B(r)and Anthem: What Startups Can Learn About Brand Building From Hit-Making Bands

By Charlie Holman, Strategy Director, Founders Makers

It’s no secret that businesses grow from building brand fame, creating memorable hits, and connecting with new fans. So, as we delve into the depths of the UK festival season, what can we learn about building brands from the journey of successful bands?

Well, for starters the leap from startup to scale-up is like evolving from a scrappy garage band playing local pubs to headlining a major festival. 

At first there’s wild experimentation to find your unique sound. But as you grow, you need to nail what works, create consistency, and craft that distinctive stage presence that makes you memorable.

For brands, making that shift and balancing changing priorities is a wild ride. But it’s the secret sauce to growing successfully, and at Founders Makers, we love partnering with brands to make it happen. 

Finding Your Sound: The Startup Stage

At the startup stage, it’s all about experimenting and defining your uniqueness. Establish your mission, vision, and values to guide decisions through the inevitable ups, downs, and rejections.

1. Investor vs Consumer Focus

Attention, startups: your investors are not your target market! Think of investors as record label executives—they might fund your tour, but they’re not buying tickets to your shows. Keep investors happy, but focus on real customers. Create niche communities, conduct focus groups, and gather feedback from initial fans. It’s something you won’t have the luxury of later down the line. 

2. Capture the Founders’ Gut Instincts

Founders’ gut feelings can shape brand success. Test founders’ hunches and hypotheses to uncover really unique positioning points you can use in messaging. These instincts can really create differences in your brand early on, but as you scale, replace those instincts with expertise and trusted specialists.

Think what would have happened if  Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie & Mick Jagger focussed group their sound. 

3. Branding Your Future

Many don’t, but it’s important to invest early in your brand’s core foundations, I don’t mean a visual identity. Solid mission, vision, and values build resilience and motivation. They help founders focus, ensure team alignment, and attract the right hires.

Hitting the Big Time: From Experimentation to Distinction, the Scale-Up Stage

As you transition from startup to scale-up, the need for rock-solid consistency and distinctive branding grows. If you want to be playing the mainstage you need to maintain uniqueness while achieving broad recognition and appeal.

1. Difference to Distinction

Marketing your ‘difference’ won’t sustain growth. Focus on building distinctive brand assets that people remember. The bank Monzo for example have painted London in their ‘coral red’ brand colour for their latest campaign and Little Moons, our own client, have made a super distinct visual world in order to really stand out and sustain their market presence.

2. You’ll need a Metric Makeover

As you reset growth ambitions at the scale-up stage you have to challenge and overhaul old benchmarks that won’t work for you anymore. As you scale, the KPIs and signals you track will change. It’s like shifting from counting pub gig bar takings  to measuring chart positions and streaming numbers. 

It’s at the scale up stage that CMOs need to educate founders on the delayed payoffs of campaigns and start hiring data scientists for better decision-making.

3. Stay Interesting: What’s the Cost of Being Dull?

Dullness costs economies billions annually. So avoid playing the same old setlist—it might be perfect, but it won’t win new fans. 

Nearly half of the ads and campaigns out there right now make no emotional impact with their audience (system 1 data); and bigger budgets often result in duller campaigns. In today’s digital landscape, being dull means being invisible. Prioritise creativity and engagement over a checklist of rational and functional messages.

Whether you’re finding your rhythm or headlining your categories main stage, let’s make some noise together!

Check out our work: Founders-makers.com

Let’s chat: hello@founders-makers