Top 10 mistakes scale-ups make about their brand
How important is having a clear and compelling brand when you’re looking to scale-up your business? Organisations at this critical stage of growth often downplay the role brand plays. After all, the logic goes, you have a clear and compelling product, it’s driven success to date, and isn’t that ultimately what people buy? It’s easy to believe brand isn’t a priority for now when telling more people about that product feels like the most important job to focus on.
This logic is flawed. As a founding team what makes you unique and interesting is clear to you. But others are unlikely to perceive you with the same burning clarity. Their interest and engagement levels are inevitably much lower than yours. What takes up most of your waking hours’ features as merely incidental in theirs. If at all.
You only need to look at the average investor memorandum or funding pitch to see this has costly repercussions. Investors know that to grow at scale means investing in building a brand. They’re looking for evidence that prospective investments have their brand sorted, and a plan in place for driving it forward. Unfortunately, that evidence often isn’t there. It’s a huge missed opportunity.
So, where do many scale-ups and ready-to-scale-ups get it wrong? Here are the top 10 mistakes we’ve seen in action when it comes to thinking about brand:
Believing logo and name are the only real brand essentials.
Your logo and name are brand assets, not your brand fundamentals. A strong brand is rooted in the purpose of the business. As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras set out in ‘Built to Last’, building a visionary company means articulating a core ideology. It powers your business from the inside and helps you communicate your strengths relative to your competition. The sooner you do this the better.
Overlooking brand communications in the early days of a business.
Some experts believe that spending on brand advertising too soon is a sign of a weak business idea. In reality, it’s more likely that early advertising spend is propping up a bad startup. On the assumption that you have a strong business idea, investing in brand communications will help you grow faster.
Continuing to deploy what’s worked for early adopters as a business scales.
Your early adopter audience is savvy and motivated to translate your product features into a benefit they need. But once this audience has been exhausted, you’ll need to tap into a more mainstream audience who are more risk-averse and less engaged. That means switching from product features to becoming known principally for the problem you solve. If you wait until you notice a sales plateau, you’ll have eaten into the valuable time and budget available to fix it.
Focussing on a too-tightly defined audience.
Most businesses gain initial traction by targeting a very specific segment of their category. But this can only ever work short-term. Once you’re trying to reach a wider audience, your prospective buyers will be category buyers. It’s better to spend your budget lightly targeting the whole category rather than a sub-segment more frequently.
Underestimating the real competitive set because of a stand-apart innovation.
Having a unique widget rarely means you’ve created a new category. You’re competing on problems, not products, which means your competition is anyone who also solves that problem, no matter how they do it. That’s not an easy mental shift to make when you’ve spent your early days honing your product to be the best it can be. But it’s vital if you want to compete for attention.
Solving one customer problem brilliantly to build long-term traction.
Humans look for solutions to problems. So the more problems you are known for solving, the more easily your brand will come to mind. And the more ‘entry points’ you associate with your brand, the more likely you are to grow. That’s one of the reasons why defining your purpose early is important. Purpose sits above everything: over time you can have multiple ways in which you achieve that.
Increasing the value of existing customers to drive exponential growth.
The proven secret to brand growth is acquiring new customers, not driving repeat purchases from existing ones, as tempting as that might seem. Growth is a numbers game, and that means investing in communicating with as many potential new customers as possible. If your share of voice is greater than your share of the market, your brand is highly likely to grow. Fact.
Using product-focussed ads in brand channels.
Good brand advertising creates fame and works emotionally, as so much IPA research over the years has shown. So save your rational product messages for the roughly 40% of your budget you should be spending on activation communications. For brand building, character and story drive memorability and talk-ability.
Treating brand assets with flexibility.
Your brand needs to be flexible to tell your story in different ways and work across many channels. But that doesn’t mean your brand assets should be. Brands are basically memory structures - they need to be repeated in people’s minds. Your brand assets - your colours, slogans, characters etc. - have to be distinctly and consistently you. They act as a short-hand for your brand, increasing the effectiveness of your brand recognition and attribution. So vary them at your peril.
Downplaying the role of brand internally.
Articulating what your brand means internally isn’t just for big corporates. The belief and values that tie you together, energise you and give you focus are arguably even more important for a young brand in a rapid phase of growth - as your team grows, and as the pressures and targets mount. Taking time to uncover and express these unspoken foundations of how your business operates ensures their preservation into the future, underpinning your ongoing success.
If you’re in preparation for your scale-up phase or facing what may be the early signs of a sales plateau, make sure these mistakes aren’t underpinning your growth strategy, or you may be holding back your potential with both investors and customers. Or even misdirecting precious budget and resources. Your brand will reward you for giving it the attention, careful nurture and passion you’ve demonstrated in building your business to date.
And if you’re keen to understand more about the theory behind the brand approach to scale-up growth, just drop us a line.