By Rob Simone, Partner & President at Summer Friday
When you work in an industry for any reasonable amount of time, you inevitably find some patterns that exist, particularly in sales and business development. Prospects will often exhibit red flags, people will use the same buzz terms, and misconceptions can run rampant.
One such example that I have personally experienced, having been an advertising and marketing entrepreneur for over 18 years, relates specifically to early-stage companies. Quite simply, founders and their early c-suites tend to delay the development of branding, marketing strategy, and agency partnerships, mainly because they believe it is premature and cost-prohibitive.
Sure, the perception of having bigger fish to fry is real, and no doubt, cash is tight in a young venture. Additionally, many agencies steer clear of startups because they don’t easily fit into a clear capabilities bucket. They also may not represent an easy revenue win.
That’s because most agencies aren’t looking for genuine long-term partnerships. They say that they are, but in truth, it appears that most are only looking for opportunities with early ventures in which the circumstances are ideal. While we understand risk management, we also don’t believe that partnerships come without risk.
Through experience, we have found that it is more than possible to structure a mutually beneficial partnership with the right-minded early-stage company. In fact, after a few refreshing engagements, I worked with my team to structure a formal Marketing Incubator Program with the specific goal of enriching a particularly underserved sector of business.
Is it perfect? Nope. But it’s the advanced thought that considers what an early brand can benefit from most and removes a tremendous amount of back and forth from the sales cycle, saving a founder precious time.
Even more important, our incubator program deals head-on with the realities of young brand budgets and cost models. Unlike our mature Fortune 500 and 100 clients, we need to be more resilient and open to alternative compensation models. It’s a plain fact, and if that’s not in the cards for your agency, please stand down now.
Now that we have established how it can be tremendously positive for a properly structured agency team to endeavor into this realm, I should absolutely mention that the real impetus to work with early-stage players came from how essential we felt it was for them to make an investment in their brand and marketing success during their fledgling days.
I say this because on more than a handful of occasions, we have assisted companies that were doubling back to fix branding and strategy ailments that were a result of delaying proper attention. We get it—companies evolve, and product/market fit takes time to identify. It is absolutely true, however, that you will pay a higher price for delaying the setting of a proper foundation at the onset of your business journey.
Take, for example, the project that we conducted for Strategic Financial Solutions/Firstly. Its team had identified a potential gap in the financial content landscape whereby people who fit into the “sandwich generation” were in great need of ideas and solutions for getting on track with their financial planning.
Instead of simply diving in and building a brand to attack this niche, Firstly called on Summer Friday to perform the appropriate research (from a target persona standpoint and also from a competitive mindset) and develop a brand strategy for qualifying and directly appealing to the intended audience. Seems fundamental, right?
All too often, young brands try to hustle their way to success in this vein without a partner, only to spend marketing dollars with the wrong focus and double back later to conduct a more expensive brand restoration effort.
Another huge benefit to spending wisely in the upfront is how it allows your brand and supporting team to move quickly. Our work with Able Hearts is a great representation of how a rapid branding and go-to-market strategy exercise allowed Able Hearts to open 17 cohesive rehabilitation and care facilities in its first year, complete with all necessary digital and physical marketing materials and collateral.
If instead, Able Hearts had chosen to short-change its branding work, it would be dealing with the ramifications of having to re-brand facilities and signage while also re-deploying marketing materials and collateral on the fly. We truly wanted to clear a path for young brands to tackle important foundational issues despite the stereotypical blockades. As such, we focused on the following buckets:
- Brand Development
- Go-to-Market Strategy
- Content Optimization & Refinement
- Early Media Strategy
In quickly glancing at this list, I think it’s clear that these topics are both pressing in early brand development as well as typical stumbling blocks for young companies. And while you can make a case for suggesting that some forms of elaborate branding exercises are over-engineered and fluffy, you can no longer claim in 2022 that the core elements of brand positioning and messaging as they relate to your core target audiences are frivolous.
This is especially true if you are planning to spend on sales and acquisition in the coming months and do not have the assurance of knowing that your identity and strategy are qualified or tested in front of your prospective audience.
Our objective is clear: if you are an early-stage company or founder who believes that it’s “too soon to build a brand identity” or that “it’s too expensive to work with a creative partner” and you’re simply “not ready,” take the time to examine the potential midterm ramifications of putting off discovery in this respect.
We promise that there are high-quality partners out there who understand how to effectively work with young brands, and we would cherish the opportunity to demonstrate just exactly how.
