by Stevy Tewel
When Arielle Jackson started her career at Google, one of her mentors taught her to embrace the fact that marketing is a highly tactical function. To this day, she loves sweating the small stuff — mostly because it all adds up to be big stuff. That’s how she helped home WiFi startup eero pull in $2.5 million in sales in a fortnight via a successful pre-order campaign. All the little stuff — from the details of eero’s website copy to the subtleties of its customer communications — added up. Rainmakers are known for their storm, but Jackson pays mind to each droplet.
While at Google, Jackson had spent nearly a decade marketing various products, including Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Voice. As Director of Retail Partnerships and Marketing Programs at Square, she managed distribution partnerships that put its products in 30,000 retail stores. At Cover, she led marketing and communications before Twitter acquired the startup. Since, Jackson’s set out on her own to help startups better grasp and broadcast their brands.
At First Round’s recent CEO Summit, Jackson outlined a simple, but powerful framework that she’s used with more than 30 startups to nail the purpose, position and personality of their brands. After working through these frameworks, founders have consistently remarked how it’s helped crystallize their identify and direction — and that they wish they would’ve done it sooner. Here, Jackson shares those brand marketing exercises.
Let’s get one thing straight about brand.
It’s a bit meta, but to Jackson, branding itself could stand to be re-branded. “If the initial impressions of the founders I’ve worked with are any indication, there’s a healthy contingent of entrepreneurs out there who think anything involving brand or marketing is complete fluff and a waste of time,” says Jackson. “I’ve found that this belief often springs from a misconception: that a brand is equivalent to a logo. It’s not true. A brand is who people think you are. The more you get your marketing fundamentals in order early on, the more control you’ll have over that brand.”
Deeper than a logo, a brand draws from ideals not initiatives. “Take Volvo. Most of you immediately think ‘safety.’ That’s because Volvo has spent the better part of the last 70 years trying to own this word safety. And it’s not just pure marketing,” says Jackson. “Volvo lives, breathes and dies by safety. In the late ‘50s, before seat belts were even required in cars, they invented the 3-point safety harness that all of us wear when we drive today. Rather than patent it and use it only to make Volvo cars safer, they gave the technology away. That’s how obsessed they are with safety. The way that they market and message safety is very much in line with their product belief and their core principles as a company.”