The launch is just the beginning.
Whenever we’re working with a new client, we always make sure to explain a very simple, but important principle: “If you build it, they will come” is NOT reality. Now, this is not news we particularly enjoy delivering. Why? It’s a buzzkill.
Founders in the trenches of building their vision are often looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. For many, the light is usually the brand launch. The moment where they can triumphantly admire the fruits of their tireless labor and say, “I’ve done it! I’ve finished building my business and now the world can enjoy what I’ve been working so hard to create!”
Yes, launching a brand is absolutely a time for great celebration. Many hurdles have been overcome and accomplished, but this is only the beginning of the real work. Planes, factories, restaurants, etc. aren’t built just to be admired. They’re built to be used. And no one is going to use them if they don’t know or care that they exist.
That’s the bigger picture that founders need to keep in mind throughout the life of their business, not just prior to launch. It’s critically important for all founders to fully absorb the following key lessons in order to understand the reality of owning a business:
You're in the business of sustaining your business.
The business, brand, and marketing must be in alignment.
Learn from the efforts and failures, otherwise that time is wasted.
Let’s look at each of these concepts to define them and understand why they’re important.
You're in the business of sustaining your business.
Many founders assume that their business is defined by what they sell - e.g A bakery is in the food business. A mobile game is in the app business. An online t-shirt shop is in the fashion business. And that’s true to an extent, but it doesn’t tell the full story.
Let’s take the online t-shirt shop, for example. Yes, t-shirts are fundamental to the business of the t-shirt shop, but how does the t-shirt shop actually get its business? Most likely through some kind of marketing. Now, if that t-shirt shop is a fairly typical D2C e-commerce business then the real work and skill of running that business is not only anchored in their great t-shirts, but also in their customer acquisition and retention processes. Why is that? Great t-shirts that exist in a vacuum don’t generate revenue. To be a viable t-shirt company, there has to be a way to get people to know, care about, and acquire the shirts.
Therefore, to build a great t-shirt company there needs to be a customer acquisition vehicle. In order to build that vehicle, one must ask detailed questions to determine the best method:
Where to advertise? What are the customer acquisition costs? How optimized is the website for SEO? What is the pricing strategy and how does it hold up against the company’s margins as well as the competitors? These questions and many more are the difference between the success and failure of the t-shirt company.
One of the biggest implications of this reality is that the team that’s great at making desirable t-shirts is not necessarily the same team that’s great at building a thriving online business. Those are two radically different specialties that likely have very little overlap. The good news of course is that people who are great at selling t-shirts can be hired. And all the questions needed to build the customer acquisition vehicle can be answered.
Founders should keep in mind that they cannot overlook the importance of having a team that specializes in helping their business attain customers, no matter how great their product/service might be as they literally will not be in business without a viable customer acquisition plan.
The business, brand, and marketing must be in alignment.
Founders can’t think of their business, brand, and marketing strategies as siloed practices. Just as we discussed how brand strategy is integral to business strategy, marketing strategy is integral to both.
One of the most common issues that people - including ourselves - have with many businesses is that they often say one thing and then do something totally different. For instance, a company who is a major contributor of pollution might run an ad about their care for the environment on Earth Day. Or an online game might fail to show the actual interface or gameplay in their ads. Many think of marketing as the art of deception. While it’s not, it is truly hard to blame this cynicism when so many companies are guilty of this kind of misrepresentation.
While those are extreme examples, it is quite common that businesses misrepresent themselves. Not in an effort to deceive, but rather due to a lack of alignment and continuity of vision when it comes to the company and brand they’ve built combined with the way they broadcast to the world who they are. Marketing is all about setting expectations, so it’s important that the expectations set are relevant and reflective of what the business actually achieves.
Let’s look at a more expansive example. Sally is launching a restaurant brand that at its core is about going for drinks with your dog. However, her marketing material centers around the food, showing photos of the variety of dishes they offer and little else. Certainly not dogs, drinks, or even people. It would seem obvious that the brand’s marketing material should make an impression that going to this restaurant means fun times with dogs and drinks, but this disconnect between brand and marketing is all too common in the real world. At best, what’s being marketed is confusing and at worst it hurts the business as customers are unable to form appropriate expectations, and therefore preferences, for the true value that the restaurant delivers.
It’s a classic issue of the business not being in sync with the marketing. The drivers of these missteps are vast, though inexperience and general lack of effort are among the most common. For the brands who try, but still fail, it’s frequently an issue of making “best practice” or data-driven decisions which don’t take the brand’s context into account. Using our example of Sally’s dog bar, suppose the reason for the food-centric marketing approach was that the social media manager had found a stat stating food photos are the best way to grow followers for a restaurant's Instagram account. While this may be true, when one considers that the restaurant brand is all about drinks and dogs, it’s not a very relevant stat. Hence the need to consider the brand context when creating a marketing approach.
So remember that while rules of thumb, data, and “best practices” are good to know, the true art of marketing comes from understanding which tactics are meaningful and relevant to each individual brand. It may be frustrating, but in reality following the “rules” can be one of the worst things you can do for the business’s marketing.
Therefore we recommend identifying the prevailing wisdom of the marketing approach and only applying those that align with the brand’s unique context. Marketing solutions should always be grounded in the true intent of the vision, the facts of the business, and the nuances of the audience. This is why our marketing solutions combine the deep expertise of our marketing experts with the business and brand-oriented perspective of our brand strategists to ensure nothing gets lost in translation and the message delivered to the world is clear and contextualized.
Learn from the efforts and failures, otherwise that time is wasted.
Lastly, we feel it’s essential for founders to understand the idea of constant improvement. As the much-respected business researchers, Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras wrote in Built to Last, the essence of a great business is around its ability to “preserve the core and stimulate progress,” - i.e. change everything readily, except the core foundations of the business.
We strongly endorse this viewpoint and feel that founders should adopt it across every element of their business. To achieve this, we find that marketing is often the prime place to start.
There is no possibility of attaining perfection, growing a business is an evolutionary process which requires constant adjustment. Because of this, we encourage founders to look at their marketing efforts not as a “set it and forget it” process, but as a never-ending series of tests used to learn what does and doesn’t work for their unique brand.
This mindset is especially important during the brand launch. The go-to-market campaign for a new business is essentially the firm's first test to see which ideas about their business gain traction in the market. This is not a process to take lightly. This “test” should be well thought out with ample research and strategy used to formulate the campaign. By design, this is in the best interest of the company, no matter the outcome.
Founders might balk at the idea of their launch campaign being considered an experiment,but this is a shortsighted way of understanding the situation. Taking on a testing mindset will allow the firm to learn an immense amount about their company in an extremely short amount of time, while also still likely driving growth along the way.
Let’s examine a fictional firm that launched their new brand on social media. They ran images of whimsical quotes on Instagram and videos of the product in action on TikTok. After running the campaign for a period of time they find out that despite high impressions, the quotes on Instagram are getting almost no engagement, while the videos on TikTok are going viral. The brand now has useful information to fine-tune their marketing approach and they can start to ask questions as to why the Instagram content didn’t work: Is it the wrong audience? The wrong content? Simply the wrong platform? Or was it the way the content was produced? Etc. They can now do more research and test their questions and newly developed hypotheses. Though it’s not only from their failures where they can learn, it’s also from their success, as well: Which posts performed especially well? What kinds of comments did the content get? Which audience demographic was most engaged? etc. All these questions can help inform how they can continue their success and find opportunities for new campaign content.
All marketing efforts can have value even if they don't provide the desired results, but the trick is in capturing and evaluating the information. The best way to do that is to have well-informed goals and expectations from the outset that can be used to evaluate the relative performance of the company’s efforts.
Without the learning infrastructure built into the marketing approach, essential insights will slip through the company’s fingers. A failed campaign will be a detrimental waste of resources since they won’t be able to understand what went wrong and therefore won’t have an informed position to test a better solution. Of course for the efforts that do succeed, it would be hard to know how, why, and in essence if they even did, without analyzing the results.
Final word.
There are few projects more tiring and rewarding than building a business, and knowing how much more work there is to do once the vision is initially defined can likely feel overwhelming and demoralizing. We totally get it. Hopefully, it’s helpful to think of this process as one of nurturing the vision instead of an endless toil. No one thinks that birthing a child is the end of being a parent, much of the work and reward is in raising the baby into a thriving adult. As the founder of a company, the birth of your business is likely to be painful and messy, but raising that company to maturity will ideally provide a great deal of meaning and fulfillment along the way.
We take every brand launch we work on very personally. It means a lot to us to ensure the vision we helped our founders establish is well represented in the marketing, and that our clients have the tools they need to grow well beyond the launch phase. We’d be thrilled to help formulate an impactful go-to-market campaign that helps put your best foot forward.
