Everyone knows brand building is an essential component of building a company. “That’s not on brand,” you hear people say. Or: “This is going to be great for our brand.”
There’s brand essence, brand style, brand ambassadors, brand story…. But, when it comes to defining what a brand is – let alone how you build one – things start to get a little murky.
Part of that stems from a confusion between two similar, related, yet distinct terms: branding and brand.
Your company’s “branding” refers to the collection of visual and verbal assets associated with your company. That includes things like your logo, color scheme, messaging platform. These are the cues that signal to customers that they’re interacting with your company.
Your...
Although plenty of established corporations have begun to embrace niche areas of the green movement, they’re often slow to change. Consequently, achieving true sustainability can take a long time — but it doesn’t have to. Thanks to a new breed of disruptive entrepreneurs, the majority of vertical markets are tackling green initiatives and spurring widespread interest in smarter stewardship of natural resources.
This evolutionary process toward greener values, policies, and models hasn’t been lost on stakeholders. From the consumer to the employee to the potential new hire, people universally are increasing their expectations of brands when it comes to aligning with their environmental values. Investors know this innately; even larger ones a...
Be sure to catch Part I of this discussion
“The customer is why you exist. Why your company chooses to exist. If you don’t put them on a pedestal, if you don’t remind yourself, your team, your operations why you’re a business, why you’re here, you’re destined for fail.”
–Joshua Davidson, Six Customer Service Principles To Abide By
New, new, new, new…. We tend to grow the most excited over new things and to obsess over them, so it’s no surprise that startups focus tremendous energy on new customers. So much so, that a vey important player in the destiny of companies gets overlooked: existing customers.
Unforgivable as that might be, the good news, according to Dr. Deborah Hecker, is that “respect, empathy, good listening, recognizing that ...
SEO. You’ve heard the acronym and you know that a lot of small businesses are seeing great growth from investing in it. But you don’t know how to do it, or what it can mean for your company.
SEO is an ongoing full-company initiative. It involves a very real investment.
But, you’re a small business or a startup. You have very limited resources, a short financial runway, and you’re trying to get something new off the ground. So what does SEO mean for you?
In the next 10 minutes you spend reading this article, my goal is to help you understand what SEO can mean for a small business like yours. We’ll cover:
The conventional wisdom in the startup community these days is that to create a successful startup, you need to move at breakneck speed in everything you do.
And, to facilitate this, you should consume as much money as you can get your hands on along the way to make sure you’re removing all obstacles from getting to market. The perception is that if you move too slowly at the beginning, you’ll miss the market and, even worse, you won’t get funding.
But, is this correct?
While we completely support the idea that getting a great product to market as quickly as possible is a cornerstone of startup success, we just don’t buy that frenetic speed is the best way to do it. It’s not what has worked for us, nor for any of the successful startups we’...
Growing up broke was one of the most valuable assets to shape me as a startup Founder. At the time it didn't feel too valuable (it sucked) but I'd come to learn later that it burned specific traits into my behavior that served me insanely well in building startups from scratch.
Many of us have had the same challenges, coming from disadvantaged upbringings that felt like a setback at the time but also became crucibles of learning and adaptation that actually made us far more capable when our skills were put to the test later on.
When we're broke, we can't afford to pay anyone to do anything. Plumbing breaks? We become a plumber. Car won't start? We become a mechanic. We just don't have a choice, so it forces us...
Sallie Krawcheck is one of my favorite entrepreneurs I’ve met in 2017, after many years following her career as one of the most senior women on Wall Street. A 2002 Fortune Magazine cover put her face as the hope of trust on Wall Street with a headline: “The Last Honest Analyst.”
Indeed, she was fired in 2008 from Citi because she wanted to bank to reimburse clients for bad investments that were the bank’s fault. Or as she put it in an on stage interview in 2016, “I was fired for being a woman,” because women are more focused on relationships and long-term outcomes than men on Wall Street.
What do you do when you reach the pinnacle of your career– farther than almost any other woman in Wall Street has climbed– and then get fired for doing th...
For busy startup teams, the name of the game — today more than ever — is productivity.
FitStars CEO and co-founder Mike Maser sums it up perfectly: “When you’re building a vision, a team and a product all at once, time is your ultimate currency. Every day presents both the opportunity to break ground and the risk of losing ground. At the end of the day I’d trade anything for an extra hour to ensure we’ve taken a step forward.”
And when you’re a startup, working at the breakneck speed of startups, it’s only natural that things start falling through the cracks. Social media gets neglected, correspondence goes unresponded-to. Every startup has a laundry list of items they should be doing but aren’t — or things they are doing, but could be doi...
Many retailers are looking to establish an international e-commerce presence, whether sourcing goods from abroad or selling goods in a new country. Research from Pitney Bowes found that an impressive two-thirds of consumers have made an international purchase, and almost a third do so once a month or more. DHL has predicted a 25 percent increase in cross-border retail volumes between 2015 and 2020, amounting to a hefty $900 billion market.
It’s natural for retailers to try to cut out a piece of this pie, but my experience at eBay and Tophatter has taught me that it typically requires a substantial investment. Establishing cross-border trade takes trial and error — getting it right almost always requires making lots of mistakes along the way...
Look, we love blog posts as much as the next person. (Maybe even a little bit more.) There’s a lot of knowledge startup founders can find on the internet. But when it comes to real deep dives, you can’t beat a good startup book.
“Imagine your personal network was filled with titans of industry — from marketing mavens to business moguls,” Benjamin Evans, startup founder and lead designer on Airbnb’s Anti-Discrimination team tells Startups.com. “How much easier would it be to level up in business and life if you had the best insights available to you whenever you needed them? Well, I believe that’s the value of books. In my ideal world, I’d have a network filled with my role models — from Seth Godin through to Richard Branson — on hand to hel...