The know, like and trust problem: how to build your brand

If you’re a bootstrapping, founder-led business, you’re probably very focused on selling your product on repeat and getting that sales engine going. And in that context, your ‘brand’ can feel like the fluffy bit - it’s your brand colours, your website design, your logo - and so it doesn’t matter too much right now.

Except it’s not. It’s a valuable business asset you’re neglecting.‍

What actually is brand strategy?‍

Brand strategy is about how you position yourself, relative to the rest of your category. Done well, it requires you to know where you’re headed, to identify the magic sauce of what makes you unique, to have more than an eye to the future of what’s happening in and around your category and with the people you’re hoping to influence and a clear picture of what you stand for and believe in. It’s related to, but bigger and more stretchy than the service you provide or the product you sell.

It’ll be a core idea that encapsulates all of that in a beautifully told story, a manifesto that tells us what the brand is here for, what it believes in and how it behaves and ideally, a big disruptive reason for being.

Then everything you do in your business is focused on landing it with absolute clarity in the world. It directs your marketing and messaging, the look, tone and way your brand behaves, your business model and how you productise, your innovation pipeline, who you partner and associate with, your own personal brand and visibility, through to the assets and intellectual property you create.

It becomes the filter for ideas. How you plan and prioritise investments and business activities. How you assess success towards the longer-term ambition.

Really it comes down to knowing if you’re trying to scale the service you provide by doing more of it, or you’re building a valuable business that’s bigger than that?

Who’d want to do the former, right? So why are so many founders (especially female founders) stuck in that trap?

Mostly because they don’t know any different. It’s not part of the narrative.‍

The Know, Like and Trust Problem‍

The internet is too busy telling female founders in particular to get visible, to leverage social media, to become ‘known, liked and trusted’, to let the world into their personal lives and to get that sales machine going in the background to leverage it and to sell your services on repeat.

Advice rarely goes beyond the tactics required to get the wheels turning and then how to scale it from there. The problem with that is that founders become trapped, often in a hyper specific niche and they eventually get bored and the founder fire goes out fast.

And if your only lever is ‘visibility’, how do you go bigger, evolve the business, create a stepchange in your profile? With great difficulty. If it’s just about doing more of the same, it will drain you.

There also aren’t many women starting businesses who think of themselves as ‘entrepreneurs building high value businesses’ from the outset. We’re waiting to see what happens, hoping for the best, waiting to earn our profile and reputation‍

Why great brand positioning is so crucial‍

A stellar brand positioning requires you to have a good sense of your ambition - of how big you want to take things, the nature of how you want the business to evolve, what you want for your own experience of the business, the kind of profile you want to build.

The stretch is what gives you a nice big sandpit to play in. It keeps that founder's fire lit and gives an energy to the business. You’re on a mission and everyone is welcome to join you in it.

It feels safer to stay in the weeds of selling your services, than standing for a difference in your category and having a disruptive point of view on the world outside of what you do or just having a voice.

From my own work, this is more often the case with ex-corporates in their 30s/40s and 50s. They’ve never really thought about the unique value that their decades of skills, experience and perspective has given them and so they start again, waiting to earn their stripes in this new world of entrepreneurship.

I wish they’d spend more time crafting their unique point of view and less time worrying about visibility.‍

Finding your unique voice‍

For your brand to become your million pound business asset, you have to know the space you want to claim and be comfortable with doing things in a different way to everyone else, developing a fresh unique voice amidst a crowded category all doing the same.

A wild difference built around your genuine equities and what you believe in, how you carry yourself in the world, will trump a spicy headline on Threads or a provocative hook on a social post, any day of the week.

Most founders say, ‘I don’t think I am that different to the rest of the category’. I guarantee it’s there, it just doesn’t fall out of the sky and you’re always the least qualified person to spot it in yourself.

So what sits on the other side of developing a brilliant high-value brand strategy for you as a founder and for your business brand? What changes?

Everything.

It changes the energy and also gives you focus. Strategic clarity. That frees up the headspace and the energy that you might otherwise have wasted on constant pivots or second guessing. You know the messages you’re trying to land and the business plan, the marketing, the evolution of products and services, become the ways you’ll land it.

It’s how you build value beyond the selling of your service, because it’ll inspire assets and intellectual property, it’ll set you up to evolve in the right way, to premiumise your offering, to create new commercial opportunities.

And imagine the freedom you’ll feel when you can stop burning yourself out trying to stand-out, because you know you’re positioned for high-value difference. That’s the million pound asset you’re building.‍

About the Author‍

Emma Gage is a Brand and Business Strategist for female entrepreneurs and the founder of The Wild Ones, which has a mission to blow the gender-based disruption gap wide open and start a stampede of female unicorns. Emma helps create disruptive business strategies for women who want to grow unicorn businesses.