Looking to hire a new CMO, agency or just learn enterprise-level marketing? Briefmix is 8+ years of my marketing experience from San Francisco, New York, London and Stockholm written down in one place. I’ll show you the playbook companies like Nike and Google swear by - and yes, we will be using a lot of technology.

Graduating From Early Stage: Building a Serious Marketing Function

In the early stages of a company, founders often handle marketing themselves. As the company grows you might hire a junior marketing team but at some point, marketing becoming a bottleneck for many startups.

Founders who understand advanced scale-up marketing (and the tools required) obviously sees more success - especially when hiring their first CMO, VP of marketing, agency or marketing team all-together.

This series aim to provide founders and marketers with an in-depth understanding of how advanced marketing research, positioning and branding is developed for the worlds leading businesses - you'll be able to employ these strategies yourself or use them as a measuring stick when evaluating a new marketing hire or agency pitch.

I'm drawing from my experience consulting various startups as well as working with larger brands such as Google and Nike when curating this list of strategies - with ROI top of mind. The articles are quick and straight forward - I will also provide examples you can copy or tweak for your own use cases. Let's get into it.

Let's start with the basics - what even is a marketing strategy?

Let's say the girl scouts asked you to create a marketing strategy for their new improved version of the thin mint. You grab a classic brief template (there are millions..) such as the GET-TO-BY framework to create the following strategy:

GET: pot-smoking teenagers
TO: choose the ultimate munchies snack
BY: handing out flyers under every door, promoting it in the nearby dormitory

In a nutshell, this is all there is to it - coming up with a clever roadmap on how to achieve your specific marketing goal, e.g. stealing market share, increase market penetration, boost customer acquisition etc. Which in turn should be rooted in your company wide sales goal. More on this later.

A strategy is a specified way to solve a problem. A marketing strategy is how to solve a marketing problem to achieve a specific business objective - whether that's increasing sales, market penetration, shareholder value or anything else.

I'm a brand strategist with an agency background who turned JavaScript developer. During my 8+ years of experience I've worked with 30+ startup as well as household brands such as Google, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the government (I even helped Applebee's make profit after 3 years of slumping sales - the trick turned out to be $1 margaritas).

The marketing process turns out to be quite formulaic for startups as for the Fortune 500. This series is dedicated to share their playbook and show how the top advertising agencies of the world think about branding. When learning marketing strategy, I always found it hard to get plain English advice on how to create something concrete - like a marketing document - ready to be used by a client or a company.

In this series, I will attempt to cut out as much fluff as possible and provide clear instructions on how to develop a brand (with deliverables) step by step, with examples. By the end, you'll be able to develop a bulletproof brand, go-to-market strategy and channel mix for your company and understand if your new CMO knows what they are talking about.

Let's get started by exploring how to set sequential objectives that ladder up to your business goal:

Next module: Setting sequential marketing objectives & KPIs (after product market fit) ->

1.01 - Objectives, KPIs and the effectiveness framework - Map how your marketing efforts will add commercial value to your balance sheet by driving behavioural change.

1.02 - Branding fundamentals - A quick overview that explains the basics of branding and brand positioning.

1.03 - Target Audience - How firms like Bain & McKinsey help Fortune 500 companies create a segmentation and find their ideal target customer.

1.04 - Research & the 4 C's of marketing - How to conduct research to form the basis of your brand positioning.

1.05 - Consumer - Dig deeper into your segments and develop an audience persona.

1.06 - Competition - How to conduct a robust competitor audit to reveal whitespaces in the market.

1.07 - Culture - An introduction into trends research - how to put your finger on the pulse of culture and discover micro, medio and macro trends in society.

1.08 - Company - There are always insights to gain from looking into the history of a company. What can we learn about the founding days?

1.09 - Positioning Statement - How to craft a unique brand or product positioning statement to keep your marketing activities consistent and clear.

1.10 - Manifesto, Visual Identity & TOV - Express what and who your brand represents by creating a manifesto, visual identity and tone-of-voice.

2.01 - Defining a Brand - Learn how to structure your positioning work, expand it, simplify it and make it "production-ready" to be used as the foundation for all your marketing and communication efforts.

2.02 - Brand Architecture - We’ll define a system to organize your brand(s), product(s) and service(s) to help your audience access and relate to your portfolio.

2.03 - Brand Purpose - Define your brand's reason for being and what you stand for - allowing your brand to connect with consumers (and employees) on an emotional level.

2.04 - Values & Behaviours - Define a set of guiding principles to shape every aspect of your business and dictate your brand message and personality.

2.05 - Additional Brand Attributes - What other attributes and tools can we use to define our brand?

2.06 - RTBs & Proof Points - What are “Reasons-to-believe” and how do you choose which ones to prioritise?

2.07 - Brand Book & Visual Guidelines - How to create a document that sets distinct guidelines for maintaining brand identity across all aspects of your business.

3.01 - Introduction to advertising campaigns - How to create a strategy designed for a specific business objective (eg. to strengthen a brand, launch a product or steal market share).

3.02 - The Consumer Journey - Understand your customer’s purchase journey and the experiences they go through when interacting with your brand, from awareness to purchase and loyalty.

3.03 - Comms architecture - How to plan your marketing tactics and deliver comms to consumers at the right moment in their buying cycle.

3.04 - The Creative Brief - Create succinct documents outlining the strategy for a creative project which can be provided to partners such as copywriters, designers, film producers and web developers.

4.01 - Introduction to Media Strategy - Why it's important to choose the right marketing channels for your business and how to find the perfect ones for you in a sea of options.

4.02 - Media Plan - Create a campaign media plan to deliver your ad message via the right channels and increase conversions in an effective manner, at low cost.

4.03 - Channel strategy - Strategies for specific channels and approaches to figure them out (eg. TV, Google Ads, Billboards, SEO, Social Media, Apps, Email, PR).

4.04 - KPIs & measurement - Learn how to define KPIs and create a measurement strategy to understand campaign performance and inform adjustments to current tactics.

4.05 - Branding 101 Conclusion - Summary of what we've done and where to go next.

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"Don't invest in paid marketing" might be one of the most common startup recommendations - but when should you? In this article we'll explore when to invest in marketing and how to avoid losing millions of dollars by setting sequential marketing objectives.

Spending $1,500,000 on Ads Without Getting a Single Customer

1.01 - Objectives, KPIs and the effectiveness framework

I once joined a company as a consultant - in the previous 12 months, they'd spent their entire $1,500,000 yearly marketing budget on Google/Facebook ads. Using Hubspot we could track leads through the funnel and look at exactly how many customers this spend had generated. The answer was 0. In total, the ads brought in two leads to the website who never even booked a demo for the product. For $1,500,000.

Marketing can be expensive and drain your runway if done incorrectly, without a valid strategy and clear objectives. This is why accelerators like YC prefer cold outreach / emailing prospects during the early days of your company. Sales > marketing.

But how do you know if your business is ready to invest in marketing? To answer this question, you'll need to understand if your company has some form of product market fit (PMF). There are many ways you can define PMF:

In 2009, Sean Ellis, also known as the founder of Growth Hacking, wrote that he identified Product-Market fit with the help of a survey. He asks the users of a product however they would be disappointed if the product would no longer be available. If at least 40% of users say they would be very disappointed, it probably means that you have Product-Market Fit.

Further, he adds that “Admittedly this threshold is a bit arbitrary, but I defined it after comparing results across nearly 100 startups. Those that struggle for traction are always under 40%, while most that gain strong traction exceed 40%.”

There are more abstract definitions which say that PMF has been achieved when your company is drowning in demand - without time or resources to scale. I don't like this definition as much because it's only the ultimate form of PMF from a VC perspective and it doesn't take into account your positioning. Maybe you have PMF in an undiscovered segment? Maybe your communication is off? If a kid sells lemonade on a sunny day, they can still make bank even if the line to the stand isn't running around the block.

The goal of e.g. paid marketing is to find a predictable method where you spend e.g. $1,000 and expect a 3x return of $3,000 in profit (a model that can be tweaked, improved and should scale with your marketing budget). If it's clear that your product don't have any PMF, this is unachievable and a waste of money. Instead, invest your budget in product development to reach PMF.


Congratulations! You've got over the hardest part of starting a startup and can start investing in your marketing efforts.

The basis of a good marketing strategy is aligning it with your business objective(s) - no more lofty "number of likes" metrics. Start at the top - here are some examples of marketing objectives to choose from:

Boost Customer Acquisition: Attract new customers to expand your customer base and drive revenue growth.

Increase Market Share: Expand the percentage of the market your business serves, often achieved by outperforming competitors or acquiring new customers.

Market penetration: If your startup is expanding to new markets, the marketing objective could be to increase market penetration in those regions.

Improve Brand Awareness: Enhance the recognition and visibility of your brand among the target audience, leading to increased trust and customer loyalty.

Enhance Customer Retention: Focus on strategies to retain existing customers, thereby reducing churn and fostering long-term relationships (marketing team can help with this too).

Improve Employee Engagement (internal communication): Foster a positive work culture and invest in employee development to increase productivity and reduce turnover.


This is usually agreed on a leadership level based on what can be accomplished with the soon to be approved marketing budget. For this exercise, let's imagine a SaaS business named ApiHub, targeting B2B customers looking for an API to power their e-commerce business:

Company wide business objective for end of year (EOY):

Boost Customer Acquisition: Get 666,250 additional visitors to our website before EOY.

How did we arrive at this number? As a rule of thumb, the pipeline in startup SaaS businesses usually comes from:

Hence,  $8,000,000 x 0.4 / $3,000 Annual Contract Value (ACV) = 1,066 customers before EOY.

This is where your website analytics comes in handy - e.g. last year, we know that we had 1,200,000 visitors on our SaaS website. Of them, 2,000 became paying customers - hence the conversion rate from visitor to customer is 2,000 / 1,200,000 =  0.16%. If we want to understand how many additional website visitors we need to generate 1,066 more customers, we calculate (1,066 / 16) x  10,000 = 666,250 additional visitors.

Caveat: This is napkin maths - every business will need to adapt their own maths to get to their targets. You'll also have to take other factors such as quality of leads into account. But these targets are helpful guidelines that will focus your marketing efforts, regardless if you hit them or not.

How the heck do we get 666,250 new visitors?

Now what? We need to dig deeper to get to specific marketing strategies and tasks to be able to execute on. Many companies use OKRs to drill down sequential marketing objectives and specify key results that ladder back up to our overarching target. But I prefer a "effectiveness framework" used in many agencies instead.

In 2005, the UK grocery chain Sainsbury's set up a big sales goal to recover profit over a period of declining sales. With a simple equation, agency BBDO calculated that the marketing portion of this sales goal would be achieved if they got each shopper to spend an extra £1.14 every time they shopped.

This led to the campaign 'Try Something New Today', encouraging each shopper to spend an extra £1.14 every time they shopped. Analysis had shown that customers were 'sleep-shopping' and in a rut with the things they buy and cook. By using TV, press, radio and in-store advertising, Sainsbury's gave its customers simple meal ideas, which encouraged them to try new things and spend more on their shopping. The success of this campaign has generated £550 million in sales over two years.

This is a really great effectiveness case study where Sainsbury's managed to impact the bottom line using a clear marketing objective derived from their business objective. I recommend watching their short case study here.

The idea of an effectiveness framework is to clearly map out what objectives you need to hit, what consumer behaviour change needs to happen and the role and tasks of comms you need to achieve.

For our API business, the beginning of an effectiveness map might look something like this:

You can view and download this template here. We have also started to add KPIs next to the map which will be important to measure during the year to make sure our efforts are on track.

This is only the beginning to the map as we have yet to decide about the brand, marketing mix, tactics and channels. As we progress through the course, we will loop back to this map and fill it out further.

And there we have it! Before we can start filling out the rest of the framework with tactics, we need to have a good understanding of our brand and what we stand for. Let’s start by understanding why a third of Coca Cola's market value comes from its brand:

Next module: How do you define a brand? ->

"Don't invest in marketing" might be one of the most common startup recommendations - but when should you? In this article we'll explore when to invest in marketing and how to avoid losing millions of dollars by setting sequential marketing objectives.

This module will discuss the role of branding in a modern organisation and define 4 distinct pillars that startups and Fortune 500 companies like Coca Cola, Nike & Google use to build world class brands.

Branding 1.02 - Branding basics & fundamentals

Coca Cola - a company selling sugar water with a total market value of $230 billion. One specific asset they possess makes up around $90 billion of that value - and it’s not their "secret" recipe. It’s their brand. 

A company’s brand is both a strategic and financial asset - and it opens a lot of doors for your business. It increases customer loyalty, which in turn increases the value of your company. It allows you to set higher prices for your products and services. People associate higher quality to branded products, and they’ll pay more for it than a generic version, even if the two are identical. This is true for both B2B and B2C brands.

Why? Because customers trust the brand more than competitors - as brands make and keep their promises.

Loyal customers don’t need to be marketed to as much

It’s easier to launch new products as customers associate your brand promises to new products right away

Studies even show that companies with strong brands even have lower turnover and are able to recruit the best employees in the industry

Despite all these benefits, it might not make sense to create a brand for your company. For example:

In new markets with few customers, you’d probably want to invest in growing the awareness and interest in the category first.

If you’re already the market leader in the category, expensive branding efforts might slow you down.

If you’re in a very fragmented industry with 1000s of small competitors, you might want to invest in specific forms of direct marketing instead of branding.

However, if you’re in a position where customer loyalty is important, branding can be your best investment - allowing you to scale your business and get ahead of competition.

Is it your logo? Packaging? Name of your company? Visual identity?

The classic definition is: “A brand is a promise”. It means that a brand is (in an abstract sense) what a company promises to provide to the customer when buying their products.

For me:
•  Apple promises me “beautiful technology that just works”
•  McDonald’s promises me “not the greatest burger but will satisfy a craving when on a budget”
•  Spotify promises me “an algorithm that knows my music taste better than myself”

However, this is an oversimplification that I’ve always had a problem with. While true, I’d like to take this definition one step further and define a brand as “The individual relationship a customer has with a company”. Just like relationships can mean different things to different people, so can brands.

For others:
•  Apple promises “overpriced devices to fool hipsters”
•  McDonald’s promises “obesity for me and my entire family”
•  Spotify promises “the end of creativity in the music industry by not paying artists their fair share”

Hence, the word "promise" might not always fit. Feel free to stick with “A brand is a promise” if you like, but remember - it cuts both ways.

Let’s have a look at how to get started with building a brand. Most Fortune 500 companies will look at branding from 4 distinct pillars - this course will break out the branding process the same way:

Brand positioning is understanding where the market whitespace exists and align your products, marketing and communication to fill this gap. 

Learn how to structure your positioning work, expand it, simplify it and make it "production ready" to be used as the foundation for all your marketing and communication efforts. This effort usually takes the form of a "brand book" deliverable.

Ad campaigns are important to reinforce your brand’s values with your target audience - ensuring that your brand stays relevant and healthy as well as informing customers of new features and products. In this section, we’ll discuss how to develop brand and product campaigns and go to market strategies grounded in our previous positioning and definition work.

In this section, we’ll look at why it's important to choose the right marketing channels for your business and how to develop a media plan. We’re also looking at the cheapest and most efficient way of doing so.

Want to get started? - Let’s jump into our first and perhaps most important article:

Next module: How to Develop a $300,000 Target Audience Segmentation Like McKinsey ->

 In this module I'll show you the methodology firms like Bain and McKinsey use to find businesses their ideal target customer.

How to Develop a $300,000 Target Audience Segmentation Like McKinsey

In the introduction, we talked about strategy being “a specified way to solve a problem”. But how do we know who you're solving the problem for? Maybe your product solves multiple problems for multiple types of customers - who do we focus on?

After setting a clear objective, good marketing or product briefs need a clear articulation of who your end consumer is. You might have a brilliant best-in-class product, but if targeting the wrong customer then no one is going to use it. So the question is:


I’ve been in meetings where board members making nine-figures are getting stumped when asked this question. It is the most important and often hardest question to answer for many startups - and even enterprise businesses.

Instinctively, many assume that “everyone is my audience” as every person on earth technically could use or benefit from your product.

•  We’re a burger fast-food chain - everyone loves burgers, why not target everyone?
•  We’re a SaaS startup helping users manage their tasks - everyone could use that right? 
•  We’re a nature-focused magazine - who doesn't love nature!?

The answer to these questions mainly comes down to one thing: Why would anyone pick your company over another solution to their problem? Keep in mind that we’re not only talking about competing companies, but competing ways of solving the problem.

•  A burger fast-food chain? - I can get cheap burgers at McDonald’s or fancy Kobe sliders at the Japanese restaurant up the street.
•  A SaaS startup managing my tasks? - I'll just use my notepad, I don’t need expensive software.
•  A nature-focused magazine? - Why read about nature when I can go out and experience it instead?

Some of these answers are hard to rebut. But a clear audience definition will help you do multiple things: 

Convince the prospects above that your product is of value to them

Not wasting time and marketing budget on bad leads

Internally communicate who the company needs to reach & build for - and getting everyone (product, sales, marketing, even HR) to row in the same direction

Don't worry about alienating potential consumers - if you understand your core audience and manage to sell to them, the rest will always follow.

There are plenty of ways to define an audience and one is not more correct than another - however, they differ by the stage your company is in.

In this article, we’ll focus on businesses with some form of product market fit or traction, with a pre-existing set of initial users or customers. This means that we already know some people that are willing to buy our product or service - but we find it hard to define who they are and scale our marketing accordingly. If you're very early stage without many or even any customers and looking for product validation, I recommend this video by Y Combinator instead.

However, at our stage, many larger corporations will hire a consulting agency like Bain or McKinsey to create an initial segmentation of their existing and potential customers. The next best thing would be to let a “creative agency" like Ogilvy, Grey or Saatchi & Saatchi do the legwork.

A marketing segmentation is just a fancy word for asking your audience a bunch of questions and grouping them in segments according to their needs, values and problems they need solving. This allows companies to focus on one group at a time which often undermines competitors and unlocks growth. As many entrepreneurs know, finding the right problem / audience to work with is many times more important than positioning your solution.

Using a combination of methodologies like quantitative and qualitative research (guidelines outlined later in this article), the output of a segmentation usually takes the form of a PDF that ranks the segments per business opportunity and pinpoints the most attractive set of customers to pursue.

Don’t have the money to hire Bain for $300,000? Let’s see how we can create our own.

Start by creating a list of needs your potential and existing customers would have. What do they care about? What’s important to them?

•  Burger chain
   -  Has the most delicious burger possible
   -  Has vegan options
   -  Gets me the most quantity of meat for the money
•  SaaS task manager startup
   -  Has a simple and beautiful user interface
   -  Has the fastest learning curve to get started with
   -  Has a 24/4 chat support ready to answer any question I have
•  Nature-focused magazine
   -  Comes out regularly (at least once a month)
   -  Has an equal amount of beautiful and inspiring pictures as amount of text
   -  They care about the environment and show commitment to offset their employee CO2 emissions

You can come up with these by intuition, asking relevant stakeholders such as your customers/client or conduct desk research to inspire your need statements. They could be about reliability, quality, customer service and countless others of “value buckets” depending on your product or service. Aim to have around 30 of them. Here is an example list with our fictional ApiHub example, with needs of B2B customers looking for an API to power their e-commerce business:

•  Has the most reliable performance
•  Displays a genuine sense of responsibility when handling my data
•  Consistently provides the highest quality products & services
•  Has real expertise in my specific industry
•  Is proactive in communicating with me and fixing issues
•  Reacts fast to any sudden changes in my business requirements
•  Has no unexpected costs, I’m charged what I'm quoted
•  Is a well established, financially stable organisation
•  Able to adapt to business needs that change over the long term
•  Offers long term cost stability
•  Has local/regional expertise in my industry
•  Offers timings & schedules that exactly suit my needs
•  Offers a full range of software products
•  Has transparent costs where different packages are itemised
•  There is always someone to contact/talk to if needed
•  Offers the fastest API response
•  Has a fair policy on additional fees, surcharges & penalties
•  Provide real time analytics of API usage
•  Provides an answer quickly to customer enquiries
•  Simple and convenient online solutions for docs, invoices, payments etc
•  Understands my industry and business dynamics
•  Offers the lowest possible price
•  Provides multiple options whining each product type
•  Offers consultation to help me optimise my software business
•  Is known for innovation within the industry
•  I have the same contact person for all my requirements
•  Credit is available

Once you have this list, we have to talk to our users (prospects and existing customers). I recommend watching this great YC video on how to talk to users to mine insights. You can decide what mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods to use using these guidelines:

It depends on your business but I’d recommend a mix of people such as existing customers and people you think could become customers. If you're selling high-end burgers, chat with the local hipsters in your neighborhood. If you're selling expensive B2B solutions, you'd probably want to talk to CEOs or IT managers of other businesses. Find the decision makers, the ones that will open their wallets.

An incredibly underutilized source of knowledge is the people in your business who (hopefully) speak to customers every day. Make sure to interview your CEO, founder, sales department and customer service reps who will provide a treasure trove of aggregated insights about your audience.

There is no magic number that will ensure the best possible result but the more the merrier - it really depends on your client. In my experience, Global Fortune 500 companies might go with a sample size of 2000 people. But this would definitely not be necessary for a mid-sized business that might do 10-15 interviews and 100+ survey responses. For startups, some say you only need 5 users. 1 is better than no one - I'd say get as many as you need to feel intuitively confident in your results.

What qualitative and quantitative research should I use?

Using the list of needs we created above, create an interview script, a group discussion guide and a survey where you ask our interviewees to rank all needs according to what’s resonating with them. Next, take down demographic and psychographic information about them which we’ll use later to cluster our segments.

3x group-discussions (traditionally called a “focus group”) with 3-5 people in each

100x responses to a well crafted & pre-tested survey

The interviews will add some depth and insight to our customers and why they feel like they do, while the survey works brilliantly to rank groups of people by the needs they find most important. Again, if you only get to speak to one person, it is better than nothing. 

As the research is conducted, you’ll now do the actual segmentation. Start off by using answers from the survey to cluster sets of needs that seem important to your customer.

How many groups should you come up with? It depends on your business - with the SaaS list above, 4 solid segments emerged but it can be up to 10 or even more.

Next comes the obligatory part of naming your segments something quirky and easy to remember - it sounds dumb but will help you communicate these audiences internally within the company. Keep in mind, these are different from "Customer personas" which we'll talk about later in this course.

•  The Expanders
   - Ambition to scale their company quick
   - 30% of current customer base
Top needs:
   -  Has local/regional expertise in my industry
   -  Reacts fast to any sudden changes in my business requirements
   -  Is proactive in communicating with me and fixing issues

•  The Seekers
   - Needing expertise to help guide them through the current business landscape
   - 20% of current customer base
Top needs:
   -  Has real expertise in my specific industry
   -  Provides an answer quickly to customer enquiries
   -  Is a well established, financially stable organisation

•  The Bargainers
   - Wanting the cheapest solution possible
   - 10% of current customer base
Top needs:
   -  Offers the lowest possible price
   -  Has no unexpected costs, I’m charged what I'm quoted
   -  Offers long term cost stability

•  The Streamliners
   - Simplicity is the name of the game
   - 5% of current customer base
Top needs:
   -  Offers a full range of software products
   -  Simple and convenient online solutions for docs, invoices, payments etc
   -  Offers the fastest API response


Now, flesh out your segments using the demographic & psychographic information you collected - use quotes from your interviews to provide insight, colour and depth to make your segments come alive. The goal is to have a solid audience profile that makes it clear who the segment represents. These profiles can be used from informing top level decisions like new product features to ground level tactics like what targeting settings to use for a Facebook ad.

Once you have a few solid segment profiles, you’ll need to figure out which segment(s) would be the most lucrative to focus on for your business. You can do this by asking yourself questions such as:

What is the current business objective of the company?
(E.g: Break into a new segment, increase market penetration, sell a more expensive product, increase shareholder value)

Which of your segments did most of your respondents fall into?
(Side-note: Most customers identifying with one group does not necessarily mean that this segment is the one to focus on. You’ll have to take your current business objective into consideration.)

Which segment has the most punching power / would pay the most for your product?

Which segment seems overlooked by your competitors?

Which segment's needs align the most with what your company is offering?

Which segment seems easy and cheap to reach taking your marketing budget into account?

Using your research, we can rank the segments and make a recommendation of which segment(s) the business should focus on from a marketing point of view.

After this exercise you should have a complete deck with your methodology (how you conducted the research), your segments and finally your recommended segment(s) to focus on - preferably in a presentable PDF deck. See, wasn’t that hard? And you just saved $300,000!

Now when you have a clear understanding on who your target audience is, it’s time to use that information to position your brand:

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A strategy is only as good as the problem you're trying to solve. But how do we know who we're solving for? In this module I'll show you the methodology firms like Bain and McKinsey use to find businesses their ideal target customer.

In this article we’ll explore how to escape the startup trough of sorrow by leveraging positioning and the 4 C’s - the most central ideas of marketing.

How To Escape The Startup Trough Of Sorrow

1.04 - Positioning & The 4 C's of Marketing

The trough of sorrow can show up in many stages of a company’s lifecycle. It can manifest after demo day with decreasing interest from customers. It can follow a launch of a new product where the excitement wears off. It can show up 5 or 10 years after the company started, when you're transforming into an enterprise but your competitors start to catch up.

The trough of sorrow is often defined as the period of hardship a company faces after a setback and can be very difficult for founders to deal with - regardless how experienced they are.

A 5 year old startup I consulted had product market fit (PMF) in a segment which was too small to generate substantial growth. While going after a more lucrative segment, competitors started to close in - diminishing profit from the original segment. How did we turn it around?

Positioning - this startup actually had PMF in both segments. The issue was their inability to communicate what they offered properly, leading to prospects choosing competitors instead. Changing their positioning and communication put this startup back on track.

Positioning your brand/product in the market - in simple terms - is giving a clear articulation of what gives your brand an edge over competitors. It’s the communication around how you solve a customer's problem better than anyone else.

Agency folks sometimes express a piece of positioning work as “the big brand idea” which usually comes with a few supporting documents such as a brand manifesto, tone-of-voice and style guidelines. Strategists, designers and copywriters then build on these documents to develop assets like a brand book and ad campaigns.

The sandbox positioning document we will work to produce in this series can also be thought of as a “broad creative territory” that the company can play in over the next few years - informing your creative assets like design and copywriting. With new competitors constantly popping up and an ever changing market, positioning work is usually not meant to be permanent. Evolving trends often force brands to tweak their positioning or sometimes change it entirely.

This is especially true for startups - I’ve seen many strike a gold vein early with a huge growth curve in the first 3 years of existence. They then hit a trough of sorrow with a growth stall. This can be a sign that it’s time to revisit your positioning and adjust to the current needs of the market and make sure you’re still providing unique value that the new players on the block don't offer. Especially if you’re trying to go after a new or additional audience segment.

An example: Spotify might have seemed to be perfectly positioned for a long time as “free music with ads”. However, during recessions and pandemics many advertisers cut their budgets which hurts this type of business model. Spotify managed to reposition to a more successful model by starting to focus on their original content (like Netflix) and curated playlists. They became a tastemaker which skyrocketed their paid subscriptions.

Many brands I worked with only kept their positioning for 2-5 years at a time, then renewed it using extensive research to understand what aspects of the positioning to keep, tweak or cut - such as features, proof points and values to promote or de-emphasize. This is the type of research we will get into in this article.

How to develop a brand positioning strategy?

There are plenty of methodologies you can use to position your brand but all of them involve research. This is a core part of why marketing agencies get paid a lot of money and junior strategists (who do all the work) never get enough credit for. The research is often quite pseudoscientific but this doesn’t really matter - research doesn't have to be perfect to build a good narrative and create a strong brand.

In a nutshell, this research is about investigating different broad categories such as current trends, culture or consumer behaviour to find “insights” used to build your big brand idea. There are a million different frameworks that agencies use to structure their research (which all are sold and branded as their own proprietary methodology) but they all boil down to the same output.

I prefer the “4 C’s of marketing” framework which gives you a nice mix of insights relevant to the times, your target audience and the history and essence of your company and its founders.

Every agency and their mother have their own definition of the 4 C’s, what they stand for and when to use them - hence, they come with a bit of controversy in the marketing community. The most traditional definition is “Consumer, Cost, Convenience, Communications” (or the 4 P’s which are “Product, Price, Place, Promotion”).

The original 4 C’s, proposed by Robert Lauterborn in 1990 as a more consumer focused version of the 4 P’s are used as tools to pursue a company’s marketing objectives. We’re going to use a slightly different 4C framework for our research that in my experience have proven to be more effective in the early process of positioning:

Consumer - Flesh out the segmentation research we just completed to find key “insights” about the behaviour and needs of our consumer.

Competitors - An audit of our competitors strategic messaging and creative work to understand where the white space in our market lies.

Culture - What cultural changes and trends are happening in society that our brand can join, take a position against or capitalise on in some way, shape or form.

Company - Looking through the history and DNA of your (or your client’s) company, founding values and ideas that would be able to support our new positioning. 

This methodology is not set in stone, so feel free to add any dimensions you want. I’ve seen strategists add geographics, human experiences, packaging and more but I found that most can usually be subcategories of my setup. The ones above are usually enough to get to a few good positioning territories to choose from.

The output of the 4C’s research can take many shapes - I’ve seen presentations as short as one slide per “C”, deriving one insight for each which comes together to inform a simple positioning statement that designers and copywriters can work off. Here is a made up example for a company selling bicycles:

Consumer - We ride to escape. To escape from our own thoughts. To find that state of flow. A sense of solitude, a form of meditation when your mind is completely free. It’s just you and your bike in the moment. 

Competitors - A cluttered category filled with unnecessary gear - loud, colourful and ostentatious. 

Culture - In an attempt to combat our busy, hectic lifestyles, people are decluttering. They’re seeking simplicity, buying less stuff and looking for ways to detach from this fast moving world. 

Company - Cyckl makes high performance gear with purpose. Nothing is superfluous or unnecessary. It’s simple and understated. Beautifully clean.

Here the jump off point for creating a positioning statement could be something in the lines of “Enjoy the silence” - but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The above would be fine for a startup or positioning for an individual product as long as you can back up your narrative. However, this would not fly in most agencies with Fortune 500 enterprise clients demanding a larger body of research - otherwise, why would they pay those $400,000?

The common output I produced for clients involved presentations that told a full story, spanning 100s of slides. That might sound like a lot, but when presenting a key theme from every slide in around 10-20 seconds you end up with a nice 30 min presentation. Here is an old example from 2019 looking at insights around the logistics industry:

I want to stress that these slides would obviously be prettified by a designer before being shown to a client… Side note: It is quite interesting to read through all of these predictions before COVID was a thing.

Before we derive a few positioning territories to choose from, let's see how we can build a presentation like the one above by starting with the first C and explore how to get good Consumer insights.

Next module: Consumer insights and where to find them -> // Coming soon // 

We’ll explore customer insights, where to find them and how to create a customer persona document (example included!) to use in your startup positioning - changing your prospects and customers' thought patterns and behaviours.

How to Change What Your Customers Think and Feel About Your Product

In the 18th century, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier proposed the potato as a suitable addition to France’s diet. Despite widespread starvation, French peasants resisted growing it, declaring them to be dirty and without taste. Parmentier was not deterred - after all, he was the Steve Jobs of potatoes. 

King Louis XVI granted him large plots of land which he turned into potato patches. He surrounded them with armed guards during the day to suggest they were valuable goods. He’d then instruct the guards to accept bribes and withdrew them at night.

Not before long, peasants began stealing these “royal crops” to grow themselves. Suddenly everyone in France was eating la pommes de terre (apples of the earth).

Now, I don’t suggest you hire a group of mediaeval guards to premiumize your SaaS offering - but the story shows how Parmentier understood a fundamental truth about the people he wanted to influence. An insight that let him change their behaviour.

When it comes to marketing, consumer insights are a bit different from what your product manager is working with. Their insights usually revolve around product market fit, solving customer problems and building features your audience want.

In contrast, consumer insights for marketing are about human behaviour and emotion, sometimes on a subconscious level. There is definitely overlap between the two, but keep this in mind as we continue.

There are approximately a billion definitions of what constitutes a consumer insight - this is marketing 101 stuff, yet most strategists struggle to articulate how to define one. Here are some terrible explanations I’ve come across:

“An insight is a disturbance in discourse”

“An insight is like a refrigerator. When you open the door, a light comes on”

“An insight is something that is 'weird-normal' - it's an invitation to interpret. We know it's familiar in a way, but it's also unfamiliar”

I gag when I read these. They might be commonplace in the agency world, but I’ve always despised their pretentiousness and how they often muddle a quite simple concept:

A consumer insight is a fact used by businesses to gain a deeper understanding of how their audience thinks and feels. Analysing human behaviours allows companies to understand what their consumers want and need, but most importantly why they feel this way. These can be used in many ways, e.g. connecting with a consumer, driving behaviour change or positioning messaging to align with a new segment.

It’s hard to explain what “deeper” means in this context - but a good way of getting to a deep insight is to begin with an observation, then keep asking “why” until you hit the root of the insight. This is best explained with examples:

Graduating From Early Stage: Building a Serious Marketing Function

Spending $1,500,000 on Ads Without Getting a Single Customer

What Is a Company’s Brand?

How to Develop a $300,000 Target Audience Segmentation Like McKinsey

How To Escape The Startup Trough Of Sorrow

How to Change What Your Customers Think and Feel About Your Product