevant, and singular in nature.

When we meet with founders, however, they often are focused only on the product. Product positioning is not the same as brand positioning. Product marketing focuses on features and benefits, speeds and feeds, and even ROI.

That is not enough to compete today.

Bringing the Outside In

Your brand positioning is an articulation of you as a company and your product: who you are, what you do, how do you do it better and different, why you matter, and—importantly—why anyone should care.

If you try to articulate your brand positioning by just looking at your product and direct competitors, your brand will fall short. You need to bring the outside in. The most important outsider to focus on first? Your prospective customer.

Yes, you’ve spent time with your customers. You’ve probably talked about the competitor offerings they’ve bought or considered. But do you have empathy for them? Many prospects say they’re interested in a “better” solution but when it comes down to purchasing, are they ready? Do you understand what it takes to displace a legacy solution? What does your buyer need to know and feel to have the confidence to do a rip and replace? To earn this confidence, you need a brand that stands for something meaningful and different.

Don’t limit your discovery work to how your brand compares to entrenched competitors. Empathy means understanding all of the demands on a customers’ time and wallet; it’s about a wide-angle view. The people in your target buyer audience have a long list of priorities for the year. Cloud migration, data replication, security—these corporate initiatives all vie for their attention and budget. Your brand needs to not only reflect the reality of your direct competitors but these other players too.

Additionally, take the time to look outside of your category. Learn from other technologies that have succeeded in similar situations—displaced legacy technologies, created net-new infrastructure, used AI or ML to solve the toughest of challenges. Data analytics, cloud migration, and modern data infrastructure plays are changing the technology landscape. You can learn a lot by extending your competitive evaluation beyond your expected primary competitive set.

Finally, tap your investors as a resource. If you‘ve made it to the launch date, your investors are a great external resource you can tap. They’ve seen many companies in your space—including direct competitors and adjacent players. Test your positioning and messaging with them and use them as you build your brand.

Pay Attention to Voice

What you say is important, but how you say it matters just as much—if not even more critical. Voice is an extension of your brand; when your voice matches the kind of brand you are building, magic happens. Take Snowflake, for instance. Snowflake came onto the scene with a product they marketed as a ”cloud data warehouse”. While this product name was new, the category “data warehouse” was not. Snowflake made a splash with cheeky messaging and a differentiated but predictable brand voice. They put up billboard messages like “Love at first petabyte”, “Mi Data Es Su Data”, “The Data Sharehouse Has Arrived” and “Ghost Your On-prem”. This voice strengthens the brand and creates more connections between the company and its audiences.

Make an Emotional Connection

Even if you are selling deep tech, you can’t ignore emotions. Customers don’t connect with features; they connect with an emotion that a product drives. Think about how a netops engineer will feel when they learn that your security product can stop 99% of all phishing scams. Will they experience relief? Will they feel powerful? Drill down to that idea and make sure your brand and your messaging reflect that emotion.

Give Them Something to Believe In

We’ve worked with many Series A companies that go to market with a solid brand but without a fully realized product. The company leads with an initial use case but, longer-term, they have much larger ambitions. Even so, their brand works for today and for the future.

Your brand can—and should—be aspirational. It should enable early adopters to buy into what you offer right now and communicate what customers will receive from you over time. A future-facing brand will also help attract talent; candidates want to work for a company with technology that has the potential for impact. And, an overarching brand can ignite a tribe of people who share your beliefs and will follow your brand as you grow and expand your offering.

Branding is not the time to be introspective. When you look outside, you develop empathy for your customers, understand their emotions, and take a wide view of your industry. An outside-in perspective helps you build a brand that can cut through the clutter, grab attention, and differentiate with meaning.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Many of our clients call us after they’ve got a working product or once they embark on a sales effort in earnest. They see branding as an expensive and time-consuming exercise that they’d rather postpone.

In almost every case, we wish they’d reached out sooner.

Branding is not a one-time exercise; your brand is a muscle that you strengthen over time. Most high-growth tech companies go through several brand iterations over their life cycle. Knowing that, we believe it’s never too early to invest in your brand.

In fact, when you invest in branding early in the life of your company, you’ll tap the benefits of a strong brand—market recognition, customer loyalty, and sales growth—even earlier.

Raise Your Next Round of Funding

When you fundraise, especially for an early-stage company, you need a compelling story. It’s more important than your logo and a critical part of your PR. Seriously, how can you ask for millions of dollars when you can’t explain it effectively? This is why when we create a brand, we often include a narrative that an organization can rally around internally and use as the basis of its pitch.

Unite Leadership and Employees

A brand development project has an added benefit of internal consensus building. When clients tell us they want a brand strategy, we often discover that executives’ goals are not consistent. Again, it’s a part of the process. Some people will have to give up their sacred cows; others will finally be able to share a revolutionary idea. In the end, teams gain alignment.

Get the Attention of Gartner

What could be better than a mention in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant? Many of the high-growth tech companies we meet are disrupting existing categories or even building new ones. When you show a new and better way of doing things, a strong brand makes you credible and attracts analysts’ attention.

Plus, when you launch or relaunch with a killer brand in a new category, you give newcomers a standard to emulate and make it easier for these competitors to enter.

Learn More About Your Market

In addition to internal interviews, we reach out to your prospects and, if appropriate, customers. We hear their thoughts about the market and also pressure-test your initial brand positioning and messaging. This forces you, via our work, to “get out of the building” and test your hypotheses right away.

Honest feedback is priceless. Because we are not the ones building the product, external stakeholders feel more comfortable about sharing their positive and negative reactions. And, by testing your brand with the market pre-launch, you gain reassurance that your messaging will stick.

Better Return on Your Marketing Dollars

Speaking of marketing, that function is rarely an early investment at startups. But, eventually, you’re going to focus on this effort. How great would it be if your first marketing hire received a one-pager with your brand architecture when they arrived at the company?

Brand positioning and messaging are also the foundation on which you build your brand’s look and feel—everything from your logo to your website. When your website doesn’t reflect your brand, your market will have little impact or longevity.

A strong brand will boost the effectiveness of your public relations. Every time a company communicates publicly before they’ve developed their brand, they end up continually recreating their story. Build the brand first and you’ll have a better ability to sustain a consistent message in the market.

Helps You Attract Talent

It’s a sellers’ market for talent; great employees can pick where they want to go. A strong brand raises your profile and intrigues your prospects. And your recruiters will thank you for making their job easier.

Is it ever too early to focus on your brand? Should you wait until you have a product? Perhaps, but we’ve had clients that, in the process of brand development, actually realize they need to adjust their focus and pivot to a slightly different product or service. The process of creating their brand makes their company stronger. If you think you’re too small to have a brand strategy, it’s time to reconsider.