7 Principles of Great Startup Marketing Strategies
- 7 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 36 minutes ago
"Strategy … " says The Marketing-Man-Without-a-Face.
"What's the strategy of this marketing campaign?" he asks, hiding behind those 8 letters like a murderer who, unconvinced of his ethos, will hold knife in one hand and Bible in the other.
The-Marketing-Man-Without-a-Face was blessed with a special gift.
And it was the result of this special gift, as the doctor had explained, and not some extraordinary event like the one-eyed cat that came coincidentally out of the birth canal, that made his facelessness an origin of his own making.
For the thoughts, ideas, and perspectives, all those very individual makings that make up the face of one marketer and distinguished his makings from another, were nowhere to be found.
The-Marketing-Man-Without-a-Face had been a conscious creation of unconscious making.
In startup marketing, "strategy" is meaningless without the principles that give it substance.
We've all met The Marketing-Man-Without-a-Face.
In your career, he may have been a client or manager, maybe even a whole department, that rarely seemed to have a rhyme or marketing reason behind their marketing strategy.
It's a world we, as startup marketers, never want to settle for.
That's why this Stupid article is about principles. The substance behind strategy.
The purpose of these principles is to more clearly define startup marketing strategies. To shed light on why certain strategies could make sense for you.
To explore this, we'll learn 7 principles from my Mister Stupid's Original Marketing Principles.™
Together, we'll:
Look at examples of startup marketing strategy.
Define the principles behind the strategy.
Identify how these principles benefit you.
7 Principles Behind Great Startup Marketing Strategies
Jump to a principle
1. The Impact of Marketing Mentorship
Before “Stupid For Startups,” several of my prior brand names failed to resonate.
When I reached my breaking point, coinciding with 37 beers at my local pub, I surrendered myself to the truth about my creative crisis: I needed help.
Coincidentally, at the time, a brand strategist from Los Angeles, whom I had admired for a few years, had shared that he was offering his first mentorship program.
I signed up on the spot. However, during the first minutes of our mentoring call, he gave me some unexpected feedback about the name of my consulting brand.
"It sounds like a 16 year-old girl writing online," he remarked.
Today, I can laugh. Especially, after he ended up being a great guy who was just simply very direct. But the fact of the marketing matter, is that I allowed myself permission to hear painful truths. And the best advice doesn't always come as you hope.
It sometimes comes in the form of a Zoom call and a bitch-slap across the cheek of what's most important to you. Ultimately, that moment got me writing under a new name people connect with. And that bitch-slap? It changed the trajectory of my consulting career.
In the movie that gave us 121 minutes we didn’t need of Mark Zuckerberg, you'll find the inspiration for "The A Million Dollars Isn't Cool Principle."
Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, is the asshole who bitch-slaps Zuck and The Facebook into thinking bigger.
2. Finding Early-Adopters
Do people hate change? Love comfort? Or do the majority simply need the societal stamp of approval before ditching the horse and buggy for the Ford Model T?
Don't die wondering. But if you were to ask Mister Stupid, he'd recommend hedging your bets on micro-culture marketing. Or, what I refer to as "The Internet Killed the Shopping Mall Principle"
The principle states:
“Startups who embrace micro-culture marketing enhance their ability to acquire consumers via early-adopter audiences.”
Early-adopters in the startup sense are:
• Subgroups within society of an ultra-progressive leaning that tend to deviate from the status quo in their embrace of new ideas.
The best example is the plant-based meat brand, Heura, parking their ad truck in front of the Barcelona Medical School on exam day. As potential early-adopters, these future doctors are likely to share ultra-progressive dietary beliefs.
The Internet Killed the Shopping Mall Principle is a reminder to prioritize those who recognize your value today—not the future mainstream audience you hope to grow into.
At Stupid For Startups, I need early-adopters, too.
However, they weren't my corporate connections on LinkedIn (duh). Nor famous startups like AirBnB or Stripe who didn't need publicity (obviously).
They were upstarts like Seapoint with founders like Sean Mullaney who are active participants in their LinkedIn marketing strategy. He's an example of an early-adopter who saw value in Stupid For Startups content.
3. Marketing-Against-the-Mean
Founded as a startup credit card, I spent two years as a copywriter at Capital One and learned a lot about marketing.
What makes them different from other banks I've written for is how they defy their industry standard.
For example, Capital One is famous for collaborating with iconic celebrities to find the comic relief in banking. Something that was unheard of. They've also become synonymous with sporting events such as March Madness because of relentless brand sponsorships and memorable marketing campaigns.
Hell. Even randos would parrot back the "What's in your wallet" slogan to me when I told them I wrote for Capital One.
For these reasons, this exemplifies the core of Mister Stupid's Original Marketing Principle: The Rebel With A Cause Principle.
It states that:
"When entering a traditional product category, the success of every startup marketing program lies in its ability to defy that industry's standard."
Or what we can also refer to as "Marketing-Against-the-Mean."
4. Product of the (Marketing) Environment
I've come to believe that you can tell how well a brand is doing by listening to one of the many speaking events they book for their brand officer throughout the year.
"Ohh, that all makes sense now..." is a common reflection upon attendance. As the brand officer, who, struggling to produce even a shadow of what could be considered individual thought, closes in on the Guinness Records for most buzzwords uttered in a 60-minute presentation.
It's not uncommon that many marketing leaders struggle to express a distinctive point of view. It's also not their fault. Not always.
Marketing is an industry that, by nature, is vulnerable to groupthink. Ideas thrive when they satisfy the demands of popular opinion. Creative can capture more eyes if only it hijacks the right fad or trend.
But that, as we know, is not the recipe of a leader. But a follower.
And in a creative business where shared thinking is the only way to get buy-in about the very things you create. Conformity is not just contagious, but advantageous. And the marketing mean multiplies.
Followers attract other followers. Risk-averse breeds more risk-averse. Boring ideas feel comfortable around other boring ideas.
The You Are What You Hire Principle speaks for itself. The personalities you hire, their traits, their thoughts, or lack thereof, will permeate into the marketing.
God help us, if we were to hire boring marketers—then not expect boring marketing in return.
Stupid Example #1
The hypothesis behind The You Are What You Hire Principle was tested when I listened to Chief Brand Officer, Marc Mentry, speak at Capital One.
He's known for having a polarizing point of view that can be unfiltered, even unpredictable in his brand all-hands meetings. 'You never knew what you were going to get,' another creative had warned me.
But that's what made it so interesting.
Is it any surprise that the brand in which this polarizing leader presides—creates great advertising?
5. One Big Hairy Change
When a German courier plane got lost and crash-landed in Belgium after the outbreak of World War 2, the Allies discovered the secret plans for the invasion of France.
That left two options for the German Army High Command:
Make several small changes to the original attack: Such as altering troop movements or tank pincers, additional air support, or even modifying the timing of the attack.
Make one big change to the original attack: Such as drive a modern army with tanks and mechanized equipment through the impassable forest terrain of the Ardennes Forest.
The Germans did the latter, and what was predicted to be a drawn-out, meat-grinder conflict like that of World War 1—ended in just six weeks.
Why do I tell this story?
I share it because of the fantastical misconception that refuses to die in millions of marketing departments across the world: That if we make a lot of small changes we can expect them to accumulate into big results.
No, you will merely hold-the-line.
Nothing makes me feel like I got into the wrong career more than when I sit in a Creative Meeting of a brand that isn't relevant. And doesn't make good marketing that makes people think. And the only question someone can summon is, "Are we sure we want to put that period right there?"
If your startup marketing isn't where it wants to be. If you're not the market leader you set out to become. Or the challenger that's taking advantage of the market leader's missteps.
No small moves or changes. No matter how many you make, will bring the big sweeping, strategically sound impact you dream about
(I was sure about not putting that period right there)
6. Own-Able Assets
In my first paid gig, I was a one-man-marketing-department at a 17-person company in Washington, DC.
There was an Italian deli down the street that reminded me of home. And whenever I got that shit-I-think-I-may-get-fired feeling in my gut, I'd go there to nuke my depression with their famous pastrami-on-rye sandwich.
Luckily, I was very young, and my artery walls held out amidst the onslaught of cholesterol just as I started figuring out something very important about marketing.
At the time, this 17-person company was one of the only staffing companies branded as strictly “nonprofit staffing."
However, despite having this differentiator, instead of Marketing-Against-the-Mean (#3), they fell into the trap of marketing the way everyone believed a staffing company should. Something best described as either very corporate, or very functional marketing.
Then a day came when everything changed.
I had read a message on our LinkedIn. A candidate for our firm had asked where she could get her hands on one of our brand swag items: a coffee mug with our purple branded font and orange heart that said, "I 🧡 LOVE MY JOB."
Over the next several months, the same question came up several more times.
After that telltale, we made our big hairy decision to strategically brand the entire shebang around this little coffee mug. This little coffee mug that became a little character in the marketing. A sort of marketing mascot brimming with feeling and fulfillment.
It was that universal symbol in marketing that could make even your mother who knew nothing about marketing, relate.
As a result, this little coffee mug served as a strategic filter for every message we'd create. Anytime any piece of communications sounded even remotely corporate or felt like the status quo of staffing—we'd ask, "Does this message say I 🧡 LOVE MY JOB?"
If not? Delete. Delete. Delete.
50-thousand-new-followers-on-LinkedIn later, as the marketing doctor had ordered, I confessed in bitter sweetness to the Italian deli man that he was now looking at "a pastrami-free man."
P.S. You can find this pastrami sandwich at Loeb's Deli on 17th Street Washington, DC (Farragut Square)
Conversely to this principle of brand assets, if you're one of the 5.2 million people who follow Robert Half on LinkedIn, you'll notice they get surprisingly good engagement for the big stale corporation that they unabashedly are.
But if you strip away LinkedIn likes. If you take away the trends they must constantly (shamelessly) jump on to get them. What do you have left?
Life is easy when you can rely on your riches. No doubt. Startup marketers aren't afforded this luxury.
That's why we must think in terms of brand assets. Just like that coffee mug, it's the one thing we can own and control and unabashedly exploit.
7. Startup Child Stars — RIP
That time eventually comes when the happy-go-lucky smile goes out of style.
For every child star at the peak of his powers, what lies ahead is inevitable: Children grow up. Innocence is lost. Interests change.
What happens next? Does the child star, now an adult, continue to perform the same kiddish act before the empty seats? Or perhaps, after the costly stint in rehab in the Arizona desert they turn to the adult world of entertainment in the San Fernando Valley?
Paradoxically, it's a similar parallel to what you may see with startups who outgrow their marketing phases.
For example, those who build awareness in the Early-Stage will struggle if they can’t evolve that functional marketing into emotional marketing in the Growth Stage.
And likewise, those who cannot curtail that emotional marketing into a broader message capturing a wider net, will fail to meet the demands of the Late-Stage.
Here's an example of DASH Water and how their marketing messaging has shifted accordingly.
Congratulations.
In a world of squirrel-like attention span.
You've finished this Stupid article.
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