Most founders treat branding like a finishing touch. Build the product, hire a sales team, raise some capital, then, somewhere down the line, hire someone to design a better logo, create a tagline, and produce some ads. But branding is so much more than how your brand looks; branding shapes how interacting with your business feels. And treating it as an afterthought costs founders more than they realize.
A business plan and a brand strategy are the two documents that should govern every decision founders make from day one.
Your business plan answers what you sell, how you produce your offerings, how you’re capitalized, and how you’ll grow. Every founder knows they need one. But it won’t tell you who you’re actually building this for, what you’ll charge and why, how people will come to know you exist, or why they’ll choose you over alternatives. That’s the brand strategy’s job. Treat it as optional, or as something you’ll “figure out with a designer later,” and you’re making pricing, hiring, and positioning calls with half the information you need.
A real brand strategy answers questions your business plan doesn’t. How will you justify the price you charge? Who, specifically, will you serve? Who are you actually competing with in your customer’s mind, not just your category? How will people find out you exist without you buying their attention every single time? And how will you treat the people who work for you and buy from you?
Logos, websites, press releases, ads, and other comms “stuff” are outputs of a brand strategy, not the strategy itself. A wordmark or a founding story are what people see; pricing, audience, positioning, and behavior are what people actually feel and remember. You can redesign your visual identity in a weekend. You can’t redesign a reputation for treating customers poorly, or for competing on price when you meant to compete on meaning.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. Before you finalize your revenue model, decide who you want to build the most loyalty with, not just who will buy from you, but who will buy into you. Before you hire your first employee, decide what kind of internal culture makes people want to work for you (and ideally evangelize your company to everyone they know), because your team will do more for your growth than any ad budget you don’t have yet. And before you spend a dollar acquiring customers, decide what you’re willing to be known for that your competitor isn’t, because “we’re better” isn’t a brand strategy, it’s a hope.
Founders who write both documents from day one make faster, more consistent decisions later. They’re not relitigating who they are every time a hard call comes up. Founders who only write the business plan end up building a brand by accident, one ad hoc decision at a time, and accidents are rarely remarkable.
Your business plan tells the world what you do.
Your brand strategy tells the world why it should care.
Write both.
Chris Kneeland is the co-founder of Cult Collective, The Gathering Festival, and the Brand Hall of Fame, all headquartered in Calgary, AB.
Chris Kneeland is the co-founder of Cult Collective, The Gathering Festival, and the Brand Hall of Fame, all headquartered in Calgary, AB.
