September 17, 2020
Brand-Building: Want to be an entrepreneur? Start with a rallying cry!
Entrepreneurial thinking, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial degrees. Everyone wants to start his or her own business these days, but brand-building is about more than a carefully considered plan.
When there’s a feeling component—a kind of whole-body commitment to who and what you are—it informs your brand naming, package design, brand positioning, and so much more.
Consider some of the qualities of the entrepreneurs we admire:
They’re scrappy.
They make mistakes (and learn fast from them).
They get lucky.
They have alignment and a clear mission, knowing what they are (and are not).
They have a rallying cry—something people can believe in and rally behind.
Entrepreneurs believe. They have heart.
As a brand agency and design consultancy, we work with all kinds of CPG start-ups. You can feel it right away when they have the above qualities.
A great example: Justin Gold of Justin’s Nut Butter. Justin and his team know exactly why they’re in business. When they make the decisions related to package design, brand strategy, portfolio architecture—you name it—they’re incredibly decisive. It’s easy for them to quickly give a thumbs-up or -down, because they’ve so thoroughly internalized their vision.
Brand-Building Tips for Start-ups
Here are some tips and key questions to help increase your speed-to-market and grow the entrepreneurial spirit at your company.
1. Mission Clarity. Do you align to the mission at hand, define the business challenge, and set your sights on what looks like success before embarking on a project?
2. Rally Cry. Does your company have a rallying cry that is clear internally and externally? A rally cry keeps people focused.
3. Effective, Cross-Functional Teams. How do you design and develop a team to achieve your mission? Find people who are experts and open to collaboration and share an end vision of success. Keep it small and nimble.
4. Consumer Empathy and Design Thinking. Put the consumer in the center. It helps you make decisions faster so that you can iterate based on insights—and some gut instinct.
5. Fail Forward. Part of being in start-up mode is failing and pivoting quickly to find a new path.
We can help, even take baby steps, to guide you through a new way of working that achieves rapid speed-to-market results and improved outcomes, including greater team alignment and management buy-in along the way. Thinking like an entrepreneur is just one lens we can look through in order to think, design, and execute differently.
It’s not always easy, but it can be a game-changer.
Written by Stacy Hintermeister
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