High-Growth Startups Archives

Is it Time for a Brand Refresh?

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Tracy Lloyd

What Got You Here

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize that it’s time for a brand refresh. Why embark on a brand refresh if your business is successfully growing? Many high-growth companies grow organically, without any strategic direction. Things takeoff. Your team expands. New offices open. Your product line multiplies. And growth mode may happen without making plans for how the brand will accommodate and flex as the business develops.

At these times, decisions are often made that help an internal team manage change. In many cases, this means that some of the key brand components end up holding greater meaning for those inside of the company, but lack meaning for other key audiences – prospects, customers, and recruits – who also matter to the brand’s success.

The warning signs of a solely internal-facing brand are plenty: internal names for your product, add-on brands, or a website that has been pieced together, mirroring the evolution of the company. These common indicators show that important audiences have been forgotten. If this sounds familiar, your brand needs to start looking outside itself.

Forgetting Who’s Outside

The problem with an internal-facing brand is that the brand isn’t always clear or powerful to outsiders. The purpose of an impactful brand is to connect meaningfully with all the people who matter to your business – inside and out. So if a brand makes sense to your team, but isn’t as easily understood by external audiences, your brand loses impact, and as a result, business eventually stagnates.

Sometimes all the effort that went into scaling your business becomes your brand strategy – making it very hard for outsiders to understand who you are, what you do, and why you matter. And when the people crucial to your business’s success don’t understand your brand, your business can easily fall behind the competition, risk becoming irrelevant and may even lack the future support needed to move your brand and business forward.

Time for a Brand Refresh

Consider these aspects of your strategy to refresh your brand and position your business for continued future growth.

1. Brand Architecture

For many high-growth companies, add-on brands have rendered your architecture irrelevant. Do you have one brand or many brands? A branded house? Or a house of brands? How do all of your products fit into the structure of your brand? Evaluate how all the different products, business units, and pieces of your brand fit together. Don’t let organic growth lead the way. Develop your brand architecture to help people understand your business, products, and services. Enable that architecture to work for today and accommodate for tomorrow.

2. Category Reframing

Your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. Companies that have experienced organic growth oftentimes outgrow their original category without realizing it. As such, many high-growth company will start in one category and need to shift into another over time. This shift might be necessitated by the advancement of products, the market, and/or new category. Choosing the right category or defining a new one is critical to positioning your brand in a way that frames your value and makes it relevant to your customers. We like to think of category development as a process that helps clarify and shape the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes about your brand. Think about articulating the right metaphor that will make it easy for people to find meaning in your brand.

3. Positioning

Knowing how you want your brand represented, enforced, and reinforced is part of developing your positioning. A strong and meaningful positioning can enhance what your brand does, how it differs from your competitors, and why it’s better than any alternative in the market. Ensuring you have the right positioning strategy is critical to building your business.

4. Target Audience

Who is important to your brand? Who do you sell to? Who are your most important brand champions? Who are the key influencers? These are all important questions to answer during a brand refresh. For high-growth companies, the people who were important to your brand when you started have probably evolved. So take a critical eye and focus on understanding precisely who your target audience is, why you matter to them, what are they looking to solve, and how can you create messaging to speaks to their needs and desires.

5. Your Why

It’s critical to make sure you lead with ‘why’ during a brand refresh. Most likely the success of your business and its growth is the result of your purpose, or reason for being. Formalizing your purpose into a brand promise will help your growing team get aligned internally around why you matter. Everyone can get on board the same boat and row towards the same higher purpose. And when you align everyone internally and drive them towards that purpose, the people on the outside will feel your why as well. A brand is a way of bringing your purpose to life, so focus on it and how you can make people believe in your brand.

6. The Competition

In order to differentiate yourself and offer unique value to your audiences, you have to know your competition – inside and out. Who you were competing with when you started businesses has most likely entirely shifted, especially in the fast-paced business world we work in today. Map your current brand against the competition and shift accordingly.

7. Corporate Narrative

Investing in developing a corporate narrative helps everyone understand who you are, what you do, why you matter, and what the future holds for your business. If everyone internally has insight into this, it helps the external storytelling become clear and consistent. Your corporate narrative should help tell the story of your brand in an honest, meaningful, and emotive way.

8. Creative Assets

Oftentimes, making your brand more clear, powerful, and meaningful to key audiences means refreshing your visual identity (and from there, your website). Ensure your identity represents who you are and why you matter. When looking to revamp your website, hire experts. Make sure your navigation clearly reflects your brand strategy and make sure your value proposition is clear and understandable to website visitors. There are many decisions to be made when redesigning a website, so use your newly refreshed brand strategy to guide these decisions. A strategically lead redesign is key to having a well-designed user experience.

A Brand Refresh = More Meaningful, Competitive, Successful Business

Taking the time to invest in your brand will bring tangible positive results to your bottom line.

In order to hold greater meaning in the hearts and minds of the people who are most important to your business, strongly position your brand and focus on meaningfully articulating your value.

By getting everyone around the table internally, with sales and marketing brought together, your sales cycle quickens, your business becomes better positioned for success, your recruitment efforts prove more successful, and your brand helps fuel a competitive and thriving business.

Refresh your brand and bring its purpose to life for both inward- and outward-facing audiences in order to stay ahead and continue to grow. Your business depends on it.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

The Value of Mapping Business Strategy to Brand Strategy

Posted on February 14, 2017 by Tracy Lloyd

Business strategy and brand strategy should be closely linked

There’s a perception among many executives that business strategy is strategic, and brand strategy is a marketing tool – and not a strategic asset. As a result, businesses set ambitious goals, but don’t consider how investing in and developing a brand strategy could help get them there.

As a brand strategy agency, we rely heavily on our client’s full disclosure of their business strategy – their goals and objectives, pitch decks, revenue reports, exit strategy – to build a meaningful, emotive brand that will transform their business, drive revenue, enable them to hire top talent, and power the company’s future success. But, in order for a company to measure success and see the value of the brand strategy, the business and brand strategy need to be aligned. By mapping the two together, we can create a strong, impactful brand that is geared towards specific growth goals and worthy of investment.

Mapping ensures that business can grow in any strategic direction

In any business situation, the brand strategy needs to reflect both the short-term and long-term goals of the business. A brand that aligns with the business plan ensures these goals become reality. Consider these three situations:

Startups need top talent to build and sell their products.

Most startups have aggressive hiring ambitions to meet their revenue goals. And in today’s world, because startups are all competing for the same talent – data scientists, engineers, and top sales people – they need to rely on a strong brand to effectively articulate why they matter. Investing in your company’s brand strategy will help recruit the right employees who are aligned to your brand and business aspirations. When recruits and employees connect to your brand’s purpose in more meaningful ways, the business will stand out from your competition and employees will drive business because they will be more dedicated, loyal, and committed to your success.

High-growth companies that are looking to scale at a rapid pace need a brand strategy to stand out in crowded markets.

Your brand strategy is an opportunity to better connect your product and/or services to the people that matter most to your brand, and involving your sales and marketing teams in the process is a smart way to help map your business and brand strategy together. By examining business priorities, we can develop a go-to-market strategy that will drive revenue, better support your sales and marketing teams, and boost loyalty with your customers and partners.

Established enterprise companies often need a brand refresh to meaningfully reconnect to internal and external stakeholders.

In competitive markets, business strategies have to shift and change over time to help sustain growth, maintain market share, and combat new competition. These shifts in business strategy can be hard for an established company to take on – both internally and externally. Whether you are preparing for an IPO, involved in M&A activity, or trying to stay relevant in a changing market, investing in a brand strategy refresh can help articulate these shifts. Presenting a cohesive brand, corporate narrative, and updated look that communicates who you are, why you matter, and what you stand for is necessary to shift your business and reconnect the brand to all your key stakeholders

Mindful leaders connect business and brand strategy, and reap the benefits.

Regardless of what stage the business is in, a brand strategy is the best tool to hone in on the impact your brand can make. Aligning the brand strategy to your business goals makes your brand more impactful and emotionally meaningful. It is the best way to create a road map that is tailored toward your brand’s growth. Those leaders who understand the value of a strong and clear brand strategy are better situated to lead their business. Use brand strategy to connect and matter to the people who are most important to your brand’s success.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Your Business Issues Just Might Have A Brand Solution

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

Top-of-Mind Business Issues for the C-Suite

When you spend a lot of time working with people in the C-suite, you’re exposed to C-sized business issues. And those larger strategic problems can’t be solved by the CEO alone, or often times by existing resources. When changes in your industry push you to shift business strategy, it’s a sign that your brand strategy needs to shift in a synchronized way in order to reposition for success.

We’ve surveyed C-level executives about the number one desire they have for their brand strategy. Know what they want? Differentiation. A competitive advantage. A defensible position. But differentiation is tough. And when your competitors are howling like wolves at the door, how can you stand out from the pack? So if your company plays a supporting role in a complex ecosystem, how can you stand out from the crowd? Brand strategy can help.

Here are a few business issues that you may have experienced yourself.

A small, high-growth company in a congested ecosystem filled with other small, high-growth companies needs to sharpen its position and narrative to demonstrate a meaningful difference.
A decades-old service company embarks on a long-term plan to upgrade technology and improve the customer experience. They want to update the brand and communicate what it means to people every step of the way.
One company acquires another and discovers the need for a refreshed brand architecture and streamlined product architecture, a fresh visual identity, and internal transformation programs to get two cultures to mesh as one.
A growing start-up in a lightning-fast technology category needs to lead with its authentic purpose in order to compete for engineering top talent in a field dominated by huge, established brands.
A financial services company rolling out a new developer platform needs to understand their new target audience, recalibrate its positioning, build a new go-to-market strategy, and deploy a sales enablement program to scale quickly.
An on demand start-up that’s achieved lift-off needs help preparing for its larger delivery footprint with a brand that delivers on its promise.
A high-growth SaaS company needs to define a new category to align with a new set of product features and upgrades, create new product brand messaging, and refresh the look and feel of the brand across multiple offices in multiple countries and languages.

These are real scenarios, and if they sound familiar to you, you can probably empathize with leaders of these companies. Interestingly and notably, in each of these cases, the businesses solved their business problems through the lens of brand strategy.

And you can, too.

Successful high-growth. The need to attract top talent. Launching a new product. A shift in strategic direction. These can all have major impacts on your business. So make sure your business strategy and your brand strategy are well aligned. Changing strategic direction doesn’t happen instantly. And it definitely doesn’t happen by itself. In fact, it takes thoughtful planning, strategic involvement from the C-suite, and diligent execution all the way down the line.

If you have a strong vision for the future, but have business issues with your marketing, go-to-market strategy or positioning, a strong brand strategy can help you get from here to there.

Just ask any of our clients.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency that works with high-growth companies.

Read more about brand strategy here: Why Brand Strategy Needs to Start in the C-suite.

High-Growth Software Firm Looking to Accelerate Business Quickly

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

Metal Toad: a high-growth business needed to be aligned to create maximum impact

Metal Toad is a successful, high-growth software business with a highly regarded reputation and big ambitions. As technology consultants, Metal Toad works to modernize businesses by building strategic applications for clients like Sony, Cisco, PBS, Verizon Wireless, and ABC. When they came to Emotive Brand for help, the management team was at a crossroads.

As often happens in the midst of a boom, an enthusiasm for growth left the business pursuing too many diverse initiatives. They needed to quickly realign and focus leadership around what they do and why they matter, closing the gap between their long-term vision and the reality of what their clients need today. And they needed to hold onto their momentum while continuing to deliver flawlessly. Fast Forward was the perfect answer.

As is true with many high-growth companies, Metal Toad’s challenges needed an agile approach to address the evolving nature of their business. With Fast Forward, we were able to spend one week on site with the executive team prioritizing their challenges and creating a strategy to move forward. By removing the team from their day-to-day responsibilities and creating a focused environment, challenges that were holding the business back came quickly and clearly to the surface.

Together, we developed a strategic map of the emergent, dominant, and residual forces shaping Metal Toad and its industry. This map allowed the team to come to a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities they faced, setting the solid foundation necessary for producing groundbreaking ideas, and ultimately, change.

Through the Fast Forward engagement, the Metal Toad leadership team was able to come together, collaborate, and craft a powerful brand promise that paved the way for the future of the business. The new positioning provided focus and clarity to optimize present and future organizational initiatives with maximum impact. A week later, we delivered updated copy for the website landing page to help communicate the new value proposition and convert leads.

“In less than a week, Emotive Brand was able to give us a powerful and differentiated platform for our business that was completely authentic and achievable.” Tony Rasmussen, VP Engineering, Metal Toad

Learn more about the partnership between Metal Toad and Emotive Brand, the lessons learned, and how we brought the strategy to life in the Metal Toad case study.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco based brand strategy agency.

Fast Forward: Our New Offering for High-Growth Companies

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

Developing Fast Forward, an agile marketing, branding, and business offering was the right thing for our team to develop for startups, to address the issues startups are facing right now.

We have created Fast Forward designed for our high-growth clients that need to make strategic shifts to quickly address product, industry, competitive, alignment, and other issues. Fast Forward is an agile workshop approach that very quickly develops a strategically aligned and nuanced understanding of your business and brand’s current situation. We bring the most important issues to light — business obstacles that your people and the Emotive Brand team must address head-on to maximize impact.

Agile marketing approach to address the need for speed

Fast Forward is a 3-week process built for impact and speed. Week one includes five days of on-site workshops; weeks two and three are devoted to creating deliverables specific to your immediate needs.

Condensing our process demands greater focus, attention, and teamwork. From day one, we embed our team into yours and get straight to work.

Fast Forward workshops begin by identifying and triaging the essential challenges and opportunities your business must address. It’s a very hands-on, collaborative approach. Your people are involved in a series of workshops that engage them in wrestling with your key issues. We don’t just facilitate these workshops; we concentrate our intellect, creativity, and experience on solving the issues together.

At the culmination of the on-site workshops, you emerge with an agreed upon set of high-impact strategic deliverables that addresses your most salient issues. These deliverables are tailored to your specific needs, and could include visual brand elements, company positioning, Go-To-Market strategies, target audience work, brand positioning, brand narrative, messaging etc.

By prioritizing deliverables unique to your business, challenges, and opportunities you face, we are able to amplify and accelerate the effectiveness of your investment and efforts and help you move forward with newfound purpose and energy.

Fast Forward is the fastest way for startups to move the needle of their business and brand forward

Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about our agile marketing solution — Fast Forward, or our work with high-growth companies. Check out how we helped Metal Toad accelerate their business quickly in our case study.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm focused on helping startups, their leadership teams, and their business thrive.

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Tag: High-Growth Startups