What’s a brand, and why does it need a workshop?

Early-stage companies are often consumed with technology traction by proving their concept through peer review to win government grants and secure patents. And it makes sense. There has to be some there, there, and having the blessing of the NSF, DOE, ARPA-E, a national laboratory, or the USPTO gives your idea credibility and gets you on the path to success. But as the famed Beatles song goes, it’s a long and winding road (to commercialization).

And if you want to stay on the road to scale, you need a strong brand.

A brand is far more than an icon. It’s a statement about your values and your vision. It tells your audience where you came from, whose problem you solve, and why you chose to solve it. If the foundation of your company has the strength of concrete, your brand is the cement, the binding material that holds the aggregate together. 

A brand isn’t your technology. It’s what differentiates your technology. It’s the reason you spent so many years in the lab in the first place, and it’s the rallying cry that will organize your team in the same direction and move investors to take a risk in an industry with a high failure rate.

Just as you have a business plan that guides your decision-making, you must have a marketing plan. And at the center of that marketing plan is a brand book that’s the result of painstaking research, including:

None of the great pillars of human societies were built by one person. They were based on the wisdom of the best minds of their time. That wisdom was collected, written down, and shared with adherents. In that sense, the Bible results from the world’s first brand workshop.

Your company doesn’t have hundreds of years to gather anecdotes into a coherent philosophy like it did thousands of years ago. Instead, after we’ve collected the research, we gather with your team over a day-long process to identify the core elements of your brand.

 

The book that emerges from that workshop becomes the company's guiding principles. Externally, it ensures message consistency, whether online or in person. Internally, it’s a key onboarding document for every new employee so they know why they’re devoting their working lives to your company. 

Cash-strapped startups struggle with decisions about where to spend every dollar, and crafting the correct narrative is often viewed as “tomorrow’s problem” when pitted against hiring more staff, filling out grant applications, or meeting potential investors. 

I’m not here to argue the validity of any of those priorities, but companies, like societies, need a glue to hold them together. They need a story and a mission that can be internalized to move forward in unison, and those core principles must be created and agreed upon at the outset of your journey. Otherwise, in the words of the Cheshire cat in Alice In Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you’re going, then any road leads you there.”