The entrepreneur's guide to building a brand (without spending $$$ on brand)
everything that actually matters about brand building 🍎
“Hey {first_name}, our agency specializes in branding, for the low price of just $100,000 we can put together a brand campaign for you.”
I gagged writing that. 🤢
Really early in my career I spent time working in a brand shop. The kind of place where you’d drop 6 figures for some posh creative director to tell you why blue is the color of trust. The kind of place that would blow your money driving impressions without driving results.
Brand is extremely important - but if you want to know a secret, brand isn’t something you can pay for. Not to be vulgar, but trying to pay for brand is a bit like paying for sex.
You can buy design, the same way you can buy clothes.
You can buy advertisements, the same way you can buy dinner.
You can buy a brand consultant … the same way you can pay for a therapist.
No amount of money however can help you build a powerful authentic brand, because brand is the result of your day-to-day actions, not the sum total of your display impressions.
You can think of it kind of like startup karma. Every good thing and bad thing you do, all added up, is your brand.
Brand Equity can be defined as the sum total of every interaction anyone has ever had with your brand.
[ads] Every ad impression.
[public relations] Every publication you appear on.
[content] Every article someone reads.
[referrals] Every conversation users have with each other.
[product] Every touch point a user has with your product.
[support] Every email your customer support team sends (or doesn’t send).
[hiring] Every interview you ever do, every candidate you ever reject.
Every single interaction someone has with your brand exists on a scale between “extremely negative” to “extremely positive”, and it has an impact/importance between “extremely weak” to “extremely strong”.
Brand Equity is the “net result” when you add together all of these interactions.
Brand Equity is important, because it represents the delta that someone is willing to pay between your brand & a generic identical product.
Coca-Cola without brand is unhealthy sugar water. The value of their brand equity is the premium someone is willing to pay for the well dressed sugar water.
Here’s how you build up brand equity that enables you to charge a premium, create defensibility, and inspire a generation (without blowing your money on billboards and consultants).
Creating your startup’s Brand Identity
Brand Identity can be defined as the elements one uses to associate your brand with “you”.
Don’t overcomplicate this. You don’t need some big drawn out process, you don’t need to spend an insane amount of money on designers, just follow a few really basic rules & get this done.
You need a logo - a “mark” that identifies your brand.
You need a name - a name that won’t ever need to change.
You need colors associated with your brand.
You need fonts to be associated with your brand.
[bonus] Subtle patterns can be an exceptionally powerful part of your brand identity by giving you creative elements that easily build association.
[bonus] Brand characters (check out Discord) can also be extremely powerful by giving you more creativity when creating content & ads.
The ONLY MAJOR WAY you can screw up your brand identity, is if you pick something that needs to be changed later.
Consultants will bill you a ton to tell you which colors make you feel a certain way, or which fonts create a sense of authority, or how a name will resonate with your audience … but the golden rule of brand identity is to pick something that won’t ever change.
Image if Coca-Cola changed their name to PopPleasure.
They would have lost decades of brand equity from people associating “Coca-Cola” with their product. Nobody would know what “PopPleasure” was. This would cost them billions in lost revenue.
The power of a brand is in what people associate with the identity. If the identity has to change, then people will no longer be able to associate their experiences with it. This is the most damaging thing you can do.
The most common way that people screw up their brand identity is by picking a name that won’t allow them to change or grow.
Maybe I’m a Supplement company and I name my brand “Smart Gut Supplements”.
This name makes it hard to add in supplements beyond gut health.
This name makes it hard to layer in products beyond supplements.
This domain name is taken so I can’t own the .com.
The way people mess this up is by associating their brand name with a specific product. The best brand names are timeless. Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Disney … X.
They are formless, and allow the brand to launch any infinite number of products underneath them.
Pick colors that make sense and aren’t ugly, pick fonts that are easy to read, create a logo that is simple and can easily identify your brand, pick a timeless name that could “become anything” (and doesn’t have other conflicting associations).
Product & Customer Support are the core drivers of Brand Equity
Once your brand identity is established, the most critical thing you need to understand about building an incredible brand is that what matters more than a billion billboard campaigns, is your Product + Customer Support.
Let’s use another huge household brand as an example, Comcast.
The horror stories of Comcast’s customer support are legendary, that at this point in time they basically are Comcast’s #1 brand association.
Someone says Comcast and millions of people think “shitty customer support”.
No amount of advertising will ever save Comcast. “You can’t pay for brand” brand is at the core of who you are and what you do.
A tweet can go viral and 1,000,000,000 people could see it, but a tweet is a very weak impression. A user actually using your product or talking with someone at your company, is one of the most powerful brand impressions you can provide.
If a startup or product is rotten at its core, no amount of “branding” will ever save it.
Another philosophical question … what is the worst part of the Coca-Cola brand?
“It’s unhealthy sugar water.”
Coca-Cola didn’t have this negative association back in the 60’s and 70’s. It might be a timeless classic even in 2023, but there has been a tremendous cultural shift towards eating & drinking healthier.
The product behind Coca-Cola has a fundamental flaw - it is actually extremely bad for you.
They tried to pivot with Diet Coke, and Coke Zero, but ultimately they were never able to rebrand and find a “healthy” positioning for their brand.
This key piece is what forced them to change their Brand Identity, to start launching and acquiring completely new products, with completely new brands (Vitamin Water, Powerade, Minute Maid, Gold Peak, etc).
All of the “branding” in the world will never be able to overcome the truth of your product - because your product (and the customer support/human interactions around it) are THE most powerful driver of your Brand Equity.
How to build your Brand Equity with Marketing & Advertising
When people think about "building a brand” they’re usually thinking about creative marketing + advertising campaigns, and the witty messaging behind them.
Just do it.
Every kiss begins with K.
Don’t be evil.
Have it your way.
Maybe she’s born with it … maybe it’s Maybelline.
Here’s the golden rule of leveraging Marketing & Advertising as tools to amplify and build your brand → do it profitably, with direct attribution.
The absolute worst thing a company can do when trying to build a brand is create a “budget for brand” that isn’t tied to profitably driving revenue.
Every dollar you spend on marketing and advertising should be profitable. Do not fool yourself into thinking “this will pay off in 5 years” or “this will drive brand recall” or “we’re entering a new market and just need to introduce our brand”.
There’s two reasons for this.
Spending money without creating an ROI is literally just burning your cash.
Marketing & advertising dollar spent profitably, allow you to scale your campaigns.
There is nothing special about a “performance marketing” impression vs a “brand impression”.
As far as brand is concerned, both of them are doing the exact same thing, providing a user with an interaction with your brand.
The difference is that when you are spending money on marketing & advertising profitably, you are able to purchase 10x more impressions because they are profitable and you begin to play a game of profitably maximizing volume instead of lighting your cash on fire.
Please, spend money profitably.
And then as a reward you can focus on these 3 critical levers.
The total number of impressions
The strength of those impressions
The frequency of those impressions
Some forms of impressions are stronger than others. If someone sees your brand on Twitter that might create a large # of impressions, but the strength is weak. If an industry influencer with 1,000,000 followers creates a 2 hour long tutorial on why your product is amazing - that becomes a MUCH stronger impression.
Follow me on Twitter, weak impression.
Read my Substack, stronger impression.
Read my book (about to launch), even stronger impression.
Grab coffee with me IRL, even stronger impression.
Work with me for 10 years? Probably the strongest impression.
Maybe you’re someone who has seen 1,000 of my tweets, read 4 articles, preread the beta of my book, hung out with me IRL, and works at my company. This is probably the absolute strongest “brand impression” I could possibly have.
That person will likely remember me for years and years and years (and hopefully have a positive brand impression).
Your goal when building a brand is to define your audience, reach as much of your audience as you can, do it with the absolute strongest impression you possibly can, and do it consistently, frequently, for generations.
And to do it profitably.
Why should you “build a brand?”
Brand is the difference someone is willing to pay between your product and your competitors product. It’s extremely important when you are selling a commodity, but it’s actively important for any company.
A final story for you 🙏🏻 when we first started trying to grow Rupa we tried “cold calling” our users. Nobody wanted to hear from us - they were busy doctors after all.
Today, cold calling is one of our top channels of growth.
The difference is brand. Brand we built profitably through influencer marketing, industry partnerships, Facebook ads, Google search, content, webinars, conferences, direct mail, LinkedIn ads, & an insanely good product with incredible customer support.
We call our potential users today and they say “OMG I’ve heard of you guys my friend XYZ loves you!” then they sign up and buy on the spot.
That’s the power of brand.
Do it right and your users will pay you more for the same product, it will unlock new channels of growth that used to not be profitable, it will provide a tremendous layer of defensibility, and maybe even your parents will finally know what your company does.
If you liked this post make sure to follow me on Twitter & check out the new video interview series on YouTube. :)
Want to keep reading?