What does brand even mean?

💡 The core message in this article: Your brand isn't about your story - it's about how well you understand your theirs.

Ask a CEO who feels their brand is underperforming, ‘How do you know?’ they’d say something like:

• “We lose deals because our prospect’s CFO says they’ve never heard of us.”
• “Our competitors are loud on social (LinkedIn), but we’re nowhere to be seen”.

They feel invisible.

Ideal prospects aren’t aware of them, therefore aren’t considering them.

That’s killing growth momentum. These CEOs already run successful SaaS businesses generating between £5-50m ARR. It’s not like they’re struggling with product-market fit. But they’re ambitious and want to accelerate the momentum they already have, and that acceleration comes when they are growing market share.

Without a recognised brand, your sales team is working twice as hard to close half as many deals because the brand isn’t opening doors the way it should.

But is brand really that significant?

Do successful brands really deliver meaningful value?

Research from multiple sources provides the answer:

• Companies with higher brand strength (as measured by Brand Finance’s Brand Strength Index) outperform the S&P 500 (1).
• Superior brand preference (or reputation) commanded an average price premium of 26%, even when brand quality was the same (2).
• The top 100 B2B brands account for about $2 trillion in brand value. Representing 12% of their total business value (3).

Successful brands have material value, and so does being the leader of such a brand.

Marc Benioff (Salesforce) speaks at Dreamforce, and 170,000 people hang on to his every word about the future of work.

Jason Lemkin shares an insight about SaaS in a LinkedIn post and it racks up 5,000 likes and 400 comments within a couple of hours.

Des Traynor speaks at product conferences and 8,000 product leaders pivot their strategy after hearing his view on AI.

There’s not only a sense of pride or accomplishment, there’s social recognition that comes along with notoriety. There’s more opportunity, more optionality and greater impact.

“If you’re building a SaaS company today, you can’t win on features, you have to win on brand.” David Cancel, CEO of Drift

So, what does a CEO do to solve a brand problem?

Typically, they hire an agency to deliver a killer brand.

The agency’s mandate is to produce a differentiated brand that truly captures the essence of the CEO’s business.

The agency brief begins with inspiration, looking at bigger players to emulate. Maybe it’s category leaders like Gong, Intercom, or Hubspot. Maybe it’s Apple or even Tesla. That’s the brief provided and the direction of travel for the new brand.

But ambitious CEOs end up with a seemingly valuable and very long PDF with a pretty logo that solves nothing—a far cry from the clarity needed to achieve brand premium.

I often hear, “Why did we pay so much for this brand document again?”

It’s an expensive outlay on beautiful brand assets that do little to build pipeline or reduce cost per acquisition.

So it begs the question…

How does a brand build the kind of success you’re looking for?

If it’s not a logo and the agency’s fancy PDF, what is it?

​Coconut is a great example of what happens when you nail your brand.

This was a project run inside the agency I founded, Kurve, headed up by Lena Andican, which I supported.

The result:

• 10x growth with their Partner Practices, including two top 40 accounting firms
• Accountant channel licences growing at 50% per month
• The Latest fundraising round oversubscribed by 210%

We took three steps to create this transformation:

1. We spoke to the target audience and asked them the right questions.
2. We used the interviews to understand freelancers’ current behaviours and frustrations so that Coconut could support them in developing better habits.
3. We developed a new narrative and messaging framework.

You may think that your logo, tagline, or homepage headline is the issue or that your marketing team isn’t reaching enough people and shouting about your brand. Perhaps you think the market doesn’t understand your proposition or its value.

That the market, your audience, needs to be educated.

But here’s the truth…

Your brand isn’t about your story - it’s about how well you understand your theirs.

Those two things sound similar, but they’re completely different. One is about how you present yourself, the other is about how your audience believes your solution meets their needs.

And all of this is happening because you’re misinterpreting what brand is.

Brand is more than branding.

The term branding originated from cattle farmers. Each farm had its own cattle and would stamp the cattle with their family crest. Nowadays, that branding is represented by a combination of logo + name + tagline = brand–the kind of work you commission with a branding agency.

But that’s the external representation of the brand. It’s a superficial layer.

Imagine I told you Apple was opening an airport and then asked what the experience would be like in the Apple airport.

You’d expect it to be slick, clean, spacious and user-centric.

Now, if I asked you what the McDonald’s airport would look like, you’d have a different image of that airport.

These are both exceptional brands in their own way, but why?

A brand is the total sum of your experiences with a business.

When I open the box for a new Macbook or Iphone, I feel like a 9-year old opening an exciting Christmas gift. It’s like stepping into the future, where your news device syncs smoothly with your old one as you gleefully flung it into the draw of dead-iPhones.

The product being part of that experience — the craftsmanship of the product & UX that comes with each device, the in-store helpful customer support and the slick bluetooth connectivity of all your devices.

That experience as a whole, repeated over time, is what leads to that distinct mental association.

Advertising & marketing reinforce that memory - or it can present an invitation to someone unfamiliar with your brand.

So that’s a broad definition of brand, but it doesn’t quite help us bridge the primary mistakes businesses make with their brand.

To nail and create a successful brand, you need some key ingredients, in this order:

• Product. If you’ve nailed everything else but this, you won’t retain customers and thus won’t drive enough sustainable growth to become a meaningful brand over time.
• Audiences. If you have multiple audiences but talk to each of them the same way, you won’t drive as much traction as you’re aiming for. This will be show in your conversion rates across the board.
• Positioning. If it isn’t clear how you’re differentiated, in a meaningful way that’s relevant for your prospects, you won’t get enough share of voice to grow your market share.
• Messaging. If you aren’t communicating about solving the most relevant problem in the most relevant way to your respective audiences, you won’t get traction.
• Distribution. If you aren’t able to identify where your audience is and consistently reach them, you won’t build enough association to be considered when they look for a solution like yours.

Branding is simply a wrapper for those components.

Brand problems arise when you get one, or several, of those fundamentals wrong. If that’s the case, the question then is, which component isn’t working?

How do you diagnose a brand problem?

That’s something I’ll explore in future emails.

Framework:

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