Build The Brand First

Having a brilliant product or service isn’t enough. To capture today’s consumers, smart startups are first crafting a brand strategy—one that builds a forward-looking foundation for the company.

- Leonard Sherman

Suppose you’ve got an idea for a great new thingamajig. It could be anything—a luxury candle, affordable college education, or a product to prevent male-pattern baldness. You can’t get the concept out of your head. You have to bring it to life.

But you have no prototypes, and no experience with the intricacies of industrial design. No understanding of production and distribution. No web design experience. No detailed market projections. No money.

In this moment, logic would advise against obsessing over brand strategy—and it would definitely advise against hiring a pricey agency to help you do it. And yet, a growing number of startups are doing just that, seeing great success as a result.

Only a few years ago, product was king. Founders focused on getting a minimum viable product to market, fast—iteration could fix shortcomings. Brand strategy was a back-burner issue, one to address when time and budget allowed.

But today’s tech tools make it easier for founders to, well, produce a product. With design sprints, rapid wireframe and product prototyping, contract manufacturing, fulfillment-as-a-service, webstore design, and hosting services, some entrepreneurs can go from concept to first paying customer in a matter of weeks.

That’s a double-edged sword. Those tools that make it easy to rush a product to market? They’re available to everyone, and have resulted in unprecedented competition in the startup world. (According to Crunchbase, VCs closed more than 21,800 global funding rounds last year, continuing a multiyear trend of increasing deal flow and sizes.) Countless entrepreneurs are discovering that their supposedly game-changing idea has already been launched by others, or at best is being copied by nimble competitors.