The Fatal Flaw of “Branding Can Wait”

Branding is the difference between the museum description of a painting, and the painting itself.

During the pandemic there was a run on pulse oximeters.?NPR declares that Covid made them “ubiquitous.”?And there’s a good reason.?Blood oxygen is a simple and clear indicator of when your body is struggling for survival.

There is no comparable measure of brand health, unfortunately, but there are signals nonetheless. ??Which largely are largely going unignored.?Or, more accurately, they are recognized but accepted as not worthy of immediate attention.

“We’ll get to branding in the future, maybe with the next round” is something I’ve been hearing a lot these days.?Even as brands are gasping for breath.

Why are founders and CEO so willing to de-focus on their brand storytelling???I don’t believe it is as simple as time and money. ?Led in the right way, and not by a traditional branding agency that is built for cost and wasteful, non-productive exercises – “what is your brand’s spirit animal” – it can be affordably agile.

The reason that founders are comfortable with leaving things as they are – blind faith in the religion of “as-is-ism” ?– is that they are using the pitch deck story as their branding story.?The thinking, which is deceptively logical, is that if the story was good enough to convince investors, it’s equally good for convincing buyers.

As I write this, the obvious inconsistencies between those audiences should make the statement false on its face.??Investors are convinced by rational arguments:?Here’s the TAM; here’s the white space and target; here’s the company descriptor, product, and market fit.?Here’s the team. ?Got it??Good.?Here are the wiring instructions.

That’s why we see so many websites and marketing materials that sound like investor decks:

“Our SaaS platform connects a fragmented market with a cross-channel operating system.”

"We are disrupting a legacy payment system by using the existing retails to remove cost and friction"

“We are using biotechnology to transform an unsustainable food system.”

These are “unpositioned descriptions”, often written by product people who take the lead when founders are busy being founders, and “marketing” is run by those who skills are beamed narrowly on customer acquisition.

The reality is that descriptions don’t differentiate.

They cannot provoke curiosity or connect emotionally or speak in a brand voice.?They don’t recognize the daily realities of your prospects and as such lack the core empathies that activate the creation of successful business relationships.

What passes for branding today is messaging with all the creative flair of a Wikipedia entry.?Fatigued marketing language in support of energetic business ideas is letting down both founders and investors.

When good businesses fail – and hundreds will fail in the next 24 months – ?it isn’t because the investors misjudged the market. But because they misjudged the need to invest in storytelling.

These startups haven’t caught fire or found product market fit, because there is no story to participate in, there are no business and human truths being told.

Branding keeps you up.?Descriptions are lullabies.

This is correctible, but only when the distinction between the museum description of a painting, and the painting itself, is recognized.