TL;DR
Your Brand is your most important GTM vehicle.
In a world where distribution is becoming more challenging and product development is becoming easier, your brand emerges as your most valuable asset. It is constructed every day through the activities of your company: your product, customer support, sales, and marketing.
Great brands are not accidental; they are intentionally designed, developed, and managed. Branding transcends mere logos, yet many companies struggle to know where to begin or lack the expertise needed to build a strong brand. Often, they resort to hiring costly brand agencies, resulting in assets created without a deep understanding of the business's operations or its true brand-building influences. As the company expands and customer touchpoints multiply, brand experiences can spiral out of control, leading to the need for another agency or a brand refresh to address fundamental issues.
Companies must initiate brand building early, even as early as Day-0. Founders and founding teams must play a pivotal role before hiring marketing departments. As more individuals contribute to brand-building efforts, marketing departments will shrink. A strong brand forms a robust foundation for distribution. Such brands require less spending to acquire customers, attract top talent, demonstrate resilience during crises, and command higher valuations.
Every employee will be empowered to building your brand. And every company can live up to its brand’s potential.
The key drivers that make this possible are:
A brand operating system that spans all facets of the business, including product, customer support, sales, and marketing. It enables every employee to streamline the process and accelerate deliverables by reducing the learning curve required to create memorable experiences.
More untapped creative talents globally, making beautiful brand design accessible and affordable, even for startups.
Integration of the best of human creativity and AI, with some brand rituals led entirely by humans, others by AI agents, and some as a blend of both — facilitating great branding for every company at a rapid pace, high quality, and lower costs.
Brand’s Brand.
Brand means so many things. It’s simply a name you recognize, or even intangible and borderline useless for some.
There's often a stigma associated with brand investments. For smaller companies, brand investments might appear elusive, often not considered until reaching a business milestone. Meanwhile, larger companies invest in 7-figure brand agencies, workshops, and months of effort, resulting in a sense of satisfaction, yet often not measured or fully embraced in every function. As the company grows, and the customer touch points grow exponentially, the brand experiences become out of control. Then another agency, a brand refresh, when you have more fundamental problems at the core.
Brand does require investment, tailored to the company's stage and operations.
Brand is what connects you emotionally to the market. It's the identity and story — it defines who you are at every touchpoint where your audience interacts with you. It influences how you make them feel. Every interaction with your audience shapes your brand.
Brand is a GTM Vehicle.
Brand is an important GTM vehicle. It is the most valuable asset that's built every day through the activities of sales, marketing, product, and customer success. When you have a great brand, your entire company is humming together.
Product delivers on the promise of the brand. Marketing clearly communicates the brand values and message. Sales articulates how the product aligns with the customer's needs and the brand’s promise. Customer success cultivates loyal customers and turns them into brand ambassadors.
Strong brands have better business. They spend less to acquire customers, have loyal customers, can attract top talent, are simply more resilient to crisis, and have higher valuations.
Great Brands Need An Operating System.
Whether you know it or not, you shape your brand everyday. A Brand Operating System (BrandOS) helps you shape it to where you want it to be.
A BrandOS has three pillars:
Design
The first step to building a Brand is its design. Think of it as the “design” of your audience’s experiences.
While there are hundreds of touch points for your audience, design serves as the foundation upon which these experiences are built. It's the core, or "kernel," of the BrandOS, serving all functions and people within your operating system. It's accessible for every employee in your company to adopt.
The Brand Design comprises essential elements such as your story, vision, mission, values, logo, tagline, visual identity (colors, typography, photography, illustration, iconography), non-visual identity (voice, tone, language, personality), and company boilerplate. These components collectively shape the identity and communication of the brand.
Many companies have a version of this, but it's often disorganized and inaccessible, and also difficult to apply for a functional need.
Build
Your brand design exists to deliver exceptional experiences. These are experiences for your audience across all touch points, scenarios, and interfaces.
For a tech company, the sales, marketing, product, and customer success functions create audience experiences. They need to adopt the brand design, and develop assets and experiences.
A BrandOS offers kits for creating various assets that align seamlessly with your brand's design across sales, marketing, product, customer success, and leadership.
In sales, it covers essentials like elevator pitches, pitch decks, brochures, demos, explainer videos, battlecards, and proposals.
For marketing, it includes tools for websites, social media, events, blogs, newsletters, press releases, ad creatives, user conferences, and analyst decks.
In product development, it assists with launches, product videos, whitepapers, feature updates, in-app education, nurture campaigns, and surveys.
For customer success, it helps with customer stories, adoption campaigns, and community boards.
Lastly, for founders and leaders, it supports thought leadership efforts and public profiles.
The BrandOS ensures your assets connect emotionally with your audience, and stay true to your brand.
Operate
Companies operate everything — they manage and they get better with every function, say product, or sales. Brand is similar, and a BrandOS must continuously learn and get better.
A BrandOS provides recipes, workflow automation, and measurement.
Recipes
A BrandOS adopts best practices, known as "recipes," derived from industry best practices, experts, and standout companies. Tech companies share many commonalities, so there's no need to start from scratch.
Workflow Automation
Using these recipes, a BrandOS creates and executes workflows, automating essential company rituals. Consistency and trust building are crucial in brand-building, and workflow automation reduces the resources needed for such large-scale operations. AI will increasingly play a role here to act as a copilot for some tasks, and as an autonomous agent in some other tasks.
Measurement
Continuous measurement and optimization of your brand are essential, identifying areas for improvement and adapting to develop your own recipes for success.
BrandOS: when do I need it?
Brand building starts when you have an idea — it’s important to build mindshare early on. The fundamentals of BrandOS — design, build, operate apply to each stage of the company. The company goals differ though, so you right size the brand investments accordingly.
BrandOS makes the following possible:
At founding, for building trust with your investors and founding team.
[Seed] At product launch, for establishing a presence in your target market, ensuring that your audience seeking a solution recognizes you as a contender among your competition.
[Series A] At scaling your initial customer success, for lowering your cost of customer acquisition through a solid brand foundation, enabling your team to concentrate on exploring new channels and accelerating growth.
We believe that starting your Brand Building journey shouldn’t be so hard — no steep learning curves, no hefty budgets. It should be within reach for every company.
