93. Startup Branding and Positioning 🔥 Mara Rada Interview
Mara Rada Interview Video
I try to know what I know, and where I am ignorant. One of the latter is branding and positioning. I know good brands when I see them, but I have no idea how it is done.
Mara Rada explains how to use branding and positioning to maximum effect in your startup.
Mara is a feral thinker, a brand whisperer, and a category positioner. She helps companies create the beast brands of the future without selling their souls. She has worked with some of the world's most remarkable startups, Fortune 500 corporations, and the world’s best advertising agencies (Ogilvy). She is also a veteran public speaker and keynote presenter who talks about topics such as brand naming, category design, perceptual positioning, and nin-cliche-istic branding. She is the founder of FERAL, a strategic consultancy that specializes in untamed thinking and identity commercialization. Mara is not a guru and detests the word. Maybe as much as the dreaded “digital transformation”. But she sure knows how to transform lemons.
You can find her on LinkedIn and on her business website.
https://LinkedIn.com/in/mararada
In the interview, Mara mentioned a few resources that will help founders learn more about branding and positioning:
42Courses.com has many lessons on these and related topics.
Anything written by George Tannenbaum formerly with Ogilvy, and R/GA https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgetannenbaum/
Anything written by Manoj Jacob Creative Director at Crayons. Formerly at Ogilvy, DDB Mudra, Soho Square, & Havas https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobwriter/
Summary
Below is a short summary of our conversation, followed by the full transcript:
In today's fiercely competitive business landscape, effective branding and positioning strategies are crucial for startups to stand out from the crowd. However, many founders underestimate the true scope and importance of these concepts. In this interview, we heard valuable insights from branding and positioning expert Mara Rada, shedding light on why these elements are vital for emerging companies. By understanding the multi-faceted nature of branding and the emotional factors that drive purchasing decisions, founders can create stronger connections with their target audience, ultimately leading to long-term growth and success.
The Essence of Branding and Positioning
Branding goes beyond mere aesthetics; it encompasses everything a company does, from its public-facing interactions to its customer service. It is the face of the company, reflecting its values, personality, and reputation. On the other hand, positioning refers to how a company differentiates itself from competitors and establishes a unique place in the market. This involves factors such as pricing, perceptual associations, and emotional connections with the target audience. Emotional positioning and differentiation are equally critical, yet often overlooked by tech startups that focus solely on their product or pricing strategy.
The Pitfalls of Neglecting Emotional Positioning
Many founders fall into the trap of assuming that buyers make rational decisions based on product superiority or pricing. However, research indicates that emotional factors heavily influence purchasing decisions, with buyers rationalizing their choices later on. Startups need to develop emotional positioning strategies that create a strong connection with their target audience. While having a great product is essential, it is no longer sufficient for success. By understanding the emotional needs and desires of their customers, startups can develop unique value propositions that resonate deeply, ensuring a competitive edge in a crowded market.
Finding the Right Approach
When working with startups, experts like Mara Rada assess the alignment between the founder's mindset and the broader scope of branding and positioning. This ensures a fruitful collaboration and shared understanding. For startups with radically new products or solutions, category design may be a viable option if they have the resources to establish and promote the category effectively. However, many startups can focus on creating emotional engagement through catchy names or other means as a more practical approach. The ultimate goal is to forge a strong emotional connection between the startup and its target audience, enabling long-term growth and differentiation.
Conclusion:
Branding and positioning are powerful tools that can set startups apart from their competitors and pave the way for success. By recognizing the multi-faceted nature of branding and the emotional factors that drive purchasing decisions, founders can create stronger connections with their customers. Whether through category design or more traditional branding approaches, the ultimate aim is to establish a distinctive position in the market that resonates emotionally with the target audience. As startups navigate their journey, investing in branding and positioning strategies is crucial for building a solid foundation and fostering long-term growth.
If you enjoyed this interview, you might want to check out my conversation with Tim Fitzpatrick.
Transcript:
Lance
Hey there. Today I want to talk about branding and positioning. Because I'm not particularly an expert on either of those things. I've brought in a guest. Mara Rada is an expert. I met her through the Founder Institute where we were both doing mentoring for a number of different sessions, and I was very impressed with the insights that she was able to share with founders. So I'm excited to be able to bring her onto Feel The Boot today.
Lance
Mara is an expert in naming, branding and positioning strategy for innovative companies and emerging biotech. And you can find more about her at thinkferal.com. So without more ado, let's jump into the interview.
Lance
Mara. Welcome to feel the boot.
Mara
Hi, Lance, happy to be here.
Lance
I really appreciate you coming on. As usual with Feel the Boot, I like to have experts in topics where I'm not an expert come on and share some of their experience. And we met through the Founder Institute. We were both mentoring a couple of their sessions, and I really enjoyed hearing what you had to say to those founders. And so I'm very excited to be able to bring you on Feel the Boot today.
Mara
Thank you so much. Yes, I've been mentoring with the Founder Institute and a few other accelerators for maybe four years now, and it's been a great experience both in giving and in learning. So I really do appreciate the time spent there, and meeting you was a pleasure. Likewise.
Lance
It's interesting how much I think all of us mentors learn from the people we're advising. It's definitely not just a one way street.
Mara
No, never.
Lance
So we're talking about branding and positioning mostly today, and I wanted to actually start off with yours, because you describe yourself as a feral thinker, and I love that term, and I wanted you to explain what you mean by that.
Mara
If you want. It's a new phrasing of the old thinking outside the box and with a little bit of nuance of always trying to find solutions to survive, to adapt and to perform better. Feral. It comes from feral animals who do everything in their power to survive, and many of them end up thriving. We have a lot of feral animals, at least in my home country, who manage to thrive once they are released into the wild and become feral, so they become rewilded. And I think that in the business space, whether it's corporate or startup, we are seeing a lot of anxiety when it comes to trying something new. And the problem is that staying the same is most times most dangerous. More dangerous than trying new ways, than trying something new, than trying to be different and distinct and then trying to position yourself differently.
Lance
Got it exactly right. Choosing to do nothing is still making a choice, and often any movement will be better. So we're going to be talking branding and positioning. So maybe I think we all use these terms all the time, but I'm not sure we all agree on sort of definitions. So why don't you share? How do you define those terms and what do they mean and why are they important?
Mara
So in terms of branding, especially in the startup world, it's mostly seen as, okay, let's get a logo and a color palette. That's not what branding is. In my opinion, branding is everything that a company does. Public facing branding. And part of the branding experience can be customer service can be how fast or how pleasantly a company answers its customers. Because branding is the face of the company towards the public. So everything a company does is part of that branding. In terms of positioning, what I mean when I say positioning has a variety of factors. We can talk about the factual positioning. How much does the brand cost, how much does the product or service cost in comparison to others, or the larger category, or how it is positioned perceptually because there is also a perceptual positioning. How does the company make the customer feel about that product, which may be very similar towards any other product? Let's think of fashion brands. Many of them sell T-shirts. But if we think we pay a price for a Hugo Boss T-shirt and another price for a George T-shirt that we can buy at Walmart.
So there is the price positioning, there is the perceptual positioning. How do we think, what do we associate with that brand when we think of it? And that is something that most founders, especially in the tech world, are not familiar with. And they think of positioning as something that they need to say or they need to embrace. And many times it is reduced to pricing, but most times people don't necessarily choose a product because of its pricing. And if pricing is one's only differentiation, well, guess what? A competitor can always drop the price and then you can start price wars. We've seen them in bigger companies, but it happens in startups. A new startup gets new funding from a new VC and they want to wipe out the competition. And if pricing is the only distinctive advantage that you have, it's not going to be good for you. I hear this frequently from many founders. We're the cheapest. Well, if you're the cheapest, that's not a sustainable business advantage. That's not how you position yourself. If you're the cheapest. What I hear as a strategy person, as an investor, is you're not well positioned to succeed if you're the cheapest, unless you're the cheapest and you're released by you have strong financial capital behind you.
The fact that you're the cheapest, in fact, tells me that you're not well positioned to succeed.
Lance
Right, exactly!
I love this definition of branding and positioning because it is so broad. It encompasses so much more than just getting that media packet of colors and logos and letterheads and whatever else you're going to have there.
Do you think that's the most common mistake that founders make is not understanding the scope or other mistakes that you see really frequently when you're working with startups?
Mara
I think that one of the mistakes is looking just at the financial aspect and looking at the product and financial aspect, not realizing that we buy emotionally. There is plenty of research showing that we buy emotionally first and rationally later. And even though we think we choose something rationally, many times we look for reasons to justify what our heart, so to say, has already chosen and perceptual positioning. Immaterial positioning is always more powerful emotional positioning. We choose what we want, then we try to justify and rationalize our choice. And I think that in the tech world we have this perception that we need to be product led growth. Well, not all the best products succeed. There are many great products that have failed. And one of the reasons is related to the lack of an emotional positioning. We think that buyers are rational beings and they're not, right?
Lance
Exactly. So many people justify the decision that they've already made by trying to employ logic. And I think I've had the same debate with a lot of founders who will just keep hammering on "but this is better," and being better doesn't win, right? There's huge numbers of cases of companies that obviously had the better solution but still ended up losing out in the market for any of a number of other reasons.
Mara
Just the product itself is not sufficient. And I know there is this perception and theory of product led growth which is hammered by many schools of thought. But when we're focusing only on product, we're missing out so much more. Having a great product in the highly competitive environment that we see today is a minimum sine qua non. It's the minimum, minimum condition from where you can start. If you don't have a great product, you're not going to succeed. But if all you have is a great product, that is not enough to succeed.
Lance
So I just want to interrupt this interview for a quick moment to ask you to do me a favor, please. Like this episode, subscribe to the channel and ring that bell to be notified each time new episodes are released. Even more if you go to feel the boot and sign up for the newsletter. Boot prints extremely low volume and we will never sell any of your information. That actually does guarantee that you get notified every time new episodes comes out. But more importantly, it gives you access to my office hours so you'll be able to get on my calendar and we can talk about any topic that you need help with on your startup.
So where do you start when someone comes to you from an early stage company, what's your initial discussion and how do you sort of structure that conversation with them?
Mara
Well, before deciding whether I take on a client or not. There is the discussion of whether I can work with that client or not. For example, if I'm going to meet someone who thinks that product and pricing is everything, that's most likely not going to be a great fit, and I know I won't be able to help them because it will be a battle of two hard rocks. I believe in what I'm doing, not just because I'm doing it, but because I have the experience and I've seen how the greatest corporations of the world do it, in my experience, working for them. So if it's not a mindset alignment, then there's no work together. If we do have a mindset alignment, then we explore how can we be different? What emotional advantage can we exploit? Can we create and then exploit? How do we position ourselves? And there are many positioning tactics. Some of the most common ones are find yourself a brand enemy. And this is something that you probably see on LinkedIn where we both are active day to day. There are many so called gurus who all of a sudden you see they start throwing punches at something or someone that is brand positioning or product positioning through a brand enemy.
I've seen a category growth guru throwing punches at branding. I'm not going to name names, but because they are selling category design, they throw punches at branding saying, oh, branding is insufficient, and you choose category first and brand later. And I always want to ask them, do you buy a sports car or do you want to buy a Porsche? You buy brand first. In my opinion, when a brand is established, when you are creating a category, unless you have a lot of capital behind, establishing a category is very difficult because establishing a category doesn't mean, okay, I'm not going to sell tea, I'm going to sell Jasmine infusion, and my category is Jasmine infusion. But the category creation means you need to convince the entire community to refer to that thing in the way you're referring to it. And unless you have massive budgets behind, that's very hard to do as a startup. Apple created spatial computing, okay? But Apple has the power to support spatial computing. If I come here and say I'm creating spatial computing, nobody is going to care because I don't have sufficient resources to promote that and establish it as the category determinant for the entire community.
Lance
Got it. So it'd be like the big players were able to get things like performance beverages accepted as a term. Whereas if you're trying to create some new drink, you kind of have to go with the established nomenclature.
Mara
You don't have to, but unless you have something radically new and the business widths to have it developed, it's going to waste somewhere because it won't be supported.
Lance
So how often do you find companies that are in a position to exploit that category design? And how often do you suggest that they try to avoid that and stick with more conventional sort of branding and positioning approaches?
Mara
It depends first of all on what they do. If they have something that's radically new. I work a lot in the health tech space and biotech space. If they have something radically new that's supported by science and research. And there is a founder who has commercialization intelligence that can succeed. But if there is another startup who has yet another I don't know, mar-tech solution? It's going to be extremely difficult to start creating a category unless they're one of the more established players. It doesn't mean you have to be number one to succeed. But being part of the top group, the leading group in your category, helps. If you're a novice startup and a novice founder, it's probably better to try to get a catchy name that creates emotional engagement. And I can talk about naming for the entire night. What's a good name. What's a bad name. But there are other ways to establish emotional connection. Because the reality is that whether you go through more traditional branding approach or you're trying category design, you sell when your buyer is emotionally connected to your organization, to your product, or to you as a founder.
Lance
So do you have any examples of where companies maybe companies that you've worked with or ones that would be sort of well known, that you think have done this either particularly well or particularly poorly?
Mara
I have the example of a client that I worked with who was very new in the beverages market, which is a highly competitive market, and they established a new category in my home country of Romania, the category of Rose, rose based drinks. The process was, let's create a name for the company that takes them out of the lemonades category. Because they were a lemonade with roses. They were also the rose producer. An organic rose producer. They're not called orchards. Maybe you can say gardens of roses. Edible roses. And they were producing these roses organically. And by using a name related to the rose and not to the lemonade, we were able to one register the trademark and take them out, perceptually, of the very crowded category of lemonade. There are hundreds of lemonades on the market, but there is only one roseaid. They've established this particularly well, and they were willing to go through the process of trademark registration, which many of them are told not to, by some other mentors. And now they're seeing doubling their sales and revenue year to year. And in such a category, with well established players, it was quite a success.
Now an example of doing this poorly. I've seen an example on LinkedIn. One of the companies there at some moment pivoted to do revenue development. They said. Few months later, competitor who apparently worked with a category designer came to do revenue R&D, which was extremely similar to the first one. It Wasn't Saying anything new and it wasn't establishing any desire for that particular so called novelty. And what I'm trying to say by that is that just because we decide to call something differently doesn't mean we've created a category. It may just mean that we're making things more difficult for a buyer who is used to seeing something in a way. And they're going to want to buy a sports car, not a four wheeled something, even though we may want to call it like that.
Lance
Four wheeled rapid moving vehicle.
Mara
Exactly.
Lance
It's funny, I got very lucky with my company Anonymizer back in the day that we really were creating an entirely new category of business and were able to establish Anonymizer as the description of it that actually then became a problem. We had it trademarked, but it then quickly became generic, like Xerox or Band Aid or things like that, where many of our competitors wanted to use the name of our company as a description of their company. And have you seen that and are there ways of avoiding that transition?
Mara
There are many companies who are suffering this fate. On one hand, it's good that everyone wants to be like you. On the other hand, there is the part of policing the mark. Big companies always have very powerful brand policing, and they have lawyers who do just that. Whenever they see something that's mildly similar, they start by sending a letter of cease and desist, and it can advance from there. Kleenex is a company that was able to establish a brand as a category name while also preventing everyone else from using the brand name. And people use Kleenex, but nobody else does it. While many other companies were less successful in doing that. Sneakers, for example. It's more common to refer to training shoes or sports shoes as sneakers, even by brands who are not sneakers.
Lance
Got it? So what kinds of branding and positioning do you think founders overlook the most? Where should they be paying attention that is sort of not even on their radar right now?
Mara
I think most of them don't pay sufficient attention to vocabulary. They tend to get lost in technical explanations. They want to be extremely descriptive, and that descriptiveness most times makes them sound just like the next competitor. They think that people won't understand if they communicate emotionally, which is not true. And by being overly descriptive, they end up boring the audience or being uninteresting to them.
Lance
Do you think that relates to the advice I give a lot about talking in terms of benefits versus features? Does that tie into that?
Mara
To an extent, yes. But it's more than just benefits versus features. Most times, if we look at how some companies describe their benefits, it's also very product oriented as opposed to being really user oriented. And it talks about their product, but they fail to place that product within the user's daily routine or emotional needs. Even when you buy a software. You don't necessarily buy a software because it does the best job. Maybe you buy a software just so that you look good to your boss. Maybe you're not the CEO, you're some manager who needs a software and needs to look good. And maybe they're not going to buy the best product. They're going to buy the product with the best reputation because they want a safe purchase. I've seen companies who refuse to work with startups, particularly because of this perception that they're unstable. And what if they're not going to be here in two years and they don't want to take the risk? And usually the larger the company, the more risk averse. And we need to find ways to tell that buyer whether it's a manager in a company or someone who buys something for themselves, that they're going to be successful using our product.
And that success is not always financially related. That success is much more comprehensive than just the material value that we tend to associate with a purchase.
Lance
So how did you get interested in this whole space of branding and positioning?
Mara
The start was by pure luck. I was in university and I wanted a job and a friend told me we're hiring at our advertising agency. And I asked, what's an advertising agency? Oh, we do commercials. The type that you see on TV. That's interesting. So I went there and that's how I started and I was extremely lucky. It was a creative boutique with great work. And from there I moved on to working with some of the top advertising agencies in the world, including Ogilvy, Gray, OMD, and working with Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 clients. But the beginning was pure luck. Once I got there, I discovered this whole environment that was absolutely fascinating. Copywriters are fascinating to work with. They have these brilliant minds and they make these word associations that say everything so witty and so clearly and in so few words. And they're very different from your typical LinkedIn copywriter, who I think is not at the level of advertising agency copywriter. Many of them aren't. Many of them don't have education in that field. Most copywriters are coming from a humanistic experience. They study English or whatever the native language is in the country where they work or literature.
And they like to play with words while others just decide that, okay, I'm going to take a copywriting course and afterwards I have a copywriter. Well, it doesn't really work like that.
Lance
So where can a founder sort of go to try to educate themselves a little bit about this so that they can recognize snake oil, they can tell whether the person that they're hiring or contracting with actually knows what they're doing?
Mara
This is a very difficult question because the copywriters that are really well established are going to work most likely with high caliber agencies and are going to be completely unaffordable for a young founder. But there are a lot of copywriters who left these agencies and went on to open practices of their own. So one thing to do is when you check someone's profile, look down and see, what has this person done before? Just because they say they're a copywriter now doesn't mean they have any sort of training to do that. Look behind in their experience, see if they worked with any reputable agency first. Make a list with reputable agencies of the world and you're going to find a lot of big names and a lot of creative boutiques that have won awards and some of them are not very big but are still very famous. And see if they worked with any of those. And if they did, and if you like how they write, that's probably going to be a good fit. And these people who left the corporate advertising to open practices of their own are going to be a lot more affordable than hiring Ogilvy the agency.
But still they're going to be expensive. So when you want good copywriting, if it's dirt cheap, then it's probably worth dirt.
Lance
Got it. Now, for founders who maybe even pre funding, pre revenue, where can they go to learn how to do this if they are sort of forced to do it themselves on the whole? Are there any good resources for learning? Kind of some of the basics at least, so they can avoid the big obvious mistake.
Mara
Excellent resource is 42 courses. They have a lot of courses on copywriting from some of the most brilliant minds in the industry. Don't just go and buy a course of someone who has 60,000 followers or 10,000 followers or whatever. That doesn't mean anything. Go and ask good copywriters, the ones you see are working in an agency. Maybe some of them will want to do freelancing with you for equity or ask them, and I am giving this resource, maybe others have other resources. Ask them and they're going to send you to places that are better than just someone on the net who has established a following, who says, okay, I'm selling courses. We've seen when the pandemic hit that all of a sudden everybody was an expert in something. We've seen people who had just finished university or people who have not finished any university all of a sudden becoming experts in a field in which they have not been active for a year. So how can you be an expert there? You become an expert after 10,000 hours, it is said. So I think you need a minimum of ten years in an industry, in a field to be able to call yourself an expert if you don't have that.
Of course some of them are really fast learners, but most people just follow the regular distribution curve and probably aren't.
Lance
That's right. And even if it doesn't take ten years, it's unlikely to be one. You're unlikely to be a factor of ten faster.
Mara
Yeah.
Lance
So is there anything that you wanted to share or plug? Places people should go? Things they should look at?
Mara
I do post some opinions on our website, thinkfero we like to share perspectives there, but it's not a regular posting. I'm not the person who shares a newsletter a week. I write because I write the material when I find something interesting to talk about. But I don't like to just talk about myself. I like to push other people in the industry as well. There's someone I highly look up to. There are many people I highly look up to. There is George Tannenbaum, who used to work for Ogilvy & R/GA. He was involved in a number of startup campaigns once he went on his own. Including uPath. There is Manoj Jacob , who is an Indian copywriter and then works for Crayons is the CD there? There are many people to follow, but try to follow someone with agency experience because they're going to know a lot more about this than someone who is obviously young and less experienced and is more in a position of learner than expert.
Lance
That's great. I really appreciate those list of resources and I'll make sure I get those captured and put those down in the description of this video so people can link through and find all of those people.
Mara
And I really do think that Feel The Boot is an excellent resource for founders who need to understand how to do fundraising, how to think about a business, whether before they start or after they started. As a founder, there are so many things that are completely unknown, and you come in a business with your field of experience and you realize that the business has all the fields of experience and you only have experience in one or two. So I myself follow your articles and your posts and I find tremendous value in them. And thank you for doing that. The community needs it.
Lance
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the vote of support.
Well, it's been fantastic talking with you. I really appreciate your insights in this area and I think this will be of great value to the Feel The Boot viewers. So thank you so much for joining us.
Mara
Thank you for having me.
