I’m not really a marketing person, but you probably suck at marketing, too. One thing I am is a consumer of marketing, and someone who’s spent the last decade plus grappling with what people say works, and what actually appears to work. One of those important subject arcs is brand.

Earlier this week I was at a dinner with a number of founders where the conversation focused on brand, visual design, and in general a lot of the components that make up your early stage marketing strategy. It was a great conversation, and shout out to Jana and TQ Ventures for hosting. Jana herself wrote up some learnings from the evening, but it inspired me to go a little deeper with my own thoughts on brand.

My opinion begins with a simple question: what is brand? To me, brand is a representation of you, your values, and what you think is important. Take that idea and sit on it, then ask yourself what Porsche stands for? What about Apple? Liquid Death? These companies are masters of brand, and they’re companies that inspire my thinking around it, particularly as I think about Sentry’s brand. I didn’t build Porsche, Apple, or Liquid Death, so I don’t feel I can talk about them with any authority. Instead, I’m going to use Sentry’s brand as an example, but I’m going to focus on when and where you should invest into brand, and how those investments will change over the lifetime of your company.

Early stage is an interesting challenge. What is brand when you’re just starting out? Is it even important? I’d argue that it is, but the investments behind it are going to end up looking far more personal. They’ll be a representation of the founders, the culture of the company, and in the best of situations, an early glimpse of your values. Early days Sentry it was clear we valued Open Source. It was part of our business, but also just something that we deeply cared about. That brand representation was shown in our work as well as our public speaking appearances. Those events we spoke at, those are arguably what our early brand marketing was built upon.

It was more than Open Source though, we also cared about design. This is an area that I think is super important to talk about because design is not brand. It can be. If you take a look at Linear, they’ve decided to heavily focus on design as their brand. That makes a ton of sense when you look at who Karri is (a founder and the CEO). The important point I want to make here is you shouldn’t mistake design as being brand. You can build a great brand without any focus on design at all, at least in the sense of how we talk about it most days. Design realistically is just your visual identity, and while it plays a huge part in recognition and perception of your brand, it’s far more important to showcase your values than it is to latch on to the color purple.

Another great early stage tool that came up in conversation is content. Content - just like this blog post - is a great form of showcasing your values and opinions. Our version of that was typically in front of audiences at tech conferences, but we also were fairly transparent with our customers about what we were doing at time, and that transparency was represented in content. A great example of that transparency, and us living our values, is an incident we had early on. We spent time trying to clarify what we did wrong, not just to put our customers at ease, but because we also didn’t want others to make the same mistakes. One really important callout here is that when I say content, I don’t mean farming out a bunch of generic blog posts. I mean genuinely creating thoughtful conversation and educational content for your customers. Content that espouses what your values are - in our example above, “we own our mistakes”.

As you grow the investment in your brand is likely to change. At the simplest level, you’re going to have a more significant budget. If you’re willing, that means you’re going to be able to push the boundaries. That might take shapes like building a media empire, or telling people to put their money where their mouth is. You’re effectively just creating a larger blast radius for your brand, trying to generate more market awareness and recognition. For companies like Sentry, that recognition leads to adoption, often because your customers value what you stand for. It also is how we create the chain of trust that’s so important in business. Trust is often what causes them to choose your brand over another. That goal of trust (or their lack of it) brings us back to why most people end up caring about brand.

Whether you’re early or late stage you’re competing for attention. The way you compete might look quite different depending on who your customers are, but the goal is always the same. You are trying to get your target audience to notice you, and ultimately choose you. Those are many times two separate events, and brand is going to play into both. Whether awareness or reputation is more important will depend on the stage of your company and the kinds of customers you’re targeting. The incident post-mortem is a great example of building trust on top of your brand, whereas things like our investment in Syntax are much more heavily focused on creating market awareness. Both of them represent our values, and importantly, give value to our customers.

To wrap this up, there’s one last point I want to focus on. You’re competing for attention, and many activities are just marketing wrapped in different packaging. When we develop a new campaign, I look for three key things:

1. Is it going to offend people? It’s ok to offend ideas, but not people.
2. Is it going to stand out? The industry is filled with noise.
3. Does it represent our values?

It’s hard to get this right, particularly with (2). This is one reason I’m a big admirer of Liquid Death, and their “anti-marketing” approach. They’re selling water, but you’re not buying water. They’ve built a very successful brand in an extremely crowded space, and it’s worth trying to break down why that has worked so well for them.

We’re just a funny beverage company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do. Our evil mission is to make people laugh and get more of them to drink more healthy beverages more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution.

I’ll leave you with one parting thought, one that was given to me by a great brand leader I met early in Sentry’s life. You don’t succeed by doing what your competitor is doing. Look at the companies you admire, and ask how they’d approach your problems. What would Liquid Death do?