Strategy 3 — Brand & owning a message

Summary: How to build memory associations in the broader market through consistency over time, with B2B SaaS brand examples.

Own it — in a nutshell:

• Strategy: Build your brand through associated value in the form of a tight name/need memory association.
• Attention: Passive right-brain (i.e., open but not currently in-market).
• Action: Own it — you need both consistency and frequency in broadcasting a message you own.
• Position: When a buyer needs X, they think Y — your brand. That’s the position you own in the buyer’s memory.

In our market science discussion, we discussed the B2C world, where the B2C marketing science gurus, who focus on brands, think positioning is inherently a mistake and not how you grow.

These are folks studying mass market advertising for consumer commodities, basically, and some (but not all!) of the most prominent voices ignore how innovative products enter the market. (Diffusion science has existed since the 1950s, as we discussed.)

But because science-based positioning is about synthesis of seemingly incompatible views (a very deliberate positioning choice on the part of your humble author), we can still learn from the brand folks when they’re right and ignore their blind spots when they’re wrong.

And in terms of being right, they have an incredibly helpful take on what ‘brand’ actually is.

Their view is that brand is about memories (again, as we discussed when looking at market science), specifically a name/need association that people will go to first. Put another way, people tend to search their memories before they search Google.

This matters because it clarifies what brand is not, too.

Your brand is not just your logo per se, and it’s not any elaborate brand “meaning” some marketing folks might get carried away dreaming up. Instead, it’s a simple memory/need association. Need drink; think Coke. The value of Coke as a brand has been built over decades, and its value is in the position it’s built in our minds over time, along with the physical positions they’ve built just about everywhere.

That’s mental availability on one hand — lots of people associate Coke with a refreshing and tasty drink — and physical availability on the other, with Coke being distributed virtually everywhere. This approach, like that of Starbucks, makes it very easy to buy when your memory reminds you it’s a possible solution to the thirst you’re feeling.

Coke’s brand, of course, includes its ‘distinctive assets’ (to use a term Professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has popularized). Those brand assets include its logo, its use of red, and its can and bottle design. They’re the glue between the ads we see and the product we look for.

Branding works on a category level, too. That’s why tech companies all tend to adopt similar aesthetics, and why fashion or sports companies likewise all tend to look just like their competitors over time. Branding, on a category level, is as much about positioning your company to fit in as it is about being unique. And that makes sense because it makes it easier for buyers to buy. If someone walks past a shop on the street, for example, it’s a service to them that the store looks like the kind of store that it is — fashion shops look like fashion shops; fast food joints look like fast food joints, and so on. The alternative is aesthetic anarchy, which is a fun idea but not how our brains work. Instead, we rely on visual cues and cultural associations to pattern match the world around us.

But logos and colors are about 1% of what’s interesting about branding. The real meat of branding, including memory associations, is the need you can associate with your brand and the scale at which you can establish that association, i.e., to what extent you can build a brand position in the prospect’s mind (or memory).

Branding, in this view, is more akin to spaced repetition where repeated exposure to information builds long-term memories. Spaced repetition is popular with language learning — see symbol, remember sound. See word, remember meaning. Do that once, and you’ll probably forget it. Do it at set intervals, and you’ll remember it.

The same is true for branding. The key, however, is the association, not just recall of a random symbol, which is why mere awareness isn’t enough. And if you’re going to build that association, you’ve got to own it.

Brand beyond advertising

If branding in B2C is about mental and physical availability — reminding folks that a sweet, sugary, caffeinated cola exists with a certain logo through advertising (mental availability) and making sure it’s physically available when the need strikes (vending machines, supermarkets, fast food partnerships, and so on), what’s the B2B equivalent?

That will depend heavily on your go-to-market motion. For B2C and SMB-focused design platform Canva, that meant dominating SEO. It meant showing up for every Google search around a design job-to-be-done, ever. That was physical availability for “How to design a [card/resume/poster]” in the digital world.

In sales-led B2B, mental and physical availability is more about being easy to recall and easy to buy — being there in webinars, on LinkedIn, in the search engine result pages, at the trade shows, and so on, along with going outbound in a targeted way so good-fit prospects actually encounter you.

That’s branding beyond mere advertising. The B2C folks will be the first to admit that mass market brand advertising is actually a relatively weak force, especially in the short term, and again, think twice when someone suggests you need to run a one-off “brand” advertising campaign.

The best “brand” ads tend to also activate people, that is, get them to buy in the short term, not just remember your product or brand over the longer term, which means they can be run indefinitely. That’s why Squarespace was so successful with their podcast ‘brand’ ads, as we’ll touch on below, and as I cover in Positioning Playbook.

But brand is ultimately about much more than ads. Advertising might be the only real lever B2C brand advertisers have to pull, but in tech, especially startups, we can build the product, playbook, UX, and entire buying experience to match the memory we’re trying to build.

That’s something Linear founder Karri Saarinen knows very well, so I’ll let him explain it further:

I was reflecting back to my time at Airbnb. I remember for [Airbnb founder Brian Chesky], the brand was the most important thing and I think it’s still very rare that tech company founders understand what is brand and how to use it.

I also think the brand is as much internal as it is [an] external thing. The brand is essentially what you are as a company, and internally it affects the culture and the outputs.

Many tech companies push products and messaging which doesn’t seem to make any sense. When Apple puts out something, it 99% of the time feels like Apple. It’s not by mistake.

The consistency comes from the fact that everyone in the company [has a] very clear understanding [of] what the company is, what it stands for, what’s the quality bar, what it does, how and why. Consistency is important for a brand, it’s like the soul or personality of your company. […]

At [L]inear [we] started with the brand from day one.

It’s that consistency that creates memories, and that consistency isn’t just in a logo or ad; it’s in all the marketing output, it’s in the product, it’s in the culture, and it all amounts to a more implicit, right-brain gestalt that makes you a coherent entity in the prospect’s mind.

That’s what owning it means when it comes to brand as a positioning strategy — creating a distinct memory association over time through impeccable standards and consistency.

Brand obsession

I think a high standard for what is or isn’t on-brand is a generally healthy thing for all companies to aspire to; however, it’s worth noting the failure states for brand, too.

1. Overemphasizing brand in enterprise

Products with great brands tend to just be nicer because the founders (often designers) have a taste for it, and users who appreciate it can get hands-on and tell other folks to try the product. This can work well in the UX-driven, product-led growth world if your UX really is that remarkable. In enterprise SaaS, however, the process is sales-driven, not necessarily product-driven, so thinking UX-as-brand will save you is a mistake. (There are billion-dollar enterprise companies with 2010-wave Wordpress-looking websites out there, for example.)

But there’s still a brand opportunity!

Think about the memory associations buyers form when they interact with your sales team and eventually do get hands-on with the product — how consistent is the message? How positive is the experience? Does the outcome match the promise? There’s still a promise to be fulfilled, and that’s where brand memories are built.

2. Obsessing over brand meaning

Folks like ‘Chief Brand Officers’ sometimes get carried away applying their own attention to the meaning of your brand, or even just your logo, developing wild theories about brand personalities and traits. The acid test for this overtheorizing is whether any customer would actually ever describe the brand in those terms. You can survey them and see!

What matters more is recognizability and consistency — it’s often experience that drives brand meaning (and memory associations), not vice versa. Apple didn’t become Apple because they once ran nice brand ads, they became Apple because of the consistency of experience people had with their products over years and decades.

3. Ignoring brand entirely

On the flip side, a failure state for most sales-focused tech outfits is ignoring brand entirely, thinking they’re too specialized, too sales-driven, too industry specific for anyone to care about their ‘brand.’ That’s true insofar as you don’t have to be a cool brand, but ignoring brand altogether is a self-limiting belief.

Caring about consistency in product, your message, your buyer and customer experience, and ultimately the name/need memory association you create is low-hanging fruit that benefits the whole business. Just care more. That way, folks who may have interacted with you but didn’t buy from you this cycle may well come back next time they’re in-market, switch jobs, or want to make a recommendation to a friend, simply because they felt positively about you and remembered you because your brand wasn’t the equivalent of a manilla envelope stapled to a beige wall.

The key thing, however, is that leadership has to own it. They’re the gatekeepers of consistency, after all. This consistency of experience doesn’t happen on its own — the bar needs to be set by leadership so everyone knows what standard they’re aiming for, what message they need to stick to, and ultimately what kind of experience is acceptable to deliver.

Memory builders — examples

We’ve established that brand building is essentially putting something on people’s passive right-brain radar consistently and over a long enough time period that a clear name/need association is built — a memory that sticks in the buyer’s mind.

But how do you actually do that?

Incumbents have it easy — by virtue of being the biggest, they become the safe option that ’everyone knows’, and continue to build and maintain memory associations in the market simply by continuing to exist.

To add insult to injury, B2C marketing science shows that incumbents — contrary to popular belief — tend to have slightly more loyal customers in proportion to their market share. (This is the ‘double jeopardy’ law Byron Sharp often talks about — smaller brands reach fewer buyers, and those buyers are slightly less loyal.)

Nevertheless, from a startup point of view, how do you use this kind of memory-building as a growth tool?

Here are a few possibilities:

1. Exploit a new channel

Squarespace has one of the strongest brands in SaaS, which they built over years through their innovative, relentless, and exhaustive use of podcast advertising. By seemingly advertising, at one point, on every podcast, ever, they built incredible brand memory associations in the market. Want a website? Have a friend who does? Chances are you think of, or recommend, Squarespace. Why? Because they’re first to mind.

This is the almost Pavlovian response that effective brand advertising over time generates. And in Squarespace’s case, it also generated immediate conversions, so they could keep doubling down on it. Their ads performed ‘double duty’ to use marketing-speak, building memories for the future and converting customers in the present.

2. Double-down on quality and innovation

If users are going to have an experience with your brand and product, why not make it a good one?

This is another common argument of Sharp’s — that behavior and experience drive attitudes towards a brand, not the other way around, much to the chagrin of marketers who think they can imbue their brand with magic powers of persuasion.

Think about ChatGPT, for example. Super weird name. Standard logo. Generational innovation. You can guess which of those drives attitudes for the brand.

Strong brands in tech are also often built on a superior user experience, and that was true for both Slack and Linear for that matter. Both products were riffs on existing categories of team chat and issue management, respectively. But both founders had an acute sense of their experience mattering, and that set them apart.

For Slack, the operating metaphor was that of impeccable restaurant-like service with a high bar for quality, which was established by founder Stewart Butterfield in a classic memo sent out before the product launched.

Likewise, for Linear, the brand was every interaction folks had with the product and company, including a stunning homepage and incredible product UX. The key here is the contrast — the common alternative to Linear was the long-in-the-tooth Jira, and Linear was positioned as a breath of fresh air for serious professionals who care about their tools.

This made them the first choice for early adopters who wanted to use the hottest tools. That got their momentum going, and that established their early position as the new default choice for discerning product development teams starting new projects.

3. Go B2C2B

Brand tends to work more at the B2C end of the spectrum, and some of the best SaaS brand plays therefore tend to look very B2C-ish.

Take Notion, for example. Notion is, on paper, a pretty weird concept — docs and databases intertwined in an innovative canvas of sorts where users can create their own simple tools and workspaces. What’s interesting, though, is their B2C2B approach. They go broad with incredibly accessible branding and marketing, get consumers hooked on the tool, grow their community, and then hope they’ll bring the tool into their workplace, which is when Notion cashes in.

That only works if the brand sticks, though. There needs to be that strong need/name association, and Notion has built just that for their project and work management tools.

Brand as a forcing function

Building memory associations in the market such that a steady stream of buyers will come to you simply because they happened to think of you takes a long time.

You can measure progress by watching your direct brand search traffic grow over time, but remember this is the byproduct of everything you do — your paid ads, your social posts, your sales outreach, your media efforts, and of course, the customers you’ve served over the years.

It’s also somewhat meaningless if you haven’t found product/market fit yet — hard to build memories around a need before you’ve established what that need is.

That said, brand can be a great forcing function in terms of making you think hard about exactly what clarity you want to create in the market — what need association do you want to establish in prospects’ minds? What do you want to be famous for? What’s your micro-pitch (to borrow from our upcoming narrative discussion)?

If that association is going to take years to build, once you know what it is, the sooner you can get started, the better!

Next, we’ll look at what happens when everything comes together in a winning position.

Vision questions

• What’s your vision for the distinct value, or need, you want prospects to associate with your brand?
• When people think about your brand now — if they think about your brand — what’s the current associated need?
• If you surveyed 10 or 100 customers, what do you think the consensus on the associated need or attribute would be? Would there be a consensus at all?
• Is there a channel or unique GTM opportunity in your market where you can show up consistently to drive home a unique name/need association?
• How relevant is brand to how your prospects buy? Do they buy by searching their memories first, and if they do, what do they say triggered that mental search? How can you strengthen your association with that trigger?

First published: September 2024 · Last updated: November 11, 2024