Many tech companies have great products but what about their brand?

Following almost three years of working in Silicon Valley and after many conversations on branding with both startups and post-IPO tech companies, I have made a few observations that I’d love to share with fellow brand and marketing aficionados. Please indulge in my very direct assessment below and hopefully some of my thinking will help provoke new conversations that will lead new areas of focus for marketing teams.

A good looking website is not enough

The most fundamental discovery I have made in the tech space is that there is a general lack of understanding how branding works and its relationship to design and business strategy. Most tech companies seem very much in the dark on how strategic branding can affect the bottom line. The majority of conversations subscribe to the thinking that a cute looking website combined with a dynamic campaign schedule, and a disruptive product marketing plan are enough to build a much loved brand. That couldn’t be further from how brands successfully connect to people, and I think it is the single biggest mistake most tech players make when it comes to resourcing the composition of internal design teams. It’s also the one flaw that gets harder and harder to address as companies evolve. Sure, edgy state of the art graphics and clever billboards will get businesses noticed for a minute, and repeated messaging about new features keep the conversation going. However, these types of qualities and assets are table-stakes in a world where 75% of tech companies have good looking websites and clever messaging headlines which, nowadays, can be produced by a dime a dozen agencies overnight. Fresh graphics can quickly bring an added value of hipness but without serving a purpose or without connecting to a deeper story, even the most polished look adds up to nothing more than just a beauty contest. All of that is NOT branding. Branding is a much larger take-away that speaks to an original essence, and how deep a customer believes in a company or product. So, the question should never be about how one should look like, but about what one needs to do in order to make someone believe. This means for a customer, not just to see and read a marketing asset, but to REALLY believe in the source that’s speaking.

Who are you?

Before any company can decide if a marketing asset or design style is right or wrong, they need to know who they are and what they stand for. They need to know ONE thing before they can do anything, and that one thing is the brand story. Only once we have clearly established who we are, we can make our customers really know us and only then, they will be able to believe in us. The brand story is the agreement between product and all product related marketing experiences. Web-, campaign-, event-, etc- design are all IN SERVICE OF this story and its strategic directives. Many tech firms think that design or the product alone are a story in themselves, but they are not. The common purpose of all design teams in marketing is to support the customer’s takeaway of the contact with the brand. The proof of anything the brand claims will have to be provided by the product. Without a product delivering the reality of a promise, there can be no magic and a brand can never be loved. Particularly, tech firms are so much more able to use design prototyping to explore solutions to test the validity of strategies and by doing so, investigate how their brand story connects best. I’ve noticed that this form of identity “exploration” is generally dismissed in tech as answers here are not easily quantifiable. However, I argue that tech firms can be way ahead on validation as their homepage is their main identity asset. For example, through A/B web-testing, messaging can be prototyped and tested very quickly. Here, we can get robust feedback on brand expression way faster than ever before which means it can provide real time input while a brand is built.

Spend as much time on ‘meaning’ as you do on ‘doing’

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” (Jeff Bezos). I believe that to create this brand “halo” is a key success matrix for long term marketing in which design, events, messaging, web, etc. all are part of. Every other tech brand I speak to wants to be a brand like Apple or Tesla - yet very few truly understand what makes those companies so irresistible. Apart from having a great product, a great brand is built by clearly communicating what it stands for. Then it uses design to amplify and clarify that message. (Apple’s legendary “Think Different” campaign comes to mind and in truth, anything from Apple since then has been more or less committed to being direct and clear). I also keep noticing that many tech marketers cannot differentiate between what the product DOES vs. what the product MEANS. In “what it does” is where we need to apply absolute clarity, and in “what it means” we need to create superlative magic. The skill of successful branding lies in the art of a focused balancing of all go-to-market components. Most products in tech are complicated and the market is saturated. Many times I’ve witnessed the temptation of product marketers and sales teams to explain complexities through more complexities. This is where design and language can easily become the enemy of communication. When things become convoluted and abstract, they get noisy and no one will listen.

Truth is where vision and reality meet

Strategically, tech leaders, founders, CEO’s, CMO’s, etc. need to be able to separate subject from object when it comes their brand. At one point, your baby enterprise has grown up past adolescence and needs to take its independent place in the world. It needs to be a fully dimensional entity and be perceived as having its own personality. That means, that the idea that your founder is your brand easily becomes an excuse for not looking at your brand brutally objective and shaping it to be able to communicate on its own. The vision, the history, the legacy, etc. are huge ingredients to successful branding, but the product will always be the main star and that star begs for a super sharp definition to stand on its own. Here as well, the proof of a vision becoming reality comes from communicating business outcomes through messaging tied to stories, and not from any founders’ dreams. I’d say Tesla is a fantastic example of both. If we can combine vision, outcomes, and a society’s need, we have a winning brand. If the brand is too much centered around a personal dream and not enough around people’s needs in the real world, we are only left with empty ambition.

Tech companies need teams that are built for brand success

Finally, in countless cases I’ve noticed that the internal marketing teams of organizations are not built to create great brands. Most of them are set up to separate teams by skill sets and tasks, instead of following a holistic organizing principle based on establishing clarity of message. Situations where product marketers have no clue about hierarchical messaging strategies; web analysts that cannot co-inform writers on what words connect with customers, or identity designers that keep churning out endless symbols to give a sense of formality to features - all that adds to a lack of focus that will end with the confusion of the customer. Product, product marketing, digital design and production, long and short form writers, campaigns, identity, events - all teams need to be aligned on story and purpose, and they need to be in lock step in scaling and translating the same brand story to different audiences, personas, and industries. Consequently, this means new thinking on how to build teams internally and to redefine the responsibilities of the team members. For example, product marketers need to understand the big takeaway of a brand and how to connect that quickly to specific features; events and campaign managers need to understand how the story is told differently depending on the audience yet with the same fundamental take-away; writers and campaign designers need to think as one and need to connect freely with other teams such as web designers, etc. I’ve noticed that most internal marketing resourcing in tech is sadly about solving for isolated roles. In order to build a winning tech brand, we need to reduce internal domains but increase internal networks.

Call me

In summary, tech companies need networks of connected marketing teams that are complete co-conspirators with product teams. BOTH need to be fully aligned on telling the same brand story with the goal to create one brand halo. Only when a business connects the dots and thinks about the larger customer take-away outside of product, web-graphics, events, and campaigns, then it starts thinking of brand. If you ask 50 employees or customers in any organization: “Why us?” and if you get 50 different answers, that operation will never become the brand it wants to be. What I see is an urgent need for tech to think about how clearly their story is communicated and how well it is generally understood by customers. Only if you connect your product and your experiences through your brand, customer love will grow. Do it or hire a brilliant brand director. (Hourly rates apply.)