Founder Brands have a special sort of magic. They grow from instinct, energy and passion. However, there comes a point where a clear brand strategy can really help founders take their business to the next level.
I love working with Founder Brands. For me, it’s one of the most rewarding areas of brand strategy. I get to work directly with passionate brand leaders with the power to make decisions on the spot. This creates momentum and allows projects to move at speed. And it’s satisfying to see how brand strategy helps them focus their scarce resources to boost effectiveness.
Here are some of the key insights I’ve had from working with Founder Brands.
1. Founders can only fly so far solo
Founders tend to start by flying their brands solo. The founder is the brand and the brand is the founder. The brand lives in their head, heart and gut.
This is powerful in the early years. It keeps the brand fast, distinctive and full of personality. However, it can only get a founder so far.
As the team grows, more people need to make decisions without the founder in the room. Sales, marketing, innovation, design, customer experience and external partners all need to know what the brand stands for.
I saw this first-hand working with the Australian founders of The Natural Confectionery Company, following its acquisition by Cadbury. There was a need to codify the brand so that the bigger business could understand it and grow it globally. We created a fun, visual and colourful “Recipe Book” that captured the brand positioning.
2. Founders need to bottle their magic
With founder brands, the challenge is often not to invent a new strategy. The brand has usually succeeded because there is something powerful at its core: a strong belief, a distinctive way of doing things, a tone, a product obsession, a customer connection.
The job is to bottle and bring to life the brand magic that made the brand work. This means asking the right questions. What does the founder believe that others don’t? What would they never compromise on? What makes the brand different in practice, not just in theory? What are the stories, rituals, phrases and behaviours that carry the brand’s DNA?
The best founder-brand strategies feel less like a reinvention and more like a revelation. Founders should look at it and say, “Yes, that’s us. We’ve never said it quite like that before, but that’s exactly what we mean!” This was exactly the reaction of Dr Peter Lovatt, aka Doctor Dance, when I shared the brand idea Moving Bodies. Moving Minds. It crystallised the Peter’s key proposition about helping people think, feel, connect, and live better through dance.
3. Focus can free up Founders
Founders are fuelled by energy. That is one of their superpowers. They see possibilities everywhere. New products. New partnerships. New content ideas. New services. New channels. However,
However, having too many projects can dilute scarce resources: time, money, attention and energy. A good brand strategy helps founders decide what to do but also what to stop doing.
For example, Peter Lovatt and his wife and business partner Lindsey had a wide range of activities linked to the positive power of dance and movement. The Doctor Dance brand strategy helped Peter focus on keynote speaking, the biggest source of revenue and future growth. Other smaller ventures, such as live dance lessons on the beach and selling music tracks for dancing, were stopped.
For founders, focus can be liberating. Instead of feeling the need to chase every opportunity, they get a sharper sense of where to play, how to win and what to leave behind.
4. Founders favour fast translation of strategy to action
Founders are busy and don’t have time for complex brand strategy tools, theoretical models and multi-day workshops. They need something simple, practical and energising. And this means getting quickly from thinking to doing.
On the passion brand I founded with Mrs Taylor, The TRIP COLLECTION, we moved fast from brand strategy into visual identity and website design. This helped us learn about and finalise the brand strategy, whilst also creating tangible elements of the marketing mix.
A positioning on a page is useful. But a homepage, a colour palette, a tone of voice example or a LinkedIn post makes the strategy real. It gives the founder something to react to, improve and get excited by.
5. Founders benefit from clarity
One of the biggest benefits of defining brand strategy for founders is clarity.
Founder-led businesses often suffer from message overload. The temptation is understandable: say lots of things, sell lots of things, and maximise the chances that something lands with someone. However, when a brand tries to say everything, this is the people will remember nothing.
A sharper approach is to use the brand positioning to identify three or four clear messages. These can be refreshed and brought to life in different ways over time to create “fresh consistency”.
I saw this in action this week in the latest Linked In post from Mark James, founder of investor relations consultancy Investor Reach. Rather than the common Linked In strategy of showing off an amazing professional life, Mark’s post focused on one of his four key brand messages: the importance of deep investor insight.
This is a great example of brand strategy doing a practical job, helping shape clear, focused communication.
In conclusion, Founder Brands are often rich in instinct, passion and personality, but the magic needs bottling if the brand is to stand out and scale. The role of brand strategy is not to replace the founder’s intuition, but to codify it, focus it and turn it into practical tools the whole team can use.
