We’re delighted to see our MD, Nikki Fraser, featured in Creative Bloq, sharing her perspective on one of the most misunderstood drivers of business growth: brand.
In the article, Nikki explores why branding isn’t simply a visual identity or a marketing exercise. For startups and scale-ups, it’s a strategic tool that helps attract investment, win customers and recruit talent.
As Nikki explains, the strongest brands aren’t built as an afterthought. They’re developed alongside the business itself, creating the clarity, confidence and differentiation needed to grow in increasingly competitive markets.
It’s a topic we’re passionate about at Curious, helping ambitious startups and enterprise businesses define what they stand for and communicate it in ways that drive meaningful growth.
Congratulations to Nikki on a fantastic piece and an important conversation for founders and business leaders alike.
Read the full article below 👇
To grow, tech companies must invest properly in their brand.
When you’re scaling up a business, you need three things: money, customers, and talent. All of these things are influenced by good branding, so to give your startup the best chance of growing, it’s a good idea to have your branding down. Sadly, not all tech startups seem to understand what branding is and how it helps.
When I see tech companies at conferences, it’s clear which ones have invested in brand. They’re the ones that are attracting attention, that have a decisive and cohesive way of communicating what they do, how they do it, and how this can be beneficial to others.
From big brands like Google and Airbnb (who have created some of the best rebrands to date) to smaller businesses, a good name and well-designed character will always trump a confused presentation of something that’s probably good, but nobody can fathom it, let alone want to throw money at it.
What branding is not
Here are some things that branding is not. Branding is not the campaign for your product or services. It’s also not your team and what they like to do at work, it’s not a sales pitch or team dynamics – it’s something far deeper and more important and it needs to be in place early on in any business so that you can communicate clearly with your investors (money), attract people who want what you do (customers) and make sure you can hire the best people to get onboard (talent).
When people look at branding, it’s often treated as a separate function from other parts of the business, away from tech development or business strategy. This is a good way to weaken your growth strategy. Brand is not something that goes in the L (loss) column of your P&L (profit and loss) sheet, it’s the P part, it’s investment, and it holds most of your profitable strategies together.
A visible mouthpiece
At their best, brands are recognisable, memorable, appealing, desirable, famous and attractive. You can’t do ‘a bit of branding’, that comes to a sum of nothing. Half-baked ideas are just that, and your possible customers, investors, and talent will spot them a mile away.
Remember that your brand is the visible mouthpiece of your business; in its purity, it is the visualisation of your business plan, spreadsheet or pitch. A brand is the first touchpoint for today’s increasingly time-poor consumers (and indeed investors), telling them why they need to care and pay attention. If your business can’t communicate that quickly, you might as well not bother.