Why you need to build a brand right now
A guide to brand-building for reluctant founders and sceptical marketers
One
From the middle ages into the early modern age, smallpox killed millions of people.
There was no cure.
But in the 1710s word arrived in Britain that a form of preventive measure was being practised in the east. This was a form of inoculation, already very common in China and the Arab world. The English were sceptical at first, about what they thought were 'unscientific' practices. But once the Princess of Wales had her children inoculated and made safe, the public was quick to adopt it.
As Harvard science historian Steven Shapin writes in the LRB1:
"The aristocracy took up the practice, followed by the squirearchy and the prosperous bourgeoisie, buying inoculation for their children and for themselves."
The key phrase here is buying. Inoculation was now a business.
Enter the Suttons, a Suffolk family who saw the opportunity and standardised the process, in time making it a profitable business.
But one of the six sons of the family, Daniel Sutton, was more ambitious.
"Daniel Sutton (having quarrelled with his father) set up shop in Essex, inoculating tens of thousands of patients locally, attracting trade from London, and doing the rounds in the countryside. What became known as 'the Suttonian Method' was substantially his achievement.
It was widely publicised as a stunning success.
Sutton said that the family had lost five patients out of forty thousand; on another, he offered a prize of a hundred guineas 'to any person who can prove he ever lost a single patient by inoculation – that any of his patients ever had smallpox a second time'.
Sutton had effectively branded himself: he was 'the pocky Doctor'."
But he didn’t stop there.
"Sutton offered spa-like pampering in local accommodation set aside for the purpose.
Splitting the market and niche pricing were aspects of Sutton’s business success, but so too was control of supply. Daniel also worked out a franchising system, which 'authorised' more than fifty partners throughout Britain and abroad to advertise their use of the 'Suttonian System'.
All of these very sound business and marketing decisions made Daniel Sutton a very rich man. In Shapin’s words: By 1764, he had an annual income of 6300 guineas – about $1.2 million in today’s money.
Daniel Sutton saw that there was a market, that there was competition, and that there also was a lack of trust in the choices available.
So he did what every self-respecting businessman would do.
He built a brand, and a fortune.
Two
The best book on modern marketing is Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.
The most important (and probably the funniest) is Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy.
From the chapter on signalling:
"When a choice baffles us, we take the safe default option - which is to do nothing at all. We intuitively understand that someone with a reputable brand identity has more to lose from selling a bad product that someone with no reputation at risk."
This is what Sutton was avoiding by being so loud and proud about the services he was providing. By building a brand, he was making sure that people did not do nothing: They chose him, and safety. They knew he had a brand, and therefore something at stake. He could be trusted, in the context of the time.
Later in the chapter, he tells a great story.
"Several years ago there was a national crisis in Britain regarding confidence in the meat supply, after horsemeat was found to have been secretly mixed into supplies of certified beef.
While nobody died - in fact, nobody even got ill - it significantly eroded the public’s trust in the food industry. But branded beef wasn’t affected - McDonald’s emerged from the scandal completely unscathed. The beef that was contaminated was typically labelled certified beef from a variety of sources.
No one supplying beef which they knew would be mingled with other beef had any fear of reputational shame, and therefore there was nothing to discourage any of the suppliers from adding some horsemeat into the mix."
This is the part of the argument that I really want to draw attention to.
Sutherland again:
We often forget that without the assurance of quality, there simply isn’t enough trust for markets to function at all.
Branding isn’t just something to add to great products - it’s essential to their existence.
He’s not saying that brands are important for markets, he’s saying that without brands and the reputation and risk and identity they entail, markets won’t work at all.
Three
Back in September 2018, John Bonini interviewed Mike Volpe on his GroundUp podcast2.
Volpe was part of the founding team of Hubspot and led the company’s marketing for a long time. It’s an excellent episode (and an excellent podcast), and I had saved an exchange from it.
I’m reproducing it here:
Bonini: So there was no eureka moment that you first realised inbound marketing was working?
Volpe: I felt like I was standing in the centre of Harvard square, on a soap box, yelling about inbound marketing, and everyone is just walking by thinking I am a crazy person. But then you yell and scream about it long enough, and a few people stop and think that this guy is actually making some sense. Seeing you there, people wonder why he comes back every day, then stop and ask a few questions. People see that other people are stopping and wonder what’s happening.
And then pretty soon - your 8 year overnight success story - you are up there at Inbound (the conference) in front of 15000 people and people are screaming, hooting, and hollering. You are saying the same stuff, but the difference is that 15000 people are paying attention. So in building a movement like that, I will not get discouraged in the early days if you feel that you are yelling and no one is listening.
Bonini: How long did it take for you to realise that this is catching on?
Volpe: 6 to 9 months, if not more, like 9 to 12 months, where you start to get some feedback. But until it really turned into a movement that had a gravitational force of its own, years. So I would say 3 years.
3 years.
That’s how much time it took for Hubspot to see returns on investment on their brand building.
It is in this context that you can understand brands like Chargebee, not too flashy, not too loud, slowly and surely building trust and credibility over a period of time, until suddenly you realise they are part of everyday conversation.
These days I go over to their resources page every once in a while, just to see if there’s anything new they are cooking up. They usually are. But it is their consistency that has brought them here - their design is brilliant, their content is gold for their audience, and they seldom do things for the sake of doing them. Though today their marketing is probably the best in the country and looks like an overnight success, it is nothing of that sort.
This is a focused, committed, long-term effort. Few startups have the patience. But if you think you do, there’s no better template to attempt to emulate.
Four
When Marc Benioff left Oracle to start Salesforce, most people said it’ll never work.
But they underestimated Benioff’s marketing genius. He didn’t believe the new product would sell itself. He was going to sell it.
What followed is a legendary case study in brand-building.
First, he conditioned the market by selling the tech press on the idea that software was going online. He followed that up by garnering more press by declaring The End of Software. And then positioned his product as the solution. All of this reached a peak with their famous crashing of a Siebel conference, which Benioff had got permission for by claiming it was a protest against landfills 'full of CD-ROMs'3.
Now here’s the point I want to make: Salesforce was started in February 1999.
The End of Software protest was in March 2000.
In one year, Benioff had managed to build a brand that the world was paying attention to. And what’s more, it had a voice, it had a POV, it meant something.
It is in this context that you can understand a brand like Freshworks. It’s out-there, fun, ready-for-a-scrap image is deliberate and was shaped by early showdowns with Zendesk and continued with later campaigns like Failsforce and SaaS Wars.
I was involved in the execution of the Failsforce campaign, and we were definitely aware of what we were doing - taking on Salesforce with their own old playbook. And it worked. By the end of those two days, #Failsforce had been trending on SF Twitter, we had great press coverage, and we had done what we had set out to achieve - increase visibility and recall for the Freshworks brand in the heart of Silicon Valley.
This week, Freshworks announced that they had surpassed $300 million in ARR4.
Theirs is a faster, bolder, riskier approach to building a brand. Few startups have the stomach for it. But if you think you do, the template is right here.
Five
In part one, we discussed what brands were - a way to differentiate yourself and your offering.
In part two we dissected what brands do - help consumers make decisions.
In parts three and four, we looked at two contrasting examples of how to build great software brands.
Now, it’s time to choose.
And by that, I don’t just mean between the two examples above. They are there because they are good representations, but that doesn’t mean you have to pick one of them. In a constantly renewed media and hype landscape, there are now several ways to build a following, an audience, and a brand for you and your startup.
What you can’t do is not act.
As products get easier and easier to build, competition for what you are building is a given. And the only way to build a moat of any sort around it is to build a brand. You can do it any way you want - with content, or PR, or great ads, or useful webinars, or all of these.
But you have to do it. There’s no other way.
Choose your strategy, and stick to it.
Build a brand.
From the book Play Bigger, by Ramadan, Peterson, Lochhead and Maney.
Freshworks Hits $300 Million in Sales - Bloomberg.