Growth hacking: Using brand to focus and ignite a start-up

Samantha Temple Neukom, CEO and co-founder at Northbound explains how, by focusing on a core brand idea and aligning every aspect of the company with this vision, start-ups can accelerate growth.

Creating a brand can be thought of as a luxury by start-ups. But brand helps you move and grow faster, especially if you’re a start-up. This growth hack comes from identifying and driving a single focus on a core idea with simplicity and precision.

Oleria, an enterprise security brand co-founded by Jim Alkove and Jagadeesh Kunda, invested in brand from day one. One of their first activities was to define their values and purpose, and create a name, tagline, set of messages and a visual identity that oozed that purpose and values.

“Your brand and your company aren't two separate things… your company, your values, the culture that you want to have and then your name, logo, visual identity, verbal identity are all aspects of who you are as a business,” says Jim Alkove, Oleria’s CEO.

To leverage brand for growth, it’s best to define brand holistically: values, purpose, promise, differentiators, messaging, as well as visual identity.

There are two opposing forces in the enterprise security market: companies need security to lock down and prevent breaches that are becoming more and more common and sophisticated, while companies also need to be able to unlock innovation and resources to move quickly and freely to maintain competitive advantage. Northbound and the Oleria team arrived at the core idea: ‘Security that sets your business free’. “Freedom” informed every decision the company made from product design to marketing, sales and investor relations.

Start-ups can perceive strategy as incompatible with their fast-paced environment. However, by bringing clarity around the problem you’re solving, and how you’re different from alternatives or competitors, you’re able to cut time to market and time to customer conversion.

A clear brand can accelerate attracting talent with whom your purpose and promise resonate and who identify with your values, creating momentum from the inside out. Your team will then create a consistent experience and set of expressions, resulting in your future customers more easily remembering your brand and understanding your promise.

As Jim says, “We aimed for alignment between our internal and external narratives, streamlining the story into one cohesive message. This approach facilitated employee selection, allowing us to share the company's identity during the hiring process. This early investment in defining our core values accelerated the onboarding and cohesion of our team.