Who's responsible for the brand in a start-up? Everyone, of course.

I was asked whether it's important that the brand (or communication) is everyone's responsibility in a startup or a scale-up. 

And I would say, absolutely, it's important. Because the only way you can scale a brand up without spending lots of money or hiring lots of people is to be consistent across every touchpoint. You need a story that everyone knows and everyone can contribute to, and you treat every interaction that the outside world has with your people and your business as part of the customer experience.

It’s as simple as how you respond to queries. It’s about how you pay your suppliers. When do you pay them and what grace do you have with it? Because they talk to other people. It's making sure that every sales interaction has a consistent product story attached to it so that when a potential customer hears that story from multiple people, that it is consistent, it is trustworthy, it's reliable. That they know you know what you're talking about. And that's all just basic groundwork.

Communication is not the responsibility of one person, but the responsibility of everyone. 

As much as finance in a startup is the responsibility of everyone to spend wisely, to maximize the amount of impact every single pound makes, that you spend your time in the right places, that you go after the right opportunities, it's exactly the same thing for your brand. If you don't encourage the right kind of storytelling internally, then there's no way that you're going to have that story reflected back to you from external sources.

A good example of this is how we work at what3words. I joined them when there were only 20 people. The only way we were going to reach our ambition of becoming a global standard was to be consistent in everything we did across all the channels we used; across all the conversations we were having, inside of the product itself, in the app, in the documentation, in our ads, in our videos, in our BD team going out and talking to people around the world, and the explanations from any of our colleagues when they were explaining their job to a friend. Over time, it compounds. 

A “brand” is just the story that other people tell about you - it’s that simple. And you encourage the right kind of story to be told about you by being consistent and interesting, and the only way you can do that when you're a startup or a scale-up is that everyone in your business needs to be doing it all the time, and feel confident to do it.

The comms team play a key role to champion excellence and enable the organisation to do this. Xero, the accounting software company, has an award winning case study about how to do this mid-stream. Through a well-executed change process, they identified the blockers, gathered the needs of their colleagues across different departments, and then provided a structured creative system that was rolled out in stages. By providing on-brand but flexible templates for social posts, presentations, ads, video demos, etc, with good training, the design team could offload hundreds of hours of low impact work, speed delivery up by 60%, and empower everyone to make great looking assets. In their case they used Canva as the platform, at what3words we implemented a mixture of Google & Canva. 

An added benefit is that colleagues who are comfortable in that space can help you make the brand experience stronger. They can see the weaknesses when they're having discussions, and you can improve your explanations, or your product, or improve the design, faster. That's a low investment, consistent collective effort.

Is it important that everyone in a startup contribute to creating and communicating the brand? The answer is fundamentally, yes. In their own way, everyone does whether they are aware of it or not.

At your early stage, the most value you can create, other than your product, is by building an outsized brand that occupies space in your clients' minds beyond what you are capable of paying for.

And what it takes is an attitude shift, education, co-creation, and a sensitivity to how you are perceived and understood. 

Because if you are not understood, no one's going to be buying your services. And if you are not consistent, you are not trustworthy. And you can't rely on a designer or marketing person to be able to manage every single interaction that you have with the world. Those small interactions add up fast and are far more important than any social post.