A strong brand can be your startup’s competitive advantage and a compelling reason for a VC to invest. But, you need to be playing in an outdated, out-of-touch industry.
Your brand needs to represent a better story than your industry’s status quo:
Faster
Cheaper
Higher quality
More representative of an ignored market or psychographic segment
Case: Gillette vs. DSC & Harry’s.
Pre-DSC & Harry’s: Crowded space with a crappy customer experience and unrelatable, awful brand stories.
Players / Options: Gillette, Bic, Shick, Generic.
Nobody looks like a “Gillette Man.” Their branding / story sucked. “The Best a Man Can Get” is a remarkably self-serving slogan. My friends and I will never look like the shirtless dude with an 8-pack and pecs wearing a towel while shaving.
Enter DSC and their bathroom humor (appropriate), affordable price, and D2C model.
GAME CHANGER. And, so simple. So, Harry’s copied, but with a slightly different story.
Bathroom humor is a little much for our brand, but we’re going to tell a story about quality at an affordable price. Model is D2C and retail. Also effective. Less in your face. Different psychographic. But, infinitely better than Gillette. Harry’s also hits an emotional nerve with men, “you are getting screwed on blades. take control, be the hero of your own story, and use our razor.”
Saquon Barkley is in a Gillette Commercial. He squats 585 pounds and plays in the NFL. Do you think that makes men feel good about themselves?
Guys like me went from not giving a crap about which razor we use to extreme loyalty to either DSC or Harry’s. Why?
Branding.
Tell your best story. Tell your industry’s best story. VC’s will invest.