It’s not about you*.

As a startup owner, your business is your dream.

You came up with it, shaped it and put it out into the world. It’s personal. 

So it’s tempting to treat the brand like an extension of your self: a mouthpiece for what you want the brand to say. A broadcast medium.

The most important thing to realise about your brand is that it doesn’t really belong to you. To succeed, a brand has to be a listening medium.

It’s got to be based on the needs of your customers. Shaped around their dreams, and talking to them in a language that they understand. 

81% of consumers need to trust a brand to buy from it, and increasingly, sales rely on recommendations from friends and family.

So if anything about your brand means something to you, but not to your audience, it’s not doing its job, and your business won’t feel relevant to them.

That goes for everything from the name, to the choice of influencers.

The importance of your brand is even greater when you receive feedback - it can be useful that it’s the brand responding, not you! It’s a valuable buffer, and it can give you an angle to turn a negative into a positive, as Astronomer showed brilliantly recently.

So unless you’re selling to people just like you, take a careful look at what your brand is saying, and how it’s saying it.

The best brands give their customers what they want. Whether you like it or not.

*Unless you’re talking about personal branding, in which case, er, it is.