How to Get Brand Buy-In

5 questions to understand your stakeholders (especially founders)

Happy Q4! If you liked my previous post, We Need to Talk about AI Branding, I’ve got a treat for you. This Thursday at 9am PT, I’m hosting a live, 45-minute Reforge session: How to Brand Your AI Product or Feature. You can save your spot here—bring your Qs!

We Need to Talk about AI Branding

Let’s get into today’s piece! I was torn on the title—I toyed with How to Work with Founders on Brand and 5 Questions to Understand Your Stakeholders (since the same rules pretty much apply, even if you don’t work in a founder-led company). But I’m especially speaking from my experience working in them, because founder-led situations can be notoriously precarious. These are my strategies for working with tech founders (and other executives) on brand initiatives, drawing from my experiences at Gusto, Brex, and Notion.

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Developing a brand is inherently subjective and abstract, making it particularly prone to scrutiny, bike-shedding, and second-guessing. To navigate this subjectivity and advance to later-stage brand work, we need to start with two things:

1. Impeccable agreement on basic brand foundations to serve as a basis for further decisions

2. A deep understanding of our stakeholders to tailor our approach (this post)

I wrote about those brand foundations in my recent post 📎 Why You Need a Corporate Strategy Summary (& Template). When you work in-house, just as important to figuring out who you’re trying to serve (your audience) is understanding who you need to be on board (your stakeholders).

Brand leaders manage a lot of stakeholders. The end product of your work serves customers, prospects, and investors, and if you could spend all day thinking about them, your job would be a lot easier. But a huge chunk of your job is to get internal buy-in with your brand’s decision makers—especially founders. While you aren’t building the brand for these stakeholders, they’re the ones you spend the most time managing around.

And founders, in particular, are a whole different breed. They’re visionaries, though just as often mired in the weeds as they are big-picture thinking. They’re getting pulled in a million directions and bombarded with advice from every angle. And they’re hard to say no to. As brand leaders, we need to recognize this reality. It doesn’t mean we roll over and let founders run roughshod over brand strategy, but it does mean we should take a tailored approach to this type of stakeholder (and other closely-involved execs). Listen carefully, empathize with their position, and be prepared to translate your brand expertise into their language of growth and vision. Below, I’ll get into the questions I use to build that empathy and to understand their language.

Before you jump in—a few weeks ago I published 10 Brand Rules for Founders. These are the aspects of brand-building that founders need to pay special attention to (or often get wrong). It’s good background reading before going into what I’ve learned over the years working in founder-led startups.

Start here: Name your stakeholders

Building a brand in-house is synonymous with managing stakeholders, budgets, and teams, all of which require continual alignment and constant buy-in—so before you even think about the audience you’re building your brand for (which is where all other brand work should start), it will serve you well to think first about your internal audience: your brand’s stakeholders, your company’s leadership. These are:

• Founders (and co-founders 🙃)

• Execs in your reporting chain or adjacent (Sales, Ops, Customer Experience, Revenue, etc.)

• Other key stakeholders—especially “hidden” influencers, like board members, advisors, and mentors who may be less visible than your executive team

If you subscribe to the idea that the strength of your brand is a direct reflection of the alignment your company has achieved, then you can see how understanding these stakeholders is a critical starting point to gaining that alignment.

The way you identify your brand’s greatest growth opportunities starts with understanding how your brand is discussed, understood, and prioritized internally. No brand-building work can be done effectively without alignment across the board from all the people who have a hand in defining, resourcing, or building the brand. More on this below.

Next: Figure out your pitfalls

What could go wrong? Where to start! 🥴 Before I go into the tactics I use to get to know my stakeholders, let’s make note of where you might fall into traps that derail work—or worse, erode trust in you as a leader, or (even more ridiculous) “belief” in brand as a function:

1. Assuming founders understand branding terminology: Don’t take for granted that founders are familiar with branding jargon, even the “basic” stuff. Check yourself, and check your agency partners—make sure you aren’t assuming people know what you mean by “brand architecture” or “brand pillars.” Be prepared to explain concepts in plain language and (importantly!) relate them to business outcomes.
   Honestly, this could be an entirely other post—the amount of brand jargon out there (brand promise, brand values, brand attributes, brand narrative, and a dozen others) has gotten so out of hand that I credit it, in part, with why our industry is less understood in tech as compared to product or “growth.”

2. Ignoring the founder’s emotional connection to the brand: Founders often have a deep personal investment in the brand. At moments it might feel like lip service, but otherwise not acknowledging or respecting this emotional tie can lead to resistance and conflict.

3. Presenting only the creative without the strategy: Jumping straight to copywriting and website headlines or paid ads imagery without first establishing the strategic foundation (what’s the basis for deciding something is “on strategy” or even “on brand”?) will definitely lead to subjective debates and misalignment.

4. Overlooking the founder’s risk tolerance: Brand initiatives often involve change, which can be perceived as risky. Not addressing the founder’s comfort level with risk upfront can lead to last-minute hesitation, budget refusals, or project cancellations, yay!

5. Trying to revolutionize everything at once: Similarly, changing “too many” brand elements simultaneously can overwhelm founders and lead to decision paralysis. You can be more strategic by introducing an intentional “order” to the changes and explaining why it’s necessary or beneficial to go in this order.

6. Not involving founders early enough: More so in early-stage companies, waiting too long to involve the founder can backfire if their input means significant changes late in the process. Or, they won’t understand what you’re doing and why they should even dedicate the time to giving you the feedback in the first place. Hello? *crickets*

7. Failing to manage scope creep: Without clear boundaries (again, upfront, but recognized throughout the process), founders might be the ones to continually add to the project scope, leading to delays and diluted focus. Competitors are moving fast and new features are the shiny object that can throw off everything you’ve been working toward if you don’t get ahead of this as a distraction.

So straightforward! 😅 The greatest challenge most brand operators and marketers will face is in neglecting to connect brand initiatives to business goals (or at least being perceived this way)—or connecting your work to what your founder/stakeholders care about most. Your job, at every point of the way, is to articulate how brand work only supports and furthers overall company objectives.

Figuring out what your stakeholders care about will give you the insight you need to frame your work accordingly, setting you up to win the alignment you need to land your brand strategy.

5 Questions to Understand Your Stakeholders

Use these to evaluate how your founder, executive team, manager, other leaders, and broader organization think about the brand. Do this as a desk exercise or or a whiteboard session with your immediate team or manager.

1. Who are the brand’s key decision-makers? Whose opinion influences theirs?

Identify the obvious players (founder, CEO, head of marketing, head of design) and the background players whose opinions carry weight. For example:

• At Brex, a fintech company serving heads of finance departments, our CFO’s opinion mattered a lot more than it might at other companies.

• There may be hidden influences—which board member or tech influencer has your founder’s ear? There could be in-depth conversations influencing your founder’s opinions that you might not be as privy to.

2. What’s their background? What do they care about most—professionally and personally?

Understanding key decision makers’ main motivations helps you get ahead of potential pitfalls and areas of confusion or pushback. Things I think about:

• Is the decision-maker a first-time founder (or executive)? Second, third time, already super successful? Varying degrees of ego or personal taste to consider.

• Are you working with a newly-hired C-suite executive eager to prove their value? The best way to involve them is proactively—bring them up to speed before they can jump too far ahead with maybe-derailing suggestions.

3. What are their strengths and weaknesses? How much experience do they have with branding?

You’ll probably have to spend some (maybe a lot) amount of time on internal education. Per the pitfall above, be mindful of using or avoiding brand-related jargon, especially if you’re starting from a place where there’s inherent “brand allergy.” 🤧 Understanding their experience level helps you tailor your approach:

• For those new to branding, foundational taste-making exercises might be critical. Notion’s founder and CEO, Ivan Zhao, comes from a strong design background—in his case, he’d already developed strong tastes and design opinions. For others, it might be the first time they’re tasked with thinking about why an image or color works or what it means in the competitive landscape.

• Working in a more established business? How much can you build on previous brand iterations? Do you know the potential politics at play? Do you have as much context as possible about why previous brand decisions were made? Which of those are loosely held and which are precious? Knowing the difference will change your approach about revising them.

4. What do they care about most? What does the board (or equivalent) care about most?

I can’t stress this enough: Be a parrot. 🦜 Speak their language. Mirror your founders’ and stakeholders’ language as much as possible when stating goals, desired outcomes, and problems you’re addressing—tie everything back to what they’re trying to achieve with the business or reputation or the customer segment they’re trying to win. This alignment makes it easier to get buy-in and show the relevance of your branding initiatives. Part of this is making your founder feel like your brand suggestions were their idea. 😗

5. What are the frequent sticking points?

Identify what makes decision-makers hesitant or resistant when discussing brand-related topics. When they clam up, is it during…

• abstract strategy discussions?

• debates about colors and visuals?

• new campaign proposals? (Maybe they don’t understand “campaign” the way you do?)

• budgeting or headcount conversations?

Why is this area sensitive or difficult? Get the context. Understanding these sticking points lets you anticipate and plan for them before you get tripped up. When you can address these concerns proactively, it always helps to acknowledge them candidly and address them upfront. This also shows your founders that you’re not going to get avoidant when things get subjective. You’re willing to engage head-on until you get the clarity you both need.

Once you’ve taken yourself through this audit or exercise, these are my best tips for working with founders in particular:

1. Understand how they want to work: Ask outright how they see themselves being involved in the process. Ask what they might have done differently at previous companies (if applicable).

2. Be prepared with data: Wherever possible, use desk research, hard evidence, competitive insights, and customer feedback to ground your opinions or recommendations in concrete facts. Lean on other teams to be your allies here and help round out your story.

3. Build a shared foundation: Develop and agree upon basic brand foundations that can serve as a basis for further decisions. This is where the corporate strategy framework comes in—it’s truly step one when it comes to any discussions about your brand.

   📎 Why You Need a Corporate Strategy Summary (& Template)

By understanding your stakeholders and tailoring your approach, you can navigate the subjective world of brand development more effectively. Alignment is 90% of your job—and alignment at the leadership level is crucial for successful brand initiatives. If you put in the “soft” work to understand your stakeholders upfront, you’ll be better equipped on all the “hard” decisions, and you’ll be that much more set up for success. 🥬

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What are your tips for working with founders or other VIP stakeholders?

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