How Startups Land Big Brands: Show Your "Game Change"

Hey Startups, I‘ll let you in on a little secret:  Big Brands are under severe, intense pressure to deliver BIG results.

Okay, that’s not really a secret.  The REAL secret is how you use that fact to your advantage when pitching Brands.

Every year, leadership sets exceedingly high company targets. “Grow topline revenue by $XX Billion by 2020.” “Make eCommerce an $XX Billion revenue business in 2016.” “Increase penetration by XX million more people.”  These targets cascade to business units, who are then tasked to deliver.  Basically, leadership is telling us:  “Go do something that changes the game” because you can’t drive this huge change with status quo!  And the Innovation teams lead the charge in finding those game changing ideas. 

Admittedly, the term “game changing” is now overused to the point where no one knows what it really means anymore.  To me, game changing products, services, and ideas have four main elements:

They’re disruptive:  Does it change the way the company or consumers behave or think? Does it incent a completely new way to do things? Does it force entire industries to change their business model?  Beyond the obvious examples (iPod, Napster, Uber, Facebook, Google, etc), I love how products such as Chase QuickPay, Amazon Dash, Starbucks app, Dollar Shave Club, and Houzz are subtler game changers in their own industry and a catalyst for competitors to step up and for consumers to expect more from Brands.

They have serious WOW factor:  Companies, like people, are attracted to shiny things.  Does it really excite, inspire, and motivate?  Will Brands be proud to champion it, put resources behind it, and will it increase the Brands’ perception as industry leaders?  Is it buzz-worthy?  Is it sexy?

They’re scalable:  How big can it grow?  How many users can it touch? How many business units can it impact?  Is it easily and widely adoptable?

They’re significant profit drivers:  Does it make or save money?  Most people, especially Startups, forget this little thing. Yes, it’s great to be disruptive, scalable, and have a WOW factor, but it needs to drive profitability at the end of the day.  

Since your Brand client is under pressure to identify and implement game changers, I highly recommend you position yourself as one. Nearly all Startups I see actually undersell themselves!  I think this is because they are so focused on their product details that they miss applying it to the bigger picture from the Brands’ eyes.  

For example, I once met with an amazing two person Startup who were geniuses because they had derived complex and proprietary algorithms that measured and interpreted social intelligence to customized brand attributes.

This was their pitch:

“We have created algorithms that allow us to automatically analyze and categorize social chatter so that we can measure a brand’s competitive mindshare and various satisfaction attributes.”  (+20 slides of bar graphs and charts.) 

Is that what they do?  Sure, tactically speaking.  But their pitch didn’t make me see the huge change they could enable.  In my mind I was thinking, “YES, someone finally does this!  This is going to revolutionize the entire way we measure consumer insights!  It’s going to save us so much time, money, and human interpretation, AND it’s going to be more accurate, because we know everyone lies in surveys, but never in their obnoxious tweets!”

This Startup was lucky because I was once a consumer insights nerd, so I intuitively saw how their product was truly game changing.  They are disrupting the traditional consumer insights industry, their product is scalable, they could save Brands’ millions in time and research costs, and for said research nerds, there was a WOW factor.  But they didn’t make me see that – I had to get there on my own, and Startups, you don’t want the Brand to close the gap themselves...

So, this is what I wish their pitch was:

“Throw out your mom's old brand health studies!  You’re making critical business decisions based off of phone and internet surveys that are expensive, have a positivity bias, and have a several month lag.  We’re changing the consumer insights industry with the most accurate, cost-effective, and timely methodology that provides custom interpretations of real-time social intelligence that will ultimately replace traditional methodology.  Our clients  have saved $XMM in traditional research costs and have better consumer insight that helps drives $XMM in incremental topline growth."

See the difference there?  It’s HUGE!  Not only did they identify a major problem I/my company had, but they spoke about themselves in a way that helped me (the Brand) visualize what my new world could be once their product is institutionalized.  Don’t focus on what your product is, focus on what your product can achieve in the end, at scale.  Only that way can you show how you can change their game.

Good luck!

Tina Wung sources emerging technology and innovation and signs the best startups into long term, game-changing partnerships with iconic brands.  She’s the co-founder of “Unlock the Big Ones,” a content series focused on educating startups on how to land big brand partnerships that will rocket them to success.  All opinions are her own.  Follow her @tina_wung.

Also read:  Align Your Visions, State Their Problem You Solve, Show Why You're Better, Know Your Position