After building hundreds of startup brands, Arielle Jackson shares 6 early marketing missteps to avoid

 Well, thank you so much for joining us. 

 So we're going to spend our time together exploring a bunch of the different missteps that you've noticed in, in collaborating and supporting at this point, probably hundreds of companies over the last decade, as it relates to marketing and positioning. And so I thought we could start by kind of exploring the, the challenges or missteps you see in the area of category creation.

 Sure. Well, one of the first missteps is just not thinking about it at all. I would say most of the early stage startup founders I work with, and you mentioned it's been hundreds. I just counted this year. It was 71 in 2021 alone. So it's definitely hundreds at this point. Um, and the thing I see the most is that people don't even think about it.

They don't try to define which category they're playing in, or like pick the arena, plant that in their target audiences mind, it's not a thoughtful process or it's not even a consideration. And one of the things that we do at first round and in my consultant, It's really forced founders to define which category they're playing in.

And as soon as you bring up category selection to a founder, they almost always want to create a new category if you give them that as a choice. But considering the alternatives and making a thoughtful decision is really important. there's three choices. One is you can play in an existing category. I worked on Gmail early on, and one of the things we did is we decided to play in free web mail.

You know, at the time it was Yahoo mail and Hotmail, or think about Amazon. They decided to play in retail bookseller, and sometimes choosing a category. That's an existing one is not a bad choice. The other choice would be to modify an existing category. And this is when you take a category that exists, that people have a good understanding of my favorite example actually is nest and the learning thermostat.

So before they came out with learning thermostats, everyone knew what a thermostat was. And no one had thought about it for 20 years and thermostats were boring and they just sat on your wall and, you know, kind of try to control the temperature. Um, and they didn't really do much else. And nest had this brilliant idea to just add the word, learning to the word thermostat and carve out a sub segment of that category to play in that they could really own.

And now, you know, you never heard the word learning next to the word thermostat. Now Honeywell and eco bee, and lots of other players have learning thermostats, but they really cemented that idea of a thermostat could be something new and sexy and something desirable again, as opposed to something you never thought about just by adding those words together.

I think pros did a good job with this too. And more recent example with custom shampoo. I never thought of custom shampoo before. You know, I definitely have shampoo and I know what it is. And I really don't think about it much. And all of a sudden you can add a word like custom to a word like shampoo and now pros owns it.

And I'm sure there's a million copycats too. And then your third choice when it comes to category is to create a new one. Creating a new one is great. Play bigger. Was this really popular book a few years ago, and actually it's kind of meta, they rebranded positioning and called it category creation.

And, uh, they were really big on saying that the players and who won were the ones who defined a new category, which I think is Why, founders are so big on category creation now. And there's a lot of great examples where people have branded, um, a new category totally out of the blue. I think from a B2B perspective, Marketa actually has, uh, a modified category, but Gainsight did this really well with customer success.

They kind of were the pioneers there. Uh, but if you look at a lot of the B2B examples that you think of is category creation, they're actually modifying a new category. Like Marquetto. I mentioned, um, we have some at first round that I've worked with like Sprague with continuous research or Wolf with a global collegiate university collegiate university existed, but never a global one.

So that idea of taking a modifier and putting it with an existing category to really carve out a place in which you can play and potentially win. 

 why why is establishing this early on useful or important?

 I think it's the same reason that positioning is really useful early on. And that reason is that if you don't define the space in which you're playing, your audience will either have to do it for you and they'll do eight different versions of it. And it won't be clear. And even internally, you'll have people saying you are eight different things, and it's not clear internally.

And the earlier you do this work and that you define here's who we are. Here's what we stand for. Here's How we play, where we play, why we play, um, the better it is both for internal alignment for having everyone marching to the same beat. And then also for really occupying that space in your target.

Customer's mind if pros hadn't said custom shampoo. When I talked about pros to someone else, I probably wouldn't use those words. I'd use whatever words I thought of. And when they give me that shorthand, it's much easier for their message to spread and spread in the way they want it to spread, as opposed to the way that, 8 million different people understand it.

 How should founders think about navigating you that starting point of which approach of the three choices to take.

 Well, one thing we do. We do this exercise with first round companies and otherwise is we kind of start with, what do you do? We just have the founders explain, Who are you? And what do you do as a company? And once we understand a little bit more about what it is, we then can really be intentional about making some choices.

And the way that we make choices is we explore all the alternatives. And sometimes it's very intuitive. I'll give an example of Eero, which is a first round company I worked with for a long time. And we made a list of all the existing categories they're there in the home wifi space.

And we said, okay, well, they could be a router. They could be a modern router. They could be a new kind of router, a premium router. Oh, what could they be if they were something new? And we really just brainstorm what are all the existing categories? How could we modify the existing category? Like add the word premium next to router.

And then how could we potentially create a new category here? And we did a brainstorm. And one of the items on the list of the brainstorm was home wifi system. There are enterprise wifi systems, those existed at the time, but they were never built for a home market. And Nick, the CEO just like latched onto that, loved it.

It was super intuitive. He understood the challenges of creating a new category. It takes time. It's expensive. You have to say the same thing over and over and over again until people have. Uh, if you look at their packaging, it literally has the IRO logo locked up with home wifi system on it, just like nested with learning thermostat, you cement that category along with your brand.

And now if you go to best buy there's an aisle of home wifi systems. And Google is probably the biggest player there, but it was an investment. And for Nick, it was pretty intuitive. That that was the way he wanted to go. Um, for other founders, sometimes there's a little bit of user research that gets done.

Let's hear how our customers are talking about it. Sometimes there's market research that gets done, you know, how big is the shampoo category and how could we carve this out? And would we be the kind of company we wanted to be? If we owned a subset of it, uh, we're doing it right now. There's a first round company who is in the skincare space and I'm not going to go into the details because they're not out yet, but we did a brainstorm there and they actually worked with an agency who helped here too, and came up with this modifier to skincare.

That's just so good for them. And as soon as it was said, I had an eyes light up moment. And so did a bunch of people working on this brand. And we're going so far with them. They're, they're trademarking that term, the modifier with the word skincare so that they can really go after this, modification of the skincare category and own it.

And so I would say it's, you know, like many things marketing, it's partially an art and partially a science. And I think a little more art and intuition goes here than science, it also has to do with the business you're in. If you're a B2B business, you're selling to a buyer who has budget for existing categories.

And so if you're a market research tool, let's take.

spread, right? They, they went with continuous research. If you brand yourself totally outside of the category of research, it's really hard to get budget from the people who manage the market research budget. But if you're continuous research, okay, well that fits In her market research.

 It's a new kind of research, but we understand that it goes for our research budget. So for B2B companies who are selling into customers who have existing budgets, it's often really nice to play in an existing category or modify a new one because they know that they have the budget to buy that category.

 In what cases I can see the, the way that you articulated the difference between modifying a category and creating a category and some of the trade-offs between the two of them. I it's a little bit more unclear. When does it make sense? Just to sort of use the existing category.

 Yeah. So if you use an existing category, you have to think about whether you could someday when that category. So when Gmail said we're going to play in free web mail, we really thought that we could beat out all the other people playing in that space and build a better version of free web mail. If you are pros, let's going back to the shampoo example.

They may not think that they could beat out every analysis and own the shampoo category, but they can own the custom shampoo category. And sometimes you could outgrow the modification like nest out, grew learning thermostat, and now they're in home automation or smart home devices. There's something bigger than that for the company.

The product is still learning thermostat. Um, but I think they went saying we want to modify an existing category and really own this mind share. And then that, that piece of the category is actually going to grow as a segment of the full category. with Wolf, which is an education company in the first round portfolio, when we, we brainstormed a lot, when they came and started the process with us, we were thinking they might be an API for accreditation.

That's functionally a lot of what they do. But when we thought about what they were trying to do, and we worked on their purpose, we came back to this idea of, they actually are a new kind of universe. And so we did the brainstorm of new and existing and creating a modification of an existing. And one of the inspirations for Wolf is, um, universities systems like the university of California, the university of London, Oxford, where there's many colleges that make up one university, but each college feels and operates fairly independently, but gets all the benefits of being part of a major university.

And that was kind of the inspiration of, could you make something like that for the modern age and the idea behind Wolf as well in the future, you'll take some classes online and then you might take some classes in India and then you might take some classes in Australia, wherever you want to go, you can just travel and be virtual and learn from the best people in the world.

And so this idea of a global collegiate university carving out, well, They're not going to own collegiate university. They're not going to take it over from UC and Oxford and university of London. But they're not really competitors. Those inspirations never would claim that they're global.

And so Wolf can go in and say, well, we're going to say, we're the global version of those. I don't know if that exactly answers your question about like, when and how, but I would say like, will you ever win the category? Do you think it's a reasonable and plausible thing that you will win the cat. And then you play in the existing one.

If you don't think it's reasonable, how can you carve out from the existing category? So that there's a sub segment of it, whether it's a new sub segment, like learning thermostat, custom shampoo, continuous research, or I always think about this example.

It's so dated, but it's a really good one in the book positioning, which is one of my favorite books. I always talk about this book. it dates itself cause the book is really old, but it's still quite relevant. And they talk about Virginia Slims and Virginia Slims is a cigarette, just like all of the other cigarettes for women.

And what did they do? They said, well, we're not going to compete against Marlboro. And I don't even know all the cigarette brands that played at the time, but what we think we can do is we can win. If we make a cigarette that's exactly for women. And so they said that was their modification of the cigarette category.

and they went on to for a long time, be the number one product that women purchased in the cigarette category. 

 How do you know, after you've done this work, if what your doing is working, as it relates to that the approach you've taken to, to category creation modification, et cetera.

 Yeah, it takes a while. I mean, it takes, especially if you're modifying or creating a new category, you're not going to get a read on this in a week or two, but there Are ways that you can get early reads. And I would say early reads are, look at the press articles that come out when you first announced, are they using the same category that you're using?

Look at the way your reviewers are reviewing your product. Are they reviewing it and using your category name, look at the way your users are talking about it. Are they using that name too? And I think if you're very, very consistent in the way that you talk about your product and you're consistent in everything from your website to your customer support, to your packaging, to your interviews that you give, if all of those touch points reinforce the same message, it should feel boring to you.

 I bet Nick from Eero was so sick of saying home wifi system, but it worked. And you know, it works when everyone else starts saying it too. And it really works when other people start saying it. When, when competitors enter your space and use your same category name, then you know, it's working.

 How about the idea of this approach to category definition at the company level versus the product.

 yeah. So early on when a startup is, you know, at a seed stage or even pre-seed, they usually have one product. And so the company positioning and the product.

positioning are very similar. I would say they should be the same. So if you think about square in the early days, square was the little piece of hardware that you plugged into the headphone Jack on your phone.

That was the shape of a square. And it was the square card reader. That was the company that was the product. Um, there was an app that went alongside it. So square actually ran into some issues with this. When they wanted square to stand for more than just the card reader, they had multiple product lines.

I worked on the square stand, for example. And so we needed then square to become the parent company name, the square card reader, to become the hardware, the square stand, to become the other hardware. And then there was the square register app they've since gotten even further. You see all these, all these companies now, you know, from Facebook becoming Mehta and square becoming block.

And, um, lots of companies trying to say, well, we outgrew that. And so the same thing can happen with your category. Like in the early days of nest, the word learning thermostat was locked up with the nest logo and nest was the learning thermostat. And once they came out with a, um, smoke detector and now they have cameras and other products, you don't really want the nest brand to be associated with the category of learning thermostat anymore.

But in the first 18 months of company building, which is where I like to focus the companies that I work with at least, and where first-round focuses, the product positioning, the product category you choose to play in really is the companies. And then if you outgrow it over time as nested or a square, did you evolve, but it shouldn't feel like a pivot.

It should feel like an evolution you've written about this, but I want it to give the sort of the cliff notes version of the process that you hinted at at the start of our conversation to actually do this work. But does the process look somewhat similar for the work that you would do at the product level?

 let's say you launch your fifth product and the work you do around this, this topic of category design. Is it, is it quite similar to, at the very beginning when you're sort of doing it for the company and the initial product team?

 Yeah, I think it's really similar. I mean, I did this at square. I think we were like 150 people. Um, I was acting as a product marketer for the launch of their second hardware product and we did product positioning for the square stand and the way we positioned it, it was much more like a cash register than like mobile payment acceptance.

And so, yeah, it's the same process for a new product. Once you have multiple products, you often have company level positioning and then you have product positioning for each one of your products and they all have to play nice together. But the process that you run through is quite similar. 

 So looping back to what I was just sort of mentioning, uh, you've shared some of your frameworks and ideas around how to actually do this work, but I was hoping you could kind of give a quick summary and talk about it, maybe in a company that you've worked with or kind of the end to end process.

And a founder comes here and says, Hey, I actually do want to take this seriously. What, what should this process look like to land on, your overall, uh, positioning.

 Sure. So I've been using a pretty similar process for a number of years now, and actually just taught a course through Maven. That was a way to do the work that I've been doing with first round companies. One-on-one in more of a one to many, um, system, and it was a very similar process and the way that we ran through things in the course and the way that we run through things.

When I do engagements with first round companies, we always start with the company purpose. We start with, why are you here? And why should people care? And we define the company's purpose first. Um, there's been a little bit of backlash onto purpose and like, does it really matter? And do people care, it really matters as far as rallying your internal employees, if nothing else, but I believe it matters for everything.

Um, and so no one wants to remember two to three things like a mission and a vision and a purpose. We really distill it to one statement and we make a single purpose statement that makes people want to root for you and helps you make company decisions. 

The second thing we do is product positioning and product positioning is okay. So you're a company and you have this reason for being, and it's well articulated. And now, well, what's the product that you have. What is the thing that's coming to market? So the purpose exists on a 10 year horizon and your product positioning exists more on like an 18 month horizon.

So from the time, you know, usually you're a pre-launched company till, um, around the time that you would maybe be raising your series a that's like roughly an 18 month period, these days it's, it's probably even shorter than that, but that's the way I like to think about it. And this is what product do you have?

What does it do? What category is it? Why should people care? who are you playing up against? Who's the bad guy, you know, who loses when you win? uh, sometimes the, the loser is not another competitor and other startup, but an old way of doing things. And then we talk about your differentiation and your differentiation is what makes you unique that the competing alternative can not claim that also helps me believe the benefit.

And then step three is defining the company's personality. And the personality is how you show up, particularly in written copy, but also informs visual identity. Um, and sort of the feeling you get from the company. If the company were a person, what would it be like?

 And it gets everyone writing in the same way. And delivering a consistent look and feel and a consistent voice. And so those are like, for me, that's the minimum viable brand strategy. And one thing we didn't touch on that much in, in the positioning.

section is we really focus on who are you for And who you're for is I like to think of it as like concentric circles of audience.

So you have your Tam, your total addressable market. That's the biggest circle of people that you would ever really address and then narrowing in from there. So that each circle is contained in the larger one before it, till we get to an individual model user. And that's really who we're speaking to with our communication.

 then how did these different work streams then flow into this concept of category definition?

 yeah. A category definition is a part of positioning. So when we do positioning, one of the things that we work on, we work on your audience. We work on your benefit, your category, what you're up against and how you're different. Those are sort of all the components that go into positioning. And so category definition, I want you to be able to say company X is a Y, that does Z.

So what the is the Y it's a noun and you're playing in that now. And just like Gmail played in free web mail. And Amazon played in retail, bookseller, and Uber and Lyft played in rideshare. where are you playing? Give me a mental model for what I should think about when I think about your company.

And one of the things that comes up a lot, the first time I meet with founders, it usually takes them the half of the first meeting. So it's like 30 minutes to explain to me what the company does. And we would waste 30 minutes of a, what could have been an hour long working session with me, trying to understand what the company does.

So now one of the things I do when I work with a company is I give them a worksheet and force them to answer the stuff in written language. And then I can read it and come armed with the questions, um, that I have about the company. So it forces you to write down what do you do in plain English?

 And in this sort of early work of figuring out things like how to articulate your purpose. Is it, is it about volume of ideas and you start with just the most expansive list possible, and then it's a process of editing or, or at a more detailed level in each one of these work streams, what sort of the ideal way for a team, um, to go after them?

 sure. So taking purpose as an example, um, I have a framework for each of these things that I like to use, because it's really hard just to be like, good luck, brainstorm your purpose. And you'll know when you get there. Um, for purpose in particular, I didn't invent the framework. I borrowed it from Ogilvy and their purpose framework is called the big ideal.

And it's an exercise where you brainstorm all the things that are happening in the world that are relevant to you as a company. Um, I'll give you an example. We did this with ever-growing, which is a first round company. Uh, recently they just announced, and they're playing in the space of global warming and climate change.

And we made a long list of all the things that were relevant to their company. So it was everything from, um, I want to make changes to the way. That I know I can impact the carbon that I'm putting into the atmosphere, but everything I do feels like a drop in the bucket. So the things that your users might be saying, or that people might be saying to ideas like, um, wind and, uh, solar are sort of more established, uh, ways to have an impact on this, whereas carbon offsets or something that doesn't really feel as understood.

Uh, and ultimately we made this long list. It probably had, I don't know, 30 things on it. And the, the one we chose for the cultural tension or the what's happening in the world today, the Zeit Geist around the space they're playing was climate dynamism. And that idea captured, it feels like anything I do.

Isn't going to change the course of the destruction we're causing to our earth. It feels like everything I do is a drop in the bucket. Even if we made drastic changes at a policy level or a government level or a technology level, we're probably still fucked. And so that idea of climate dynamism was really what we were trying to tap into.

And then, so that long list goes on one side of the paper or a whiteboard or Google doc. And on the other side is your brand's best self. So when you do everything you say you're going to do. What does it look like? And so we came up again with a list of 25 or 30 ideas. This is, you know, w this was a brainstorm over zoom with the founders, but it's great on a whiteboard.

Uh post-its however you like to brainstorm. And that side of the page had like, oh, well, we're going to slow the warming of, of, uh, our planet, or, um, we're going to fund projects that discover new ways of capturing carbon. Uh, and so we had all these different ways of saying it. And ultimately we got to one that said, we're going to fund every project that removes CO2 from the atmosphere.

And that sounded like, oh, okay. We, we all had that eyes light up moment. And it was so on the left-hand side was climate doom ism on the right-hand side was this idea of funding, every project that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. And then at the intersection of those two ideas, we try to finish this statement for ever-growing.

The world would be a better place if this is all Ogilvy's framework, They did it for dove was a great example where they came up with this, um, w if women could feel good about their bodies for dove soap. And so we're doing the same exact process for, you know, a seed stage startup today and forever grow.

 We did this and, and with those ideas, and then we do another brainstorm. How would the world be a better place? And, you know, came up with probably a shorter list there, but it's still a, a decent one. And then we did a sort of second one where we just said we exist too. And we finished that sentence and we did a little brainstorm there. in the topics we've explored thus farHave you changed your mind or change the way that you approach either the tactics or the overall set of strategies that, that you've shared thus far?

 Um, I think it's working with so many companies over so many years has really just cemented getting the fundamentals right early on. So I think I do these exercises and I've come up with new ones and borrowed new ones and frameworks. And I think the more you give people structure to do things like brainstorm their purpose or think about their category, the more likely you are To land somewhere.

Good. Um, and so as far as changing the way I do it, I believe in it even more, I have some new tips and tricks and great examples and all of that, but I wouldn't say it's fundamentally shifted. I think it's because. Even more clear to me how, when you get this stuff right early on, it plays dividends. your website writes itself, right?

Your, your, your purpose is your about page, your product, positioning your category and benefit is your homepage. Your differentiation is you're usually how it works or your product details page. And rather than reinventing the wheel with every piece of marketing that you have to put out into the world, if you get these fundamentals right early on, that stuff becomes so much easier.

 To your point about tips and tricks in this sort of area, are there any more recent ones that we haven't discussed thus far

 Yeah, sure. So, um, I'll answer in two parts then some tips and tricks and some ex. So, on the purpose front, one of the tricks that I like to use is, let's say you're a 10 person company. And I asked all 10 people, why do you do what you do? Meaning your company, not your, your new individually.

And I get 10 different answers, right? Can we get a purpose where in three months, if I asked all 10 people, why it is you do what you do, I would get everyone saying the same thing. I worked at Google when it was, I think I joined at like 1300 people and every single person at the company. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And I recently worked with a founder, an ex Googler who left when they were 80,000 people.

And he said, still every single person there could say that. And that's pretty impressive to me. You know, you have a pretty good one when it really, has 80,000 people saying the same thing, 

 a lot of. Come to me with many catchphrases And, many little purpose statements or mission, vision values. and there's not that one statement.

 Once you have that purpose, there are a lot of ways that you use it.

 The first and foremost is always as a north star for decision-making. And if your purpose can't help you make decisions, it's not a good purpose.

I think ring did a great job with this. They exist to make neighborhoods safer for a long time. It was, uh, to reduce crime in neighborhoods and they shifted it to the positive, but it's basically the same idea.

And I heard Jamie, the CEO speak at a first round event a few years ago, and he talked so much about how that actually helped him make decisions and how that give him ammo to go to his board and push back on ideas that he wasn't happy with. sometimes it even goes so far. As tying that purpose back to product decisions you know, with ring again, they talked about the angle that the camera lens would capture. And 

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After helping to launch iconic products at Google and Square, Arielle Jackson has worked with hundreds of early-stage startups on brand strategy as First Round’s Marketer in Residence. Here are the most common early marketing mistakes that she sees.

6 brand strategy missteps to avoid — Arielle Jackson

Arielle Jackson has worked with hundreds of early-stage startups on brand strategy. Here are 6 common early marketing mistakes she sees.

After building hundreds of startup brands, Arielle Jackson shares 6 early marketing missteps to avoid

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Great Startups Deserve Great Brands — Build a Strong Foundation by Avoiding These Mistakes