Don't forget to build a brand.

Do you sometimes feel like that about your business:  “I can’t believe it.  We forgot to build a brand!”

Brand is your business multiplier

It’s all too easy to dismiss the importance of brand if you’re just building for a fast exit – or if you’re not a marketing person or don’t know too much about “brand”.  But don’t leave brand on the back-burner for too long.  Done right it’s your most important business multiplier, as critical to your balance sheet as the product you’re building your company around.

Even if you’re just building an audience or customer base, brand is still critical to that.

Activate your purpose

Creativity is your unfair advantage.  There’s a reason why Simon Sinek’s TED talk Start With Why has been viewed over 50 million times.  
It resonates because he’s right: people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.  That may be a bitter pill to swallow if you’ve spent months, years, plotting, launching and perfecting your product or service offering.  But it’s not a slap in the face.  Nobody is trying to dismiss the importance of what you built or are building.  It works amazingly well.  

But here’s the point:  Strong products that are also resonant brands are more highly valued.

Airbnb is a great product.  It’s also an amazing brand.  And a decacorn.  

Facebook?  Ditto.  Uber?  Yup.  

BMW?  Ultimate driving machine.   Who would want to drive anything else?

Apple?  Think different.  Also a trillion dollar market cap.

All great products.  All amazingly resonant brands.  So, this is not an either/or conversation.  You’ve built a great product, let us help you turn it into a killer brand.

Brands endure

People invest in brands: VCs every it as readily as consumers and customers.  Brands endure because they own the conversation, they make the rules to their advantage.  Pick any category at random:  Which names come to mind first?  In all likelihood, the names buzzing around your head are the true brands of that category.  The other players are just products.  Maybe pretty good products.  But they’re not brands.  So, they are also-rans, living off the table scraps of the brands with an idea, a passion, an authentic purpose.

Need a brand?

We can help you with that.  We can help you crystallize an articulation of your brand that will activate your purpose, turbocharge your marketing plan, trim away the mental clutter, and focus your people up around your core values, so you can start leveraging all of the above as your unfair advantage.  It can be the difference between staying on your current growth curve or turning the corner into J-curve growth.