Shaped By

Start-ups are scaling at breakneck speed right now. Which means many are outgrowing their (hastily-cobbled-together) brands in record time. Product-market fit? Nailed. Series A? Done, and it's massive. ARR? Rocketing. But the brand? Still looks and sounds like a scrappy startup. We call this the 'scale-up inflection point'. It used to take years to arrive. Now it's arriving in months. And when it does, marketing leaders suddenly find themselves having to evolve or overhaul their brand at speed, with founder opinions flying in from all directions and zero time to do it properly. We've been working on a lot of these projects recently. And they're fraught with challenges. So I pulled together some hard-won advice from Alex Waite ✎ and Justin Ballantine on our team, along with a couple of seasoned marketing leaders (Stuart Shingler and Aviv Canaani) who've navigated this tricky issue impeccably. Hope it's useful if you're in this situation right now!

Every brand project hits the same conversation. A few weeks in, someone points to a brand they admire and says some version of: we want a bit of that. I get why it happens. You're trying to find a reference point for something that's genuinely hard to articulate. The problem is what you're actually looking at. When a founder says they love what Wiz are doing, they're not seeing Wiz. They're seeing the shop window. The visual identity, a conference presence, maybe a campaign or two. What they're not seeing is the thousands of decisions behind it. The internal arguments. The things that were tried and killed. The cultural choices baked into how that company hires and prices and handles a customer when things go wrong. What built that brand isn't visible from the outside. And it's not replicable by pointing at it. So you end up borrowing an aesthetic. Which tends to produce something that looks like inspiration but functions like a category norm. The answer is almost always already inside your own business. You just haven't surfaced it yet. New piece on why the brand you're looking at isn't the brand you think it is → https://lnkd.in/eTPMsvjW

You have to pay the bills today. That’s your short-term performance (or direct) marketing. It keeps the lights on. But if that’s your only move, you aren’t building a future. You’re effectively renting leads at a higher and higher cost. In B2B tech, it's easy to get stuck in the sprint, resetting the brand conversation with every quarterly metric. But eventually, growth hits a ceiling. The performance numbers stop making sense and leadership starts asking why the brand isn't sticking. That’s the moment you stop talking about awareness (a squishy metric that doesn't mean much) and start talking about Mental Availability. The goal: Be the brand that is easy to think of when a buyer hits a specific trigger. Don't read this as shitting on performance. You need both. Short-term results to stay alive, and long-term investment in perception to scale. If you can’t prove the latter, you’re not building a business; you’re just running a treadmill. I’ve broken down how to translate brand action into business impact on the Insights section of the Shaped By website here https://lnkd.in/eJbTciHJ. Lastly, here's an image by Marketing Architects that backs the point perfectly. #b2bgrowth #brandstrategy #measurement #b2bbrand

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