What are the brand challenges facing tech startups in 2023?
If you’re a startup founder like me, you're probably thinking (with everything that's happening out there right now) how is my startup going to grow in 2023 and maximise opportunities?
Will we get the sales to hit our growth targets? Will we get the funding we need? Will our product proposition land? Can we find the hires we badly need? What do we need to do, to get to where we need to be?
We know these are some of the big questions that keep tech founders and leaders awake at night.
So, where do you start?
We know it takes a huge amount of creativity to come up with innovative technology ideas and get them to market. I believe you need to apply the same level of creativity to grow your brand in 2023.
How do you do that? Firstly, start by working out who you are as a brand. It’s the equivalent of looking in the mirror to discover your true brand self. To help, I’ve identified five tech brand types (some will be familiar, others will be new), and I’ve also added pithy tips for each brand type – to get you focusing on how to accelerate your brand in 2023.
The tech brand types:
Are you a Category Creator?
Category Creators think about things that are not ordinarily top of the priority list. These are businesses that have new ideas and bring them to market successfully and build on them. They are adept at educating audiences that their way is now a new status quo for a specific need or challenge.
If this sounds like you, then your brand challenge is creating a brand perception that says you’ve always been there.
My top tip? The biggest opportunity and challenge for Category Creators is picking a brand name which allows you to differentiate and scale. Your name needs to work super hard to keep your brand top of mind, particularly as new entrants replicate your go-to-market. And make sure you are investing in creativity to build this brand awareness, and play to your superpowers.
Are you a Disruptor?
As a disruptor, you turn things on their head and overtly challenge how a specific market need is served by existing players, radically changing how the need is purchased and consumed by the audience in question. Disruptors ignore what everyone else is doing and do it completely differently.
My top tip? To be a Disruptor, your brand needs to reflect you do the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. You have to keep your brand fresh and ahead in the digital world. That means doing things that other brands won’t touch until it’s tried and tested, like using experiential, or experimental platforms to reflect your disruptive nature and the creativity behind it. Go on, embrace your disruptive self.
Are you a Category Multiplier?
As a Category Multiplier, you are younger, haven’t yet reached profitability, but you spot the opportunities to create more competition and differentiation against Category Creators and Disruptors. You enhance the new norms with more options for buying audiences. You proactively serve the more underserved parts of the market the Category Creators and Disruptors haven’t reached yet, or have de-prioritised.
As a Category Multiplier your creative challenge is taking a very specific customer experience, enhancing it, and owning it. You should exaggerate specific product features to the point where they become differentiated and ownable by you, even if they’re not entirely exclusive to you.
My top tip? Use a creative artifice to imply your solution is the only way to go, and other (similar offers) lag way, way behind yours. So what is a creative artifice and when do you need one? Essentially it’s a visual trick or an ingenious visual device or object that shouldn't really be there. Adding creativity to your artifice allows you to invest this object with a specific meaning beyond its intended meaning. Sounds complicated? Not really - just take a look at Revolut’s campaign “Your Way In”.
Are you an Evolutionary?
As an Evolutionary you are (more often than not) further into your journey and have reached profitability. You’re transcending your core offers and extending your propositions to completely new audiences with new needs. These new audiences and needs become pivotal to your overall growth and profitability.
My top tip? For Evolutionaries, you need to encompass staying true to what you are, your brand equity, and how you are moving forwards by evolving your products and services. I call this convergent creativity. Convergent thinking is all about how we concentrate on finding one, well-defined outcome, considering the possible alternatives, and arriving at a single solution to a problem. Now combine this with creativity, to push past established ideas, theories, rules, and procedures, and explore new and innovative ideas by looking at them from a different perspective. So for Evolutionaries, harnessing convergent creativity is all about using creativity to find new, innovative ways to highlight the benefits of your true self, and how these meet the needs of new audiences with new needs.
Last but by no means least, are you a Refresher?
As a Refresher you will be perfecting your core proposition over and over, and you are more likely to be profitable and in a mature stage of evolution. You know your market inside-out, and you focus on your core audience and service as a talisman for consistent, sustainable growth - you want to be “the” player to beat off those legacy competitors.
As a Refresher your creative challenge is all about avoiding becoming stale by resting on your laurels. Refreshing your differentiators is all about how you make each of these even more relevant - not just to today’s challenges, but tomorrow's opportunities. This means not just investing in tactical video explainers, demos, feature bursts, but investing in giant brand ideas to propel creativity and storytelling in a more strategic way.
My top tip? The world is changing very quickly: make 2023 the year for your creative brand refresh and evolution. It’s very much on you to make sure your brand, your offer and your products stay relevant. Brands that don’t respond to societal changes, or meet new audience needs, will be irrelevant in the blink of an eye. So how do you reposition your offer to get ahead of these changes? Start with a gigantic brand idea that speaks to how your revitalised brand mission is here to help solve these changing needs. Make sure this doesn’t just remain as an idea, but is tangibly expressed across everything you do - from your brand identity, to your sales cycle, and the support mechanisms you offer employees and customers.
Conclusion
As we move into an uncertain world in 2023, I believe every tech founder will be seriously wondering how they can equip their brands to thrive. I believe the answer to how to achieve this lies in one of my all time favourite quotes from 100 years ago:
"If this business were split up, I will take the brands, trademarks, and goodwill, and you can have all the bricks and mortar - and I would fare better than you."
John Stewart, Chairman of Quaker Oats.
It's not too big a stretch to imagine Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg saying exactly this 20 years ago. So get your brand thinking caps on, and channel your inner creativity!
