3 Overlooked Essentials For Early-Stage Brand-Building and GTM Planning

In my experience as both an author and a CEO of Mandel Marketing, I’ve learned that building a brand and a go-to-market (GTM) strategy for an early-stage, funded company is much more nuanced than it often appears. Too often, founders and marketers get caught up in high-profile aspects like product features, PR stunts, or flashy advertising campaigns.

Now, let’s be honest: these things do have their place, of course; but here are three often-overlooked factors that can make or break your brand’s long-term success. In the whirlwind of launching a startup, especially one that’s been fortunate enough to secure funding, it’s easy to become laser-focused on scaling quickly. However, true growth doesn’t come just from sprinting out of the gate. You need a solid foundation, and that comes from brand values and consistency, customer alignment, and storytelling.

Brand Values and Consistency

A crucial aspect of building a brand is maintaining consistency across every touchpoint. It might sound basic, but it’s astonishing how many early-stage companies, especially funded ones in a rush to scale, forget this fundamental. Your brand is more than just a logo or a snappy tagline; it’s the sum of all the interactions a customer has with your company.

Why It Matters

Consistency builds trust, and trust builds loyalty. Research shows brands that present a consistent image across platforms can increase their revenue by 10-20%. So whether it’s the design on your website, the tone of your social media posts, or the messaging in your email marketing campaigns, everything should reflect your brand’s core values and mission.

How to Maintain Brand Consistency

• Establish Brand Guidelines: Brand guidelines serve as the cornerstone of consistency. These include your logo usage, color schemes, typography, and, most importantly, tone of voice. Early on, set these guidelines and ensure every team member, especially external agencies or freelancers, has access to and adheres to them.
• Internal Education: It’s not enough to just have a PDF with your brand guidelines sitting in a shared folder. Educate your team regularly, including non-marketing teams, about what your brand stands for and how it should be communicated. This is, in fact, one of the main reasons why salespeople find it challenging to integrate brand identity into their materials. So whether someone is writing a social post, onboarding a client, or building the product, the experience should feel cohesive.
• Technology Alignment: There’s a tendency for early-stage companies to embrace multiple tools—one for social media, another for email, another for sales automation. But be wary. Fragmentation of tools can lead to fragmentation in branding. Invest in a platform or set of tools that allows you to manage multiple channels in one place so that you can maintain brand control.

Brand consistency is your ally in building credibility. Without it, you’ll confuse your audience and dilute your messaging—two deadly sins in any competitive market.

Customer Alignment and Feedback

Many early-stage companies understand the importance of identifying their target audience. Of course they do–they wouldn’t get very far if they didn’t. However, many of them fail to evolve their customer profile as they gather more data. Startups are often rooted in assumptions – sometimes about the problem their product solves, and sometimes about who their product solves it for. But over time, as you interact with real customers, you gain deeper insights that should shape both your product and brand.

Listening to Early Adopters

Your first customers are gold mines of information, yet too often, companies treat them only as transactional opportunities. Instead, use them to refine your product-market fit. Think deeply about open-ended questions such as: Who are they really? What do they love most about your product? What are their pain points, and how do they describe them?

Incorporating Feedback Loops

• Surveys and Interviews: Actively engage your early adopters for feedback. Go beyond basic customer satisfaction surveys and dive into their emotional connection with your product. What made them choose you over competitors? How do they see your product fitting into their lives or businesses in the future? Believe them when they tell you what they think.
• Behavioral Data: Now look at how your customers are actually using your product. Often, there’s a gap between what people say they want and what they actually do. Sometimes it’s a gap between what you intended and what actually happens. Your user data can reveal behaviors that should inform not only product development but also the evolution of your messaging and positioning.

Adapting to Change

• Refine Your Buyer Personas: As you gather more information, be willing to pivot. Your original hypothesis about your target customer may have been off the mark, or it may need refinement. Regularly revisit your buyer personas and ask whether they still reflect your actual customers.
• Tailor Your Messaging: At our agency, we’re all about copywriting, and a crucial aspect to successful writing is understanding how different customer segments will resonate with different aspects of your brand. Once you’ve identified key customer groups, craft personalized messaging for each. Early-stage companies sometimes default to blanket marketing because of a lack of resources, but the best strategy is to personalize as much as possible.

Customer alignment is not just about understanding who buys your product, but also about continually evolving your product and messaging to fit their needs. In an age where consumers are more discerning and brand-loyalty is harder to win, failing to evolve is a quick way to lose relevance.

Storytelling and Emotional Resonance

Startups often try to differentiate themselves by focusing on features—“Our product is faster, more scalable, easier to use.” But the truth is, features are not what create long-lasting customer relationships. Features can be copied, improved upon, or become irrelevant as the market changes. What remains is the story behind your brand—the “why” that makes customers choose you over another company.

Why Storytelling Matters

Humans are wired for stories. It goes back to cave paintings: we connect emotionally to narratives.

Well, that emotional connection is what can make customers care about your product. As a startup, especially in the early stages, you may not have a long history or a portfolio of success stories to lean on. But what you do have is the origin of your brand, the passion that drove you to create it, and the vision you have for its future.

How To Tell A Story

• Authenticity: Your story should be real and rooted in the true reason your company exists. Avoid hyperbole or painting yourself as a hero. Instead, focus on the human aspect of why your product or service matters. A great example is Patagonia. Their commitment to environmentalism isn’t a marketing ploy—it’s woven into the fabric of their company, and their audience feels that authenticity.
• Customer-Centric Stories: Your product exists to solve a problem. Instead of focusing solely on your product’s benefits, tell the story of how it changed a customer’s life or business. These narratives build empathy and emotional resonance, which ultimately drives loyalty.
• Consistency: Just like your branding, your storytelling should be consistent. It should appear in everything from your website’s About page to your social media posts, to the way your sales team communicates with prospects. If you are constantly shifting your narrative, customers won’t know what to believe or why they should care.

Integrating Storytelling Into Your GTM Strategy

At Mandel Marketing, one thing I’ve consistently seen work across industries is to weave storytelling into every phase of our clients’ GTM strategy. From the top of the funnel (brand awareness) to the bottom (conversion), storytelling should be a common thread that ties a brand’s narrative to a customer’s needs. Whether through case studies, blogs, or videos, a brand’s story should resonate at every level of the customer journey.

Go Forth and Prosper!

Building a brand and go-to-market strategy for an early-stage, funded company is much more than just product marketing or launching flashy campaigns. It’s about creating a cohesive, authentic experience that aligns with your customers' needs and evolves with time.

Brand consistency ensures your audience knows who you are. Customer alignment ensures you’re building for the right people. And storytelling ensures you make an emotional connection that drives long-term loyalty. When you take these overlooked aspects into account, your brand’s foundation will be far stronger, and your go-to-market strategy will be positioned for sustainable success.

Phillip Scott Mandel

pmandel@mandelmarketing.com

CEO of Mandel Marketing, Managing Editor of Abandon Journal, and author of An MFA For Your MBA

www.mandelmarketing.com