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Many founders mistakenly equate "branding" with a logo, a color palette, or a sleek font. However, Arielle Jackson—who helped launch products like Gmail and Square Stand before becoming a Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital—argues that your brand is actually "who people think you are." It is the cumulative perception held by your customers, defined not just by visuals, but by your purpose, your position in the market, and the personality you project.
Drawing from her experience helping over 100 early-stage companies, Jackson outlines a comprehensive framework for building legendary brands. From the psychology of naming to the tactical execution of PR, the following guide breaks down the art of strategic marketing for growing companies.
Key Takeaways
- Naming is a spectrum: While a great name aids marketing, a bad name rarely kills a great company. Focus on distinctiveness and avoiding trademark conflicts rather than finding a "perfect" word.
- The 3 Ps of Branding: A robust brand strategy consists of Purpose (why you exist), Positioning (what you do and for whom), and Personality (how you show up).
- The "Bar Test" for Positioning: If you cannot explain your product to a friend at a bar in one sentence without using corporate jargon, you have a positioning problem.
- PR dynamics have shifted: The era of broad embargoes is largely over. Early-stage startups often benefit more from exclusives and local press than chasing major national outlets with a generic funding announcement.
- Start narrow: Target a specific audience (like "tech-savvy dads") to dominate a niche before expanding to the broader market.
The Strategic Approach to Naming
Founders often obsess over finding the perfect name, but history suggests that meaning is cultivated over time rather than inherent in a word. Jackson notes that names like "Disney" or "Volvo" are not intrinsically magical or safe; they became synonymous with those attributes through decades of consistent product delivery and marketing.
Over time a word can come to mean something that is beyond what that actual word means... A good name is just going to help you but I don't think a bad name is going to kill a good company.
The Spectrum of Names
When brainstorming, it is helpful to categorize potential names across a spectrum of descriptiveness:
- Descriptive: Tells the user exactly what the tool does (e.g., Internet Explorer). These require less marketing spend to explain but are harder to trademark.
- Suggestive: Hints at the function or experience (e.g., Chrome suggests the frame around the window; Seesaw suggests back-and-forth interaction).
- Evocative: Elicits a specific feeling or nostalgia (e.g., Maven, meaning "one who understands").
- Empty Vessels: Abstract or made-up words (e.g., Yahoo, Eero). These are highly protectable but require significant capital and time to imbue with meaning.
The Naming Process
To generate high-quality options, Jackson recommends a structured "Jeopardy-style" brainstorming session. Rather than random ideation, categorize brainstorms into specific themes—such as "History of the Industry" or "Botany 101"—and generate synonyms, antonyms, and associations within those constraints. The goal is to produce hundreds of "bad" ideas to find a few distinctive gems that pass trademark and domain availability checks.
Pro Tip: Use a ridiculous code name during development. If you use a "good enough" placeholder, you risk becoming attached to a mediocre name. Using an absurd code name ensures you will force yourself to go through a proper naming process before launch.
The Brand Architecture Framework: The Three Ps
A logo and style guide are merely the visual expressions of a brand. The strategic core of a brand consists of three elements: Purpose, Positioning, and Personality.
1. Purpose (The "Why")
Your purpose is your North Star. It answers why the company exists beyond financial gain. Unlike positioning, which changes as the market evolves, a purpose should remain relevant for a decade or more.
A strong purpose statement generally follows the structure: "We exist to [verb]..."
- Google: To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
- Stripe: To increase the GDP of the internet.
- Logic Loop: To make operations data work harder than operations people.
2. Positioning (The "What" and "Who")
Positioning defines the space you occupy in your customer's mind. For early-stage startups, this should focus on a timeframe of roughly 18 months. The most critical error founders make is trying to appeal to everyone. Instead, visualize your audience as concentric circles.
The outermost circle is your Total Addressable Market (TAM), but your focus should be the center dot: the Model Persona. For Eero, this wasn't just "homeowners," but "tech-savvy dads" with specific frustrations regarding home Wi-Fi. By solving specifically for the center, you eventually capture the wider circles.
3. Personality (The "How")
If your brand were a person, who would it be? This determines your tone of voice, visual assets, and how you interact with customers. Jackson utilizes a framework based on Jennifer Aaker’s academic research, which posits that brand personality usually spikes in two of five dimensions: Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, or Ruggedness.
To create a nuanced personality, use the "X but not Y" formula to introduce tension:
- "We are playful, but not silly." (Google)
- "We are daring, but not stupid." (Mountain Dew)
- "We are savvy, but approachable."
Validating Your Strategy: The Bar Test
A common pitfall in B2B marketing is the use of robotic language—words like "leverage," "empower," or "synergy." To combat this, Jackson advocates for the Bar Test.
Imagine you are at a bar with a friend who fits your target demographic. If you explain your product using your current messaging, would they understand you, or would they stare blankly? You must be able to describe your product in a single, conversational sentence.
If you can't explain what you do to me in a sentence, you have a positioning problem.
For example, instead of saying "We provide an integrated hardware solution for payment processing," Square’s positioning was simply: "Turns your iPad into a point of sale." This is language a customer can actually repeat to a peer, fueling word-of-mouth growth.
Modern Public Relations Strategy
The media landscape has shifted dramatically over the last decade. Five years ago, a startup could embargo a launch date and expect multiple outlets to cover the news simultaneously. Today, reporters are stretched thin, and funding announcements alone are rarely considered newsworthy.
The Move to Exclusives
For seed-stage companies, the best strategy is often to offer an exclusive to a single relevant outlet. This guarantees the reporter that their story won't be diluted by competitors, increasing the likelihood of coverage.
Storytelling Over Funding
Do not rely on a funding round as the sole hook. Use the funding news as a vehicle to tell a larger story about product momentum, reference customers, or a shift in the market. Furthermore, do not underestimate local press. Local outlets are often hungry for stories about businesses in their area, and "local hero" stories can provide significant early traction and validation.
Hiring the Marketing Function
Founders often struggle with the timing of their first full-time marketing hire. Jackson suggests that this transition usually makes sense around the 10-employee mark, or when the founder is spending too much time managing a disjointed stable of freelancers and agencies.
When hiring the first marketer, look for a "T-shaped" professional. This individual should have broad knowledge across various marketing disciplines (copywriting, paid ads, product marketing) but possess deep, specialized expertise in the one channel most critical to your startup's immediate growth.
Conclusion
Building a legendary brand is not about expensive logos or Super Bowl commercials; it is about coherence. By aligning your purpose, positioning, and personality, you create a company that customers understand and want to root for. Whether you are naming a new product or refining your PR strategy, the goal is always clarity. As Jackson advises, if you do the strategic work upfront, the execution—from web copy to sales scripts—will almost write itself.
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