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TL;DR:
- There’s a lot of conflicting information about when you should start investing in branding
- We believe you should work on shaping people’s perception of your brand from the very beginning
- The two groups that your branding efforts will have the most impact on in the beginning are your team and your initial customers
Is it important to invest in “brand” at the beginning of your small business or startup journey?
The NYT best selling marketing books author, Donald Miller, says if you aren’t at the $50 million mark you shouldn’t be spending any money on branding. But he also has a book called building a story brand where he teaches you how to clarify your message so people listen.
So what is it? Are we supposed to not think about branding until we’re huge or do we need to start off with branding?
That depends on what you mean by “brand.” The problem seems to be that each person has their own definition of brand. Lets take this definition: brand is the gut feelings someone has towards a product or service.
Now, should you focus on this gut feeling when you’re just starting up? Absolutely.
There are two gut feelings you really need to work to influence in the early stages of your business.
- Your team
- Your initial customers
Your Internal Brand
How your team views you is a result of your internal branding. The things that make a good internal brand aren’t necessarily the same things that make a good customer facing brand. Employees aren’t looking for cool design or a discount on the product. Employees want to know that they can achieve their goals by being a part of your team.
You need to start with a strong unifying vision and mission that gives each person a sense of purpose. Take the time to really get the buy in of the entire team. Regularly reference the mission so it becomes ingrained in your team members’ minds.
When Donald Miller was saying you shouldn’t worry about branding in the beginning, he wasn’t talking about this, but that doesn’t matter because this is still technically branding.
Here are a couple things you can do to positively influence your team’s perception of your company:
- Know your employees names and get to know them personally - actually care about them
- Listen to people’s ideas and implement feedback they have when possible
- Be transparent with the numbers, the goals, and things that are happening that would effect them - a weekly or monthly newsletter from the leader goes a long way
Your External Brand
The next step is influencing your customers. Customer don’t tell other people about an experience they had if it was average. They tell people when it was terrible, or when it was exceptional. Y combinator gives the following advice to all new startups: Do things that don’t scale and create an experience that just 10 customers will fall in love with. The founders of Airbnb would take pictures of the listings that didn’t have pictures for free - this was at a time where it was much harder to upload pictures online. You can’t do this at scale of course, you probably can’t even do it with a thousand listings, but those initial customers had such a great experience they would definitely tell 5 other people about it.
Here are couple things you can do that don’t scale but result in incredibly positive experiences for the customers:
- Talk to your customers and get to know them, understand their problems
- when customers give you a problem with the product, fix it and circle back with them to let them know you fixed it
- Give bonus freebies - help your customers solve other problems they have in their lives
Conclusion
So coming back to the question, is it important to invest in branding at the beginning of your startup journey? Yes, although monetary investment will do little to actually brand your company in the early stages. The branding you need to focus on is the vision for the company and creating incredible experiences for your customers.