Branding and culture for start-ups and scaleups: an announced dilemma.

I was pleased to be engaged with a relevant question about scale-ups: How to manage a brand strategy for those start-ups that are going into a scale-up process?

The potential issue here is not related to marketing strategies and tactics. What has triggered my will to share my point is the underrated link of brand with culture from the start-up status to that of scale-up.

In creating a company, it must be expected that initially, the funder/s transfer ideas to team members how things need to work, the implicit or explicit values, and the brand aligned with the culture and related values.

However, when things change quickly (scale-up), culture needs to move to another dimension because of the market, marketing and product strategies.

Suppose we do not take care at the beginning of how a brand transfers a company’s values. When new strategies need to be put in place to satisfy revenue and market share requirements, instead of aligning cultural values to the brand, we could risk a) working only on the brand b) or working on both from scratch (radical change).

My point is that a way to draft a parallel process with the rapid growth from start-up to scale-up of both brand and culture (values and beliefs) must be in place. There must be a tool to progressively adjust the mutating needs of the growth to the scale-up requirements before activating any other strategy and avoiding further pushed change activities for culture.