Occasion
Growth is exciting, yet scary. Here’s how brand can help your company head into what’s next feeling like itself.
Expand your horizons, sans growing pains.
Ah, the glory days when your company was small. You used to sit side-by-side with the people who made things happen, and major conversations could be taken care of over lunch.
Then, your company took off. You staffed up. You invested in new services and ideas. Your teams started to expand. And new people started to describe your mission and culture differently than old timers.
But while it’s easy to get lost in nostalgia, there are plenty of big—if intimidating—moves ahead. Whether you’re facing new ownership, an IPO or thinking of creating a new category altogether, major decisions need to be made.
The good news
Brand is all about building consistency, so that your new possibilities can align with your central vision.
Growth Brand Playbook
Make friends with growth by implementing these branding best practices.
refresh your audience and category
Now is a perfect time to inspire every department of your organization by building a new vision for your audience, including their beliefs, habits and needs. Then, recalibrate your category definition, or put an entirely new one on the map.
Define your innovation process
Create an innovation style that’s right for your organization. Set clear expectations for how ideas are to be evaluated, organized and developed to unlock the hidden potential in your people.
Update your positioning
Times of growth often reveal initial branding choices that are limiting, like an overly telegraphic company or product name, or an outdated interface. Update your strategy and brand identity to reflect where you’re going, not where you started.
Make a splash
Invest in a big idea that can guide your marketing for the next year, and create a launch plan for both internal and external audiences. Your expanding employee base is a perfect mechanism for amplifying what your company stands for.
Recommended Services for Branding During Growth
Growth is a perfect trigger for reinvesting in brand, whether you’re roadshowing before an IPO or partnering with new ownership looking to scale. Here’s what works for some of the world’s largest and most successful companies.
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Bring in a third-party to conduct research into your expanded audiences and category. Craft a psychographic profile of your ideal audience, as well as the habits and behaviors of your users and buyers. Then, use what you learn to update your core belief, purpose and category definition.
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Evaluate your company and product names to ensure they still capture your expanded offerings.
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Expand how you define your portfolio of offerings to account for new audiences, products and services.
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Define how your company will conduct R&D, and explore which new areas you'd be poised to stretch into.
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Update your creative toolkit to inspire your new market and employees.
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Develop training materials that build consistency among your employees, and plenty of swag so they can show their pride to the world.
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Amplify your story to new audiences by lengthening your creative leash and making a bigger impact on culture.
