When Founders of startup and early stage brands think about their brand’s identity, they typically think of logos, typography colors, packaging schemes and various forms of trade dress. Brand identity is much more than the things that identify one brand vs. another.

Your brand identity is the foundational blue print for creating, relevance, differentiation, meaning and influence with customers, employees, and all stakeholders in the value chain. Brand Identity specifies what your brand will stand for in the minds of customers today and into the future. Your brand identity is your reputation and represents the quality of your presence in the marketplace.

Of course it needs to be stated that logos and all elements of trade dress are important identifiers of your brand, but they do not communicate the value of your brand identity. Brand identity encompasses three essential elements:

Your value proposition.

Your value proposition is an idea of value that defines who you are, what you do and what inspires and motivates your organization forward. This describes your purpose, passion, cause and it rarely if ever changes. Your value proposition forms the foundation of your brand storytelling narrative.

It has three components– who we are, what we do, why we do it.

The who we are component describes the brand in human terms and begins with a noun. For example: we are experts, visionaries, leaders, etc.

The what we do component describes the brand’s actions or behaviors. It begins with a verb. Examples are: who challenge, build, create, innovate, etc.

The why we do it component indicates the brand’s desired purpose/mission/cause. It begins with “in order to” or “so that”. Examples: so that the world will, customers can, no one has to, etc.

Your value proposition can be expressed in a simple sentence. Here’s mine as an example:

“We are (experts) who (create innovative strategies) so that (Founders of early stage companies can grow their business to the next level of success).”

Your brand vision.

Your brand vision is an inspirational long-term view of what your brand can be known for and how it is to be understood by customers and employees alike. Your brand vision is multi-dimensional and affects the entire ecosystem of your business. Brand vision provides guidance for brand development or transformation and determines what decisions and actions are “on brand”.

Your brand vision should include the personality, style and voice of your brand, what values you share with customers, what customers want the use of your brand to say about them, how you make life better for customers, what you’ll never compromise on, and what you do better than competitors. Your brand vision becomes the organizing principle for your actions today and informs the direction your headed into the future. Your brand vision becomes your mantra and battle cry.

Your brand positioning.

This is your strategic foundation outlining why customers will choose your brand over competitors. Brand Positioning will inevitably change over time as customer needs and competitive circumstances mandate.

Your brand positioning has four components: the customer segment that are the most fervent users of the brand, the category in which the brand competes, the most relevant and highly valued benefit customers receive from the brand, and the reasons to believe that make the key benefit credible and sustainable.

Your brand positioning statement can be expressed in one sentence: Here’s an example positioning statement using one of my recent clients:

“For (leading skin health professionals) KPS Essentials is the (skin health product line) that (solves the unsolvable skin health challenges) because it is the only brand clinically validated and scientifically formulated to replenish the essential nutrients that quickly heal the root causes of difficult skin health conditions.”

These three elements form the structure of your brand identity platform. Your brand identity allows your early stage business to make strategic and creative decisions in a systematic way that insures your brand building initiatives will support your business strategy, resonate with high value customers, inspire your employees and make your marketing programs more effective.

Nail this stuff down before you start worrying about what your logo looks like.

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Bringing the principles of purpose, vision, and mission to life in your startup or early growth business becomes the foundation of your culture and gets all concerned rowing the boat in the right direction. This is not a marketing exercise.

Many Founders struggle to clearly define and communicate the purpose, vision and mission of their business. Having clarity to define your purpose, vision and mission (PVM) becomes the foundation of your strategic positioning and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

More importantly, expressing your PVM effectively will enable you to guide and align your leadership teams to establish and provide the intellectual direction that employees need to embrace these principles as their own.

Purpose, Values, Mission Defined.

For many leaders in early growth companies, these principles are commonly misunderstood.

A PURPOSE statement answers WHY you exist.

A VISION statement answers WHAT you aim to achieve.

A MISSION statement answers HOW you plan to achieve your vision.

The purpose of your business never changes and remains relevant for as long as your enterprise exists. Purpose (why your business exists beyond money-making) communicates the emotional connection of being part of an “idea of value” that will benefit the world. Your purpose is an inspirational concept that attracts the right talent and higher value customers who value the very existence of your business.

Your vision (what you aim to achieve) is very straightforward and clarifies your business goals. Your vision must be precise in detail, measurable, attainable, and single-minded. To be practical in the age of clutter and noise, your strategic vision needs to focus on achieving both near term (one year out) and long-term business goals (3-5 years out).

Your mission (how you plan to achieve your vision) describes the aspirational and motivational depiction of the key customer benefits and differentiating initiatives. Clarity and brevity are essential in communicating your mission so customers, employees and stakeholders are motivated into action to fulfill your vision.

Guidance for developing a your purpose statement:

• Focus on how your purpose improves the lives of people.
• It’s has nothing to do with business goals or money-making.
• Stays relevant forever.
• Bigger than the individual.
• So motivating that people are excited to join in your purpose.
• It evokes a meta-physical aspiration.

Guidance for developing your vision statement:

• Measurable – so your organization will know progress is being made
• Attainable – it must stretch your current capabilities but not be lofty “pie in the sky”.
• Inspiring – must engage your people emotionally
• Cultural – must fit within your organizations unique “way of being”.
• Single-minded – must be specific and detailed
• Vivid – must be clear and understood by all.

Guidance for developing your mission statement:

• Focus on actions or initiatives and make sure they are clear enough so people can understand and be motivated by them.
• Simplicity and clarity over verbosity. For example, Google’s mission is “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”
• Focus on an all-encompassing idea of value that ties back to your vision.

Your PVM is the bedrock on which your growth and success will depend. It’s worthy of the time and effort to invest in developing your statements of purpose, vision and mission. Your PVM are three legs of the stool on which a strong and highly differentiated strategic positioning depends.

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Building a brand that matters is like building the pyramids of Egypt– large precision cut stones are quarried and placed one by one, layer by layer, over years, into the experience customers have doing business with you.

Creating a brand (making things that identify and distinguish your business from another) has never been easier, while building a brand (your reputation) has never been more difficult.

The esteem of the customers you serve and your success is pretty much uncorrelated to the creation of your brand identity. Customers don’t care much about your logo, colors and trade dress, marketing, or your latest product/service features. Customers care about achieving their desired outcomes.

The goal of brand building is to be the “one and only” choice customers can’t live without. The value of your brand and growth of your business depends on customers achieving their desired outcome.

Building a brand (reputation) takes a lot of time and treasure. Brand building is about the quality of your very presence in the marketplace. In building your brand, the precision cut stones are your actions and behaviors placed one by one, layer by layer into the total experience customers have doing business with you. This is reflected in the relevance and quality your products and services, your people, your culture and your overall contribution to your industry and community.

From the beginning of human commerce, this is how business success works–happy, satisfied, fulfilled, thriving customers.

In our social-media-attention-deprived-digital age, it might be fashionable to believe customers fundamentally behave differently than how they have behaved for thousands of years. But it’s not so. As it has always been, customers want more use value received than they paid in cash value. Nothing new here.

When your business /brand delivers more perceived use value (desired outcomes) to customers than they pay you in cash value, your price and your competitors become irrelevant. Only then will you be on your way to being a one and only brand that endures.

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To have real impact and influence in the 21^st century marketplace of noise and clutter, you must create “oneliness”– a state of mind where the consumer/customer believes there is NO substitute for what you offer.

This means creating experiences customers love and can’t live without. If you’re stuck on a growth plateau, chances are this isn’t happening and more marketing isn’t going to move you forward.

The marketplace has never been forgiving territory. This is true for all businesses large and small. Many Founders / CEOs of early stage companies, in an effort to please the marketplace lose focus on their oneliness.  To help you build momentum towards creating a one and only brand that leads to the next level of growth, focus on these ideas:

Your reason for being.

Every great brand was built on a purpose, passion or cause that deeply mattered to the Founders far beyond money-making. More importantly, your reason for being must align with what the marketplace rewards. When these dynamics come together and are aligned, you are at the white-hot center of competitive advantage (aka oneliness). You’ve heard it a million times–be clear on your why. It’s the quintessential first piece to the whole oneliness puzzle.

Who does your brand serve?

Building a oneliness brand requires you know everything about your customer and why the unique value your business/brand offers fits into the quality of their life. Your brand must be a reflection of the core values of the customer. Patagonia knows what core values they share with their customers. Founder Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia says, “we follow our beliefs, customers follow us.”

Be insanely relevant to your customer.

21^st century strategic positioning is about exclusion rather than inclusion. It’s no longer about mass marketing but micro or niche marketing. Define your niche with relentless focus. Align your niche with your purpose/passion/cause and be relevant to ONLY those people whose values are shared. In a cluttered marketplace, insane relevance is the gateway to your bigger future. This explains the difference between Apple and Dell, BMW and Chevy, Herman Miller and HON.

Forget features. Bring on the feelings.

Oneliness brands are built on emotional connections not product function or features. In our social media transparent world, customers expect things will function as promised. Today everything is good. Good=the same. Without the customer’s deep emotional connection to your brand, you’ll just be one more in the slush pile of good.

Lead a parade.

This is an insight presented by Marty Neumeier in his book ZAG. One and only brands understand the whims of the culture at large that affect the lives of customers. One and only brands are out in front of these cultural trends–in effect leading the parade. Back in the 80’s when Seiko and Casio were punching it out over quartz watch precision, Swatch realized a cultural shift toward self-expression and dominated the cheap watch category for decades. Find your parade and lead it.

Oneliness comes down to one thing.

One and only brands represent a single “idea of value” in the minds of customers that can’t be credibility claimed by alternatives in the category. Brand consultants call this your brand essence. For example, Google= Organize World Information, or Disney=family entertainment. To impact and influence customers, your brand must represent only one thing.

One voice across all media channels.

How you express the visual and verbal presence of your brand at every customer touch point is critical to building a one and only brand. To build deep emotional connections with consumers, customers, employees, strategic partners and stakeholders, brand voice is about being consistent in what you say and how you say it. Like a singing voice, brand voice has a dynamic range that defines its character. It’s imperative for the growth of your brand to manage the unique voice of your brand at every customer interaction.

If you have a brand growth challenge, let’s have a conversation.

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It takes more than a pot of investor’s money and splashy marketing to build an influential business and brand.

Juicero Inc. was one of the most talked about startups in Silicon Valley. It makes a juice machine– an internet-connected device that squeezes single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables into a convenient juice beverage.

Using your smart phone to tell a machine to squeeze your juice sounded like a great idea. The product had everything going for it – beautifully designed, world-class branding and all supported by a robust investment in slick marketing. The founder’s self-proclaimed comparison to being the Steve Jobs of juicing perfection was a part of the pitch. Investors lined up in droves and poured millions of dollars into the startup venture.

As it turned out, customers quickly discovered they could yield as much juice from the packets by squeezing them with their bare hands as from the $400 juice press machine.

Juicero went the way of other great innovations like New Coke and the Ford Edsel.

Many startup entrepreneurs believe in the conventional wisdom that investment capital and robust marketing is the source code for creating an influential company and brand. As Juicero illustrates, many startup entrepreneurs quickly find their way to the bone yard adhering to this belief.

It takes more than a pot of investor’s money and splashy marketing to build an influential business and brand. Beyond money and marketing, your proposition must represent a compelling idea of value that elevates the condition of the customer for the better. This idea must be simple and distinctive, and form the basis of all business decisions.

In a marketplace full of clutter and noise, your success as an influential leader, organization and brand can be strengthened when you embrace the discipline of four guiding pillars:

VISION.  LEADERSHIP.  VALUE CREATION.  IMPACT.

These four pillars, when aligned with purpose, discipline, and transformative innovation will form the antidote that could have saved a startup like Juicero from its fate.

STRENGTHEN YOUR CLARITY OF VISION

A strategic vision must be more than a foggy mirage in your head. A strategic vision is powered by a purpose.

Joe Bruzesse was a middle school teacher turned startup entrepreneur. In educational circles, Joe was a known authority and expert on the social development of early teen kids, and he recognized that bullying in middle schools had reached epidemic levels.

Joe was driven to help parents and kids thrive in the middle school years, which lead to his vision to create an online tool that would enable kids to anonymously report bullying to their school principal in real time.

As a result, Joe founded Sprigeo. A subscription-based mobile app that helps school administrators more effectively respond to incidents of bullying in their schools in real time. Within its first two years, Sprigeo became an influential brand with over 500 school system subscribers using it in thousands of schools across the US.

When you leverage your organization’s unique capability to serve customers everybody wins. Embracing a clear purposed-based vision to serve people moves you and your team to a sense of fulfillment far beyond moneymaking

STRENGTHEN YOUR INFLUENTIAL LEADERSHIP

You can’t be influential in your marketplace by clawing your way to the middle of the slush pile. You have to lead. Influential leadership is defined by the quality of your presence in the marketplace. The quality of your presence is determined by your guiding values.

Kevita Probiotic Drinks is a great example of values-based leadership that built an influential brand. KeVita grew from a small startup in Southern California to successful national brand in just a few years. KeVita’s core values stemmed from the beliefs of its enlightened founders. The company thrived with a simple call to action “to make delicious drinks that are better for you”.

KeVita’s core values of “natural, entrepreneurial, responsible and generous” became a battle cry for attracting talented people whose own personal values were naturally aligned to KeVita’s reason for being. These core values lead the disciplined actions of every member within the company creating an influential customer-focused culture. Delighted by their experience, the brand enjoyed loyal customers who eagerly shared the love.

The stronger and more visible your core values, the more they will shape your behavior in the marketplace. Your values lead your team to move not only in the same direction, but also in the right direction–continuously improving and expanding your contributions to your customers through experiences they love and can’t live without.

STRENGTHEN YOUR VALUE CREATION

Rather than compete in a crowded market, focus your energies on creating new value in a category all your own.

Back in the early 80s, Seiko and Casio were driving technological innovation in quartz watches–believing most people wanted technical precision. However, a small Swiss watchmaker recognized a fashion trend in the culture at large that people cared more about self-expression than geeky technical precision. From this insight, the Swatch watch was born and proved to be a radical innovation of meaning that created radical business success.

No one was asking for a Swatch, iPhone, Uber or Amazon. Yet once these innovations were revealed, customers eagerly embraced the unexpected.

Bring products to market that transform a known concept into something remarkable. You won’t scale a me-too product into an influential business and brand no matter how much money you spend on marketing.

STRENGTHEN YOUR IMPACT IN THE MARKETPLACE

Influential companies and brands are different and make a difference. They disrupt the status quo in ways worthy of the attention advertising money can’t buy.

Yvon Chouinard founder of Patagonia says, “we follow our beliefs, customers follow us.” Patagonia is but one of dozens of outdoor apparel brands. It’s not the biggest, nor the sales leader in its category, but to customers, it stands head and shoulders above them all.

Why? Because Patagonia represents core values that are shared by both employees and customers. It’s not about making and selling jackets it’s about a shared sacred ideal. For customers who value environmental stewardship, the Patagonia brand is their one and only choice.

Every decision and action they undertake has direct and lasting impact on the sustainability of our natural environment–an impact that matters. Patagonia has never depended on paid media to grow their influence with customers. Their marketing is baked in to their very existence.

MAKE A QUANTUM LEAP

Authenticity is the mother of impact, influence and competitive advantage in the marketplace. When your business makes an impact that truly matters, your influence grows exponentially. Your business becomes the “one and only” choice in the minds of loyal customers–making your price and your competitors irrelevant.

In order to grow your business from early struggle phase to higher levels of success, the strength of these four pillars will form the structural integrity of your promise to higher value customers. Instead of incremental baby steps, you’ll make a quantum leap in your progress. As your influence in the marketplace grows, the fun, creative spark, vitality, financial health and well being of your business becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When you’re facing a business/brand growth challenge, lets have a conversation.

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Without a strategic focus on the customer experience, its unlikely your startup business will gain the traction and momentum to scale against the headwinds of a cluttered and noisy marketplace.

Influence in the marketplace is the white-hot center of inspired business and life success for startup entrepreneurs seeking to thrive beyond the early struggle phase of their startup business.

In an era of shrinking attention spans and resistance to marketing and advertising claims, influence in the marketplace for any business is a high bar indeed. I call this challenge “the scalability factor”– a challenge every startup organization will face as they focus on who they are, what they stand for, whom they serve, and how their desired reputation shapes their business goals and creates customers and clients who represent a bigger future.

To be the one and only choice customers can’t live without requires a single-mindedness to make a remarkable impact and difference in your customer’s lives. Focus your creativity, innovation and resources on your customer, not your marketing.

Over time, your focus and mastery of these five strategies will create the lift to take a quantum leap to higher levels of success.

Strategy I: Focus on the right customer – not every customer.

Building an influential business is about exclusion, not inclusion. Forget the conventional wisdom of casting as wide a net as possible. Founders at the early struggle phase of their business easily fall into the trap of selling their stuff to as many people as they can. At best, most just claw their way to the middle of the slush pile. Traction and momentum comes from serving the right customers.

Your value proposition must be highly relevant to a specific target customer segment that shares in your purpose/mission/cause as if it were their own. In the minds of these customers, your business must stand for something meaningful and valuable. The power of influence begins with a deep and narrow focus on a small segment of fervent users who love what you’re up to and eagerly share it with others.

Strategy II: Focus on staying true to your core values.

It’s easy for leaders and their teams to get distracted. Outside influences, market trends and competitive pressure are a constant distraction. Every great business stays true to their core values at every level of growth. Core values represent the uncompromising true north of your purpose/passion/cause– attracting the right people, building your influence in the marketplace, and attracting higher value customers who can’t live without you.

Your business must stand for something that is cherished right from the beginning. There’s no competitive advantage in copying the success of others and selling at a cheaper price. Greatness requires focus and discipline on one thing that matters.

Avoid the temptation to follow the conventional wisdom of the industry, even if it appears as common sense. Grow your value to the world by holding true to your core values and serves the growth and success of higher value customers.

Strategy III: Focus on innovation. Create new value in your market rather than competing for the value created by others at a cheaper price.

Enlightened business leaders innovate around life experiences and propose new meanings rather than functional product features and benefits. The process of innovation in these enterprises is anchored in a deep desire to serve the well being of people–to make life a little better.

Enlightened business leaders view the process of innovation as something sacred and transcendent of the physics of their organizations. Innovation is hard-wired into their culture.

The greatest assets for innovation come from the non-physical, the formless. Focus your creativity to harness the power of radical ideas, intuition, inspiration, imagination, and insight that present new proposals to customers–which shows up in product forms that are unexpected, uniquely useful, loved, and are perceived as being of greater value.

Influential startups focus their innovations on the needs of customers in ways that are unexpected, and once realized by customers, turns out to be the very thing they were waiting for, just not asking for. Innovation is a consciousness, not an event or action step. Rather than counting transactions in three-month increments, influential companies that lead markets focus on scintillating, dramatic, novel, relevant, transformative experiences that really matter to people.

Strategy IV: Focus on embedding a clear and compelling vision for the future that everyone in your organization is committed to achieving.

Every leader of a startup business has a strategic vision for growth. The trouble is most of the time it’s all in their head and not a driving force within their organization.

A strategic vision is more than a mirage in the Founder’s head. Your strategic vision is an organizing principle that gets everyone in your organization on the same page with where you’re going and how you plan to get there. How aligned is your leadership team and the entire organization around your vision? Are all the oars of your business rowing in the same direction?

Growth is a journey of plateaus. At each new level, your strategic vision must continue to be shared by everyone in your organization if you are to make quantum leaps in your growth and profitability. Strengthening your strategic vision requires your leadership team have absolute clarity, consensus and accountability to deliver on its promise.

Strategy V: Focus on building a customer-driven culture where every employee in your business always gives a little more than is expected.

Serving customers in highly relevant ways requires you to know their desires and behaviors essentially on one-to-one level. Your competitive advantage is not about selling product features and functions at ever-cheaper prices. Rather it will be based in serving customers in ways that are unexpected and highly valued. This must be the first priority of every member of your organization.

The customer is the center of the universe. Your value must be organized around them rather than they being organized around your products and services.

In customer-driven organizations, the focus is always on customer profitability rather than product profitability. Current sales are less important than the lifetime value of the customer. The value (equity) of your startup is less important than the value of well-served customers. And finally, your market share (which only measures current competitive sales) is less important than customer equity–which is a measure of your long-term competitive advantage.

Making quantum leaps.

Quantum leaps, rather than incremental growth, will require a sustained focus and consistent application of these five strategies. You’ll need to adopt a different ideology, mindset and methodology–thinking in a certain way, above and beyond what is known and expected.

Create a “magnificent obsession” within your organization to serve customers that goes beyond the reasonable. Begin with what’s at hand. Make your move before you’re ready. You don’t prepare for a quantum leap; you create it and fine tune as you go.

Finally, quit trying harder – trying harder produces unnecessary force and a negative energy that permeates your organization. A quantum leap is an elegant solution requiring far less effort. Embrace simplicity and do everything in an easy and relaxed way without stress and anxiety.

As your focus sharpens, your influence grows. You and your team will experience more joy, fulfillment and satisfaction in your business far beyond moneymaking.

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Developing the brand positioning strategy for a startup hard kombucha brand.

Flying Embers Hard Kombucha is on a mission to be the global market leader in the better-for-you alcohol beverage category. Flying Embers brand offers the world a great tasting, organic, alcohol beverage alternative for adventurous consumers to turn every moment into a celebration.

When innovative entrepreneur Bill Moses, Founder and former CEO of KeVita Probiotic Drinks, began to venture into new beverage categories after KeVita’s acquisition by Pepsico, he reached out once again to the WHC for strategic consulting on positioning a new hard kombucha brand.

We began our collaboration with the brand team in a robust analysis and discussion of the target consumer and the cultural trends that would drive relevance and trial for the brand. The product was still in the innovation and development phase when we began to develop the brand positioning for this new product code named “Live Brew”.

Framework and content from the Strategic Brand Positioning.

The brand’s value proposition proclaimed a better for you Kefir Beer / Alcoholic Kombucha, combining scientifically proven functional ingredients, in a certified organic, consistently great tasting beverage for early adopter consumers to indulge their freedom and passion to live life their way.

Introduced to the marketplace under the brand name Flying Embers–the brand name came as a result of a massive wildfire that threatened hometown Ojai and the fledgling brewery. For three relentless days and nights the community banded together to fight the inferno. The flames towered on the ridge above the brewery, swirling embers filled the sky, and the startup brand faced complete destruction before it even got off the ground.

Alas the fates were kind. Flying Embers survived to rave reviews by the trade press and consumers alike upon it’s introduction in 2017.

Editor’s Note: Flying Embers Brand Identity assets were created by the Client’s In-House Creative Team.

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Seemingly there is no stopping the rapidity of devastating innovation. It’s happening faster and with more profound effects than anyone can imagine in real time.

Hardly a generation ago, the Rand McNally Atlas was the beloved source for navigation and finding your way around. Then came satellite navigation technology and a host of innovators popped onto the scene. Brands like Garvin and TomTom were born and prospered for a minute – then Google maps became ubiquitous on smart phones and consumers quickly forgot GPS devices.

The same painful lesson was experienced by Blackberry – one of the early innovators of the mobile phone. Blackberry is now in the bone yard of companies whose businesses were devastated by rapid technological innovation.

Radical innovation has given way to devastating innovation. Clever brand strategy and marketing can’t save those aforementioned once successful brands. They are now buggy whips in an age of technology innovation that devastates whole industries in nearly the blink of an eye.

Business and management gurus can’t keep pace with the proliferation of innovation. It’s hard to imagine that the smart phone would have such devastating impact on a host of products and industries like still and video cameras, recording equipment, publishing, travel, music and entertainment, even flashlights. No one could anticipate the speed and ferocity of devastating innovation.

Devastating innovation no longer requires a big connect-the-dots-strategy to dominate a market. Innovators hardly have a clue about the after effects of their innovations. Goggle Maps wasn’t originally created to help people find their way – it was about gathering more information about users to sell more search based advertising.

I don’t think the innovators of Twitter had any idea their innovation would become the de facto method for breaking news, leaving powerful and influential media companies flatfooted.

New technologies in cloud computing and big data enable quick and nimble entrepreneurs to develop products faster, better and cheaper. In the analog era, consumers could only have two of those three in any product or service. There was always the proverbial trade-off in value between speed, quality and price. No longer.

The new normal is new everyday. Value creation is now a blood sport. The good news is we consumers seem to be the beneficiary of all this technology led innovation. Now we can have what we want, from whomever we want it, at any price we want.

Of course devastating innovation has its devastating effect on marketers as well. Brand building, once a discipline requiring years, now has a window of success packed into a few short months. Consumers have shorter attention spans, avoid marketing at nearly every turn, and will abandon the market leader at the first sign of the latest, greatest innovation.

As the ancient expression goes “may you live in interesting times”, marketers are befuddled as devastating innovation brings more value to consumers while at the same time destroying without mercy those businesses and industries that fail to keep up.

What devastating innovation are you working on?

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The Four Pillars of an Influential Startup Business and Brand.

It takes more than a pot of investor’s money and splashy marketing to build an influential business and brand.

Influence in the marketplace is the white-hot center of inspired business and life success for creative entrepreneurs to thrive beyond the early struggle phase of their business. You can’t scale a business to the next level without influence.

I call this challenge “the scaleability factor”– a challenge every emerging entrepreneur will face as they focus on who they are, what they stand for, whom they serve, and how their desired reputation shapes their business goals and creates customers and clients who represent a bigger future.

Influence in the marketplace is the result of relentless creative focus and discipline to build a one and only brand customers and clients can’t live without. Over time, this creates the lift to take a quantum leap in the growth of your early stage business.

Focus on the right customer – not every customer.

Focus on staying true to your core values and standing for something valuable and highly desired, not in abundant supply elsewhere.

Focus on innovation–creating new value in your market rather than competing for the value created by others at a cheaper price.

Focus on embedding a clear and compelling vision for the future that everyone in your organization is committed to achieving because that vision is a shared passion, cause and purpose.

Focus on building a customer-driven culture where every employee in your business always gives a little more than is expected–creating experiences customers love and can’t live without.

These four pillars form the foundation of an enlightened approach to building your influence and a customer-focused culture that delivers experiences customers love and can’t stop talking about.

VISION
Create and connect a compelling vision for marketplace success based solely on what truly matters to you, leverages your organizations unique capability to serve customers and clients; and enables you and your team to experience greater fulfillment and deep satisfaction in serving customers beyond money-making.

LEADERSHIP
Expand the quality of your presence and influence in the marketplace by elevating your thinking, clarifying your purpose, enhance your effectiveness to innovate new value, build the right team and culture, and expand your contributions to the marketplace through experiences customers and clients love.

VALUE CREATION
Build a culture of innovation and creativity within your business, developing a more compelling value proposition, innovate new value through products and services that are loved by your customers and not in abundant supply from your competitors.

IMPACT
Enhance your competitive advantage in the marketplace through brand transformation and development strategies that position your business as the “one and only” choice in the minds of higher value customers–making your price and competitors irrelevant.

As you grow your business from early struggle phase to higher levels of success, the strength of these four pillars will form the structural integrity of your promise to higher value customers. As an operating system guiding the trajectory of your success, you will make quantum leaps rather than incremental steps in your growth and success.

Have Thomson speak at your event. This content can also be delivered as a keynote presentation and as an educational breakout workshop.

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Thousands of new food/beverage/natural products are introduced to the marketplace each year. Nearly of them are small entrepreneurial startups. Most of them will fail in the first year.

In a marketplace of clutter and noise, coupled with the battle to breakthrough customer’s ever-shorter attention spans, it’s easy to see why so many really great products never get the chance to get off the ground. In an age of micro-segmentation, failure rates for new product introductions range from 80-90%.

Even for deep-pocketed multinational brands, less than 3% of all food and beverage products will achieve mega-hit status of $50 million in annual sales. This is after they spend millions in marketing.

If you’re a Founder of an early stage food/beverage/natural products brand, you already know the odds are long and the climb is steep. But if you’re anything like the Founders I’ve collaborated with, your purpose/passion/cause runs deep and unwavering in the face of your early growth challenges to build a brand customers love and can’t live without.

A case in point: An excellent case study in strategic brand development all Founders can learn from is the startup dietary supplement brand UFORIA.

This is a great example of what it takes for a startup to innovate new value to the right market and elegantly express it with focus and clarity through the entire organization and at every point of customer interaction. It sure meets my criteria for enlightened strategic brand development.

If you’re a Founder stuck on a plateau of early struggle, here’s what it’s going to take for you to get the traction and momentum to build a one and only brand:

A compelling “idea of value” that deeply resonates with SOME people and is the ONLY one of its kind.

An idea of value is always based in the customer achieving their desire. It’s really not about your product rather it’s what your customer achieves as a result of your product. Because you’re a baby startup, you need to focus on serving the small group of early adopters who will be the basis of powerful word of mouth. Then your idea of value must be the one and only source where customers can achieve their desire. That’s how you start a fire–with relentless focus.

Have a great name.

As a startup, you need to be strategic about what name your business/brand will be known for. You need to develop your business and brand strategy first. You brand name–which will endure forever–should come after you’ve figured out who you are, what your business/ brand stands for, and how your desired reputation shapes your business goals. Your brand name is everything and the only thing that builds financial value over time. Take the time to create a memorable brand name worthy of your aspirations.

Disrupt the category.

Innovation is about creating new value, not competing for the value already created by others in your category. Change the rules of the known game to your benefit–no sense crawling your way into the middle of the slush pile. The UFORIA case study is a great example of disrupting the dietary supplement industry. It does this through DNA science. You take a DNA test; UFORIA evaluates your genetic code and formulates a single dietary supplement based on your genes that you take once a day. No other dietary supplement company is in that space. Customers can say goodbye to all the different expensive dietary supplements lingering in their pantry.

Credibly position the alternative to your offer as something “less than”.

The most important component of brand positioning strategy is to position the available alternatives to your proposition as something of less value received.This is tricky because you must have credible proof in your positioning that truly matters to your customer. Remember too, perceived value is always in the eye of the beholder. It’s not enough for your marketing to claim you’re better and different, customers must experience the difference and they’ll be the judges.

Own a high barrier to entry into your market.

Barriers to entry enhance your competitive advantage. The higher the barrier to entry into your space, the fewer players in the market. Barriers to entry, in all their forms, are an inescapable fact of business economics. There are two types of barriers to entry in a given market. A primary barrier to entry is a cost that constitutes an economic barrier to entry on its own. An ancillary barrier to entry is a cost that does not constitute an economic barrier to entry by itself, but reinforces other barriers to entry if they are present. Examples are capital, intellectual property, manufacturing processes, supply chain, distribution, market research, etc. Is there a high barrier to entry for others to compete with your innovations?

Invest in the important role strategic design plays in crafting the customer’s perception and appreciation of your unique value.

Design in all its discipline has created trillions of dollars in market value. Design takes form everywhere in your business– brand identity, product design, packaging, physical spaces, and customer support– the very quality of your presence in the marketplace. Good design is just good business. Every experience customers have of your brand must be carefully designed to bake your marketing into the amazing experience of doing business with you.

When these elements are in place, not only will you attract your early adopter customer who eagerly share their experience with others, but over time, equity partners with the seed money to finance and scale your business will be coming out of the wood work to take a stake in your bigger future.

A word of caution here–too much equity investment too early in your growth can do real harm to your future. My advice to startup Founders is to create the first level of success on your own steam.

You can do it!

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