Great brands are built early and on purpose. For a growing company, brand isn't just your logo or color palette; most importantly, it's the emotional lever that turns a transaction into a relationship.
Not sure how your brand reads to investors? Run the Marketing Audit and CMO Readiness Checklist to find the gaps.
Watch the Masterclass
What a Brand Is
Think of your brand as a filter between your business and your customer: it shapes what you communicate, how, and why it should matter. "A person's gut feeling about your product, service, or company." Because it's a feeling, what builds it is consistency: the same message, in the same voice, at every touchpoint.
Start Early, but Stay Flexible
CEOs leave brand too late because product rightly comes first. But by the time you're fundraising and recruiting, your brand is doing real work, translating your value so investors and hires grasp it fast. Early on, you're a relative unknown, so you can afford to change: Slack grew out of a failed game (Glitch); Okta began as Saasure until customers kept asking about identity. Build foundations early, but let them evolve.
The Foundations: Vision, Mission, Value Props
Your vision is the far-off future you're working toward, ambitious, even unreachable, so it gives everyone something to aim at (TED: "the power of ideas to change the world").
Your mission is what you do today to move toward it, short and concrete (TED: "spread ideas").
Build two or three value propositions, not one, so you can speak to different audiences. The progression narrows from vision to mission to value prop to messaging.
Narrative Devices That Make a Pitch Land
Keep it simple (strip jargon so anyone grasps the problem fast). Anchor the new to the known (Superlist pitched itself as two familiar tools combined). Sell the team; early investors buy into you. For technical products, use a few curated data points and show, don't tell, walk through an example, case study, or customer quote.
How to Know If Your Brand Is Working
Standard metrics (awareness, consideration, preference) are meaningless before anyone's heard of you. Set a baseline for how you want to be perceived, watch website engagement and social mentions, but lean most on conversations: talk to customers, align your team, and watch how investor pitches land.
A clear brand narrative starts with knowing exactly who you serve, working through the Ideal Client Profile exercise, and then telling a story where the customer is the hero with the Brand Audit templates.
This masterclass was led by Ben Paxman and Anna Bogdanova of Wunderdogs (wunderdogs.co).
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