4 Tips For Building Your Startup Brand 

People spend years studying and perfecting the art of effective brand building. That’s why there’s a brand representative in the C-suite and huge teams assembled to manage a brand.

Hiring full-time experts can be a luxury many startups can’t afford. However, a strong brand is essential for survival and growth. According to a recent MarketSplash study, 90% of consumers claimed brand loyalty is crucial to purchasing decisions. That is HUGE, and why it is a wise investment to build your brand from the beginning.  

Here are the four pieces of advice we share most often about building a startup brand:

1. Start with Strategy, Not a Logo

This isn’t a chicken-or-egg situation—the brand strategy comes first. The logo is one of the final outputs of the branding process. Start by defining your brand values, mission, vision, unique value proposition, personality, tone, etc. This should be a cathartic and enjoyable process, as it allows you to articulate what your brand stands for—something that may have only existed in your head until now!

Then comes defining your ‘look and feel’ with a brand identity (led by the brand strategy), including your colours, fonts, and, of course, a memorable logo. The final step is creating a brand guidelines document to ensure consistency in everything you put out into the world.

We’ve met a few businesses that have done this process back-to-front. Almost all of them have changed their brand identity once they’ve built their brand strategy and discovered what their brand really is. 

2.  A Strong Brand Will Make Your Business Stand Out

“People will forget what you said and did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”—Maya Angelou. 

One of the many profound quotes of this legendary woman perfectly articulates the essence of good branding. A powerful brand builds an emotional connection with your customers. The key is to make people smile, laugh, cry, and feel compelled to choose your brand over your competitors—achieved through creative, thoughtful, consistent PR and marketing.

IKEA is an excellent example of a brand that strikes the right chord time and time again. Their 2023 ‘Proudly Second Best’ campaign took home a Cannes Gold Lion Award. With little to no dialogue, it showed how IKEA products take a back seat to the special bond between parents and children, hitting parents right in the ‘feels.’ The impact on the business? Despite having thousands of competitors, IKEA’s solid brand identity is a critical element of why it is widely recognised as the most popular furniture retailer globally. 

3. Know the Difference Between Brand vs Marketing vs PR

Brand building is like a tasty sandwich. The brand is the filling. It is the strategic process of defining a brand’s identity, personality, and positioning—the layers of proteins, vegetables, and condiments. 

Marketing and PR are the vehicles for strategically taking the brand (filling) places—they’re the bread. One slice focuses on promoting your products or services using the 4Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), while the other slice—PR—takes care of how you reach people and make them feel something about your brand. 

The brand informs marketing and PR by providing a clear direction for how the brand should be presented and communicated. One cannot exist without the other. Well, a brand can be created, but without effective marketing and PR strategies, it’ll just gather dust. Or, be a very messy sandwich.

4. Learn to Decode Your Brand’s Success Metrics

If you ask a brand expert about success metrics, the answer can often feel vague—we get it. The truth is that it can take years to build brand equity—the ultimate score in branding where revenue comes from customers simply recognising and trusting your brand. Just look at Coca-Cola, Ford, and Cadbury—they are all over 100 years in the making!

However, that doesn’t mean a strong brand reputation needs a century to dominate a market. In today’s connected world, it’s quite the opposite—and there are quantifiable metrics to check how your brand-building strategies are performing so you can adjust and pivot accordingly.

We’re not talking about social media ad performance, click-through rates, and views—these are specific tactics within individual campaigns. They matter, of course, but we’re focusing on tangible indicators of your brand equity: awareness, perception, sentiment, and customer behaviours.

It’s about whether someone consistently chooses your business over another. Understanding why this happens is crucial for building on your success. You can measure this through surveys, focus groups, and media monitoring tools. Remember to get internal feedback too!

Building strong brand foundations is a non-negotiable for startups. It doesn’t have to come with a hefty price tag, either. Knowledge building is the best place to start. If you want to learn more about effective brand building—let’s talk!