Brand marketing is mostly useless for consumer startups. Startups build a great brand by being successful, finding product market fit and scaling traction, etc. But it’s not a real lever. Let’s not mix up correlation with causation! If this seems contrarian to you, it’s because there’s a vast ecosystem of consultants, agencies, and other middlemen …
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Guillaume Decugis
onto Ideas for entrepreneurs |
Right on. I've been on TechCrunch and we had decent coverage for Scoop.it. Did it help our user acquisition? Not really.
For Scoop.it and my previous startup (a b2c mobile platform), I've thought a lot about how to build a brand. And while I respect there might be some exceptions, I very much second what Andrew Chen writes here: building a brand is mostly the consequence - not the cause.
It doesn't mean there's just nothing to do other than growing to build a brand. The story your company tells, the values your product expresses, how it's design, how you communicate and many other things will shape your brand a certain way. But whether it's big or small - or said more bluntly whether you have a brand or not - remains tightly coupled with how much you grow.
So, as a startup founder, unless you're an exceptional marketing genius, your best bet is probably to focus on product market fit and finding the right acquisition channels while paying attention to the story you tell. The brand will follow.
PS: in his post, Andrew focuses on consumer startups but I would say that it's probably also true for most B2B startups. Even though they have more targeted PR / influencer marketing channels they can leverage for brand building purposes, I would consider them from a pure ROI standpoint as customer acquisition channels. And consider any resulting brand awareness impact a bonus.
This is a mist read for entrepreneurs