Whether you’re a global player or a small, local heritage site, brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
It is, at the end of the day, all about reputation.
But reputation is a big word. It implies expertise, a certain degree of authority. Of knowing what you’re doing.
But first and foremost, it implies experience. To have a reputation suggests that you’ve done a certain thing for a certain amount of time in a certain way. Those that have experience are better off, because they’ve been around longer. They have put in the time and a reputation has been built. The longer the legacy the more reputable. After all, companies that can add ‘Est. 1967″ to their tagline MUST be doing superior work. We like to buy into this kind of thinking.
But what then about all those vastly successful, left-field start-ups that come seemingly from nowhere? How do they build reputation without any demonstrable legacy at all?
Whether you’ve been in business for decades or are just thinking about taking on a new venture, there is a great deal we can learn from start-ups about growing brand and reputation without any track record to build on.
Innovation – the be all and end all?
You might say, ‘these are all just crazy kids with no fear and more enthusiasm than sense’, and yes, some of them will fall into that category. But there are a huge number of new businesses being started in fields that didn’t exist 10 years ago, offering products we couldn’t have dreamt of needing before they showed us the possibility.
So is reputation building for start-ups all about innovation? Not quite. Of course, being able to introduce something ground-breaking will contribute to reputation. But as numerous studies have shown, first to market isn’t always most successful (Golder & Tellis, 1993).
Their success is primarily based on this: If you can’t rely on the past for your brand and reputation, you have to go all out on the future.
The reason we buy into new businesses, new contacts and new products is their believable promise of a better future. They don’t have the luxury of talking about past achievements, so they instead talk extensively about their vision. But more importantly, they talk about OUR place in their vision. Mine, yours, and Joe Bloggs’ from three doors down. Because they know that a great idea isn’t worth very much until it MEANS something to people.
Meaning-making and the connection of tribes
Start-ups invest a huge proportion of their time not on innovating, or selling, but on building a following. On sharing their vision with the world and inviting the world to join them on their journey. They specifically look for people who are most likely to support their vision early on. Once those early adopters are on board, they get them excited and involved in spreading the word. In short, they are building tribes.
Marketing experts such as Seth Godin have extensively talked about the value of tribes and the commercial and reputational power behind finding and engaging with people who believe as you do. You don’t have to have a physical product, site or even a business to build tribes. They can be built on ideas alone, ideas that create the foundation of businesses and commercial success. These organisations are remarkable because they were brands before they were businesses. This is the basis for the concept of crowdfunding, a revolutionary system that allows ideas to become reality without the need for traditional funding channels such as investors or bank loans.
In the summer of 2018, a small Kickstarter project made waves in Cardiff. Sophie Rae, a local without any retail experience but bags of passion, decided to create Cardiff’s first zero-waste store. Without much of an advertising budget, no pre-existing community but powered by gumption, Ripple raised over £33k in just two weeks. One and a half thousand people pledged money to an idea and became part of an engaged tribe. Thanks to their belief in Sophie’s powerful and clear vision, the shop is now a highly successful staple of Cardiff’s retail landscape and expanded into new premises in late 2019.
Silence is not golden
The Ripple case study highlights another key ingredient in reputation building without a track record: it’s absolutely critical to get the word out.
It seems logical that for any (new) enterprise or project to work, people need to know about it. The crazy thing is that you don’t even have to have anything to show before you can start involving the public. If you have an idea, start talking about it. The reactions of your audience will tell you whether you’re onto a good idea. Document and tell them about your progress. Talk about the vision, how you’re planning on getting there and how they can help. Most importantly, paint them a picture of how they will feel at the end of this process.
Ripple started with nothing more than one person’s drive to make something happen, and it galvanised a whole community into action. Much of that galvanisation came from the community feeling like they each had their part to play – that they were part of a movement, a tribe. As a result, they have a sense of ownership over the project, which contributes to the long-term success of the stores. Co-creation, is a massively important but often overlooked element of brand building.
No fear
This last ingredient is one that established organisations will find most difficult to adopt, and that is to just go for it. In contrast, these unestablished start-ups have nothing to lose but their future. This makes them extremely agile and happy to take risks when it comes to getting the word out. They embrace novel concepts and unconventional strategies because they know that without getting visibility and building a tribe, their business is doomed to fail before it’s had a chance to take off. And that means that literally anything goes.
I’m not saying that for more established organisations, gaining visibility is worth going completely wild and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Having said that, good marketing demands a degree of irreverence. If you have the weight of legacy on your shoulders, it can feel like doing something new and experimental can put the entire legacy at risk. But unless you’re being disrespectful in any way, it’s one hundred percent better to stand out with something unconventional than to blend into the background. This is true for heritage organisations as much as it is for hip new software companies.
In Summary
So what can we learn from start-ups, then? What are the things we can take away to improve our own visibility, our own brand? We can learn that:
- Inviting our audience into a vision of our future can be as powerful as talking about our history,
- Audiences need to be invited to feel ownership and a connection,
- With the right encouragement, these individuals can become powerful tribes that attract resources and make stuff happen,
- Nothing happens in isolation, getting the word out is key, and lastly,
- It won’t kill you to try something new.
Sources:
Golder, Peter N and Tellis, Gerard J, (1993) ‘Pioneer Advantage: Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend?’, Journal of Marketing Research 30, 158-70