What Is Brand? The Tech Startup’s Intro to Branding

John Himes

April 16, 2024

You’ve built an incredible piece of technology, and now you’re ready to sell it and reap the rewards. Your tech startup needs a brand.

But what do we even mean when we talk about brand? And why does it matter?

Branding is as foundational to marketing—and therefore to making money—as math is to engineering. It’s the basis of everything we marketers do. Going to market without a strong brand is like trying to develop software without functional electronics.

There’s much more to branding than designing a logo and picking some colors.

The only way to maximize the impact of your tech is if people actually start using it. Branding is a key step in getting it into your customers’ hands.

Why brand matters for tech companies

People don’t connect with products. They don’t connect with companies. They connect with brands.

The brand is your company’s face and voice. It’s your identity.

When buyers have a positive perception of your brand, they’re more likely to turn into loyal customers.

Branding differentiates your company in their minds. It provides you with a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

As a tech startup, you need a brand that’s attractive to investors, customers, and top talent. Think about companies you admire and how they use brand to their advantage. Apple is a perfect example. “Apple is one of the leading branding companies in the world,” writes Leander Kahney for WIRED. The world’s largest tech company rose to the top by building an emotional connection between customers and the Apple brand.

But you don’t have to spend millions on marketing to gain a branding advantage. Startup companies that invest in basic brand building early on are more likely to survive. In fact, 22% of failed startups die because of marketing problems, second only to lack of product-market fit.

How brand translates to revenue

Whether you’re somebody who just loves building new technology or you have ambitions of scaling up to unicorn status, you founded a company to sell stuff and make money.

You might be able to score your first few customers by leveraging your network. But if you ever really want to go to market, you’re going to need a brand for your tech company.

Consider these statistics cited in Forbes:

Brand contributes, on average, 19.5% of enterprise value.
Superior brands command a 26% price premium.
Brand preference alone explains 77% of the difference in a company’s ability to capture market share.

If you’re just getting started with marketing, it might seem wild that brand perception has such a huge impact on making sales, building customer loyalty, and gaining pricing power.

Your product might be able to speak for itself to other technologists. However, especially in B2B tech sales, you’re going to need to appeal just as much to nontechnical decision makers: the CEOs, CFOs, and business owners of the world.

Don’t let branding be an afterthought. Making even a small investment early provides compounding returns on long-term revenue growth.

What is brand?

Now that you understand why branding matters to your business success, you’re probably asking:

So what is a brand anyway?

It’s not just a logo or a visual identity. Those are parts of a brand in the same way that eyes and a mouth are parts of a face.

“A brand entails making a commitment to who you are and the product or service you provide,” explains Lisa Whetstone, a senior marketing leader based in Colorado. “It involves understanding the values your organization embodies and what resonates with your customers. This understanding is then communicated effectively, followed by delivering on those values.”

Building a brand from the ground up is a deeply conceptual process. Only after you’ve defined aspects like your values and mission can you begin designing a logo or writing a tagline that’s truly reflective of who you are.

That’s how you create a brand with personality, one that customers can connect to on an emotional level.

Branding for tech startups

The biggest problem we see from technical founders is that they focus on product instead of value in their messaging.

We get it. Your product is your baby. And you want to show the world how you made it and how it works.

But building a brand is different than engineering a product. You need to start at the end: look at your target audience, the customers you want to serve, and make a clear statement about how your solution is going to provide real, tangible value to them.

The other part of branding that often goes neglected is the squishy stuff we talked about above: your values, your mission, your big idea. A product is not a brand, and neither is a logo.

Align your brand strategy with the core concepts that make your company what it is. Then use your brand to tell a story that resonates with your target audience.

Brand is the foundation of marketing

When you picture “marketing,” what comes to mind? Whether you think about advertising, posting on social media, creating content for your website, or hosting an event, what all of these have in common is that they’re ways for your audience to connect to your brand.

Think about it like a beautifully blooming cherry tree. It’s easy to admire the blossoms and forget about the trunk that supports it. Similarly, when many startup founders want to get started with marketing, they want to go straight to the blooms, straight to creating content and running ads.

The problem is that, without a brand that’s as solid as a tree trunk, those marketing efforts won’t have the vibrancy, longevity, or consistency they need to maximize their effectiveness.

Everything in marketing stems out of the brand. The purpose is to reinforce the brand in the audience’s mind: to build recognition, to form a connection, and ultimately to win trust.

Since this is a sustained effort, there’s not going to be a single marketing touchpoint that can make this happen.

A brand should be consistent, not only in its visual style and messaging but also in how it communicates its values and its purpose. If you don’t take the time to lay a solid foundation, it’s difficult to maintain that needed consistency.

Then, as you move forward with building marketing campaigns and creating media, you want to make sure everyone involved has a solid grasp on the brand’s identity. This ensures that every aspect is true to the brand.

Understand your Core Brand Elements

Whether you’re about to launch your startup or you’ve realized the logo you got on Fiverr isn’t going to cut it, it’s worth setting aside some time to write down your Core Brand Elements or have a conversation among cofounders.

Laying this conceptual groundwork will help you develop your brand. It will pay huge dividends when designing a visual identity, creating messaging, and developing everything from a pitch deck to a website to a marketing campaign.

Dynamic Tech Media is here to support you. We’ve put together a free Core Brand Elements Template to help you crystallize your brand’s most essential concepts.

Have a question or need help getting started with branding for your tech startup? Get in touch.