Minimum Viable Marketing

This question showed up on Quora: What does start up branding mean for an early stage company? Is it just picking a name and a logo? I have been asked this question from start ups before. There are also some similarities when an established company is piloting a new product. I wrote a short answer on Quora and then got more questions. So I answered them all in the spirit that it might help engineers and founders bring their amazing ideas to the world. I hope so.

The Brand:

Branding isn't just a logo. A logo or an ad may capture the meaning of a brand, but it can't create it.

A brand's meaning is created by every touch point a person has with a brand. So we have to make sure the people who are responsible for delivering those experiences -- employees -- understand our brand values. They have to believe. We have to believe.

I have found that start ups and their founders have audacious dreams to change the world that can make a great brand ideal.

Google started out to "democratize the world's information." Square wants to "change the way people do business." Kiva wants to "connect people through lending to alleviate poverty." Method wants to "make products that work, for you and for the planet." Pinterest is trying to "connect everyone in the world with the 'things' they find most interesting."

People don't pull all nighters at Square to process payments. They could do that at Paymentech. Square employees want to change the world. They are inspired by a leader who is trying to. You can feel it in everything they do: their design, pricing policy, tweets, plus more. The logo and name are a white square -- very generic -- which makes this point even more powerfully.

Revival Post: Silvia Lagnado is One of My Marketing Heroes

This interview with Silvia Lagnado has so much wisdom for big brand marketers. I often talk about the future of marketing and the possibilities, but I wanted to revive this early post because these lessons are timeless. The piece by Roy Young talks about the science and magic of what a marketer does. Very practically, it helps marketers think about their role and how to move the machine: "marketing marketing" inside big companies to get amazing work out the door...

Silvia Lagnado is one of my marketing heroes. She worked at Unilever for many years shepherding the Dove brand. She created the magic of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty with her team (who she is quick to recognize). I have had the pleasure of meeting her. She is as authentic, as passionate and as smart as you would expect.

I have learned as much from what she did at Dove as how she did it. She talks about "marketing marketing" in businesses. She makes the often misunderstood role of marketers as inspirers, interpreters and creators accessible to others, backed by her serious analytical and business chops.

This is a classic interview from 2006 conducted by Roy Young. You can see that she really listens to customers and cares. She energizes people around a bigger idea. Thank you Roy Young for capturing this moment in time. He interviewed her while researching his book on "marketing marketing." Out of respect to the source, please check it out on MarketingProfs. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Profile of a Marketing Champion: Unilever's Silvia Lagnado

by Roy Young

Published on October 31, 2006

Silvia Lagnado, new group vice-president at London-based Unilever, embodies marketing championship—in particular, the ability to "span silos" by building bridges between marketing and her company's many other functions to generate cash flow. She heads a team devoted to "brand development," including conceptualizing new products and creating advertisements, packaging, and marketing strategies.

In her daily operations, she interacts with Unilever's finance, supply chain, research and development, and human resources departments. She also collaborates extensively with the many far-flung brand-building teams of salespeople and marketers operating around the world to bring the division's offerings to market.

Silvia says the most effective way to "market marketing" in an organization is to make it very personal for staff in other key positions. She advises: "Have people think about which brands they themselves really respect and which products they love—then ask them what has made them think and feel that way. They will likely discover that a marketer's efforts are behind their feelings of respect and love."

What follows is part of an interview I conducted with her to learn what makes her a Marketing Champion.

* * *

Roy Young: Tell me a bit about your background. Did you come up through the typical marketing ranks? Or was your path to where you are now more diverse?

Silvia Lagnado: I joined Unilever in 1986, in Brazil, after getting a degree in civil engineering. But I've always worked in marketing and brand development, and the work has taken me all over the world—Brazil, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and the United States.

RY: In your view, what skills have been most important to your ability to succeed on the job?

SL: I'd say it's hard work, the ability to combine strong analytical skills with intuition, the courage to take risks, integrity, and the ambition to do good work.

RY: Of all the groups with whom you and your team interact, which relationships are the most likely to experience some tension?

SL: My team's relationship with the brand-building groups is most likely to experience some tensions and complications. The brand builders are under enormous pressure to deliver our products to market every day, to both distributors and consumers. They need product mixes on time and in full from my team. If we don't have a good relationship with them, they may start perceiving us as uncommitted to the work.

RY: What steps do you take to construct a bridge between your team and the brand builders?

SL: I've found that aligning both sides behind a compelling vision is crucial. If we can both get emotionally attached to the vision—and agree on where we want to take our brands, why this is an exciting space, and how we plan to succeed there—each group can look beyond its own pressures to the more important, higher-level goals.

Your Marketing Career

"65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet." Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University, The Atlantic. New technology, business models, processes, company cultures and many other factors are making this true.

At the same time, young people are getting incredible power and opportunity. You can create influence through the quality and quantity of your connections socially, academically, and professionally--and how you can activate those relationships for the things that are meaningful to you.

When you combine these two facts, new marketers face unprecedented opportunity. But it will require a level of awareness of this context, industriousness, and charting your own path in order for you to realize your potential and achieve what you can't even imagine yet.

It's exciting, but an important change. Those before you, the senior marketing leaders, can't necessarily help you plan your course based on their paths. (Respectfully, they may not fully realize this change yet themselves...) So knowing when to make a traditional decision vs. forge your own choice will be important. Knowing when humbly to eat your oatmeal and when to skip breakfast will be a critical skill. Be aware and be intentional.

Think about what you love, think about what you hate and think about what transferable skills you want to learn. This can be an amazing filter for jobs. Think about roles in terms of industry skills and not company-specific titles. Once you find the job(s) that fit your filter criteria, start working your connections and industriousness to get an introduction. You might just surprise yourself what will happen. Stop guessing or resume building what you think you need and directly apply for the job you want. They'll tell you what you need if there are skill gaps and otherwise, you may just get it. This is non-traditional MBA thinking. Stop worrying about your job 5 years out. At most, think about the job you want after the next one and if this next job keeps you on that path.

Finally, industriousness. You may find the curiosity and ambition that got you into school are more important for crafting your career than many of the lessons you will learn in it. Be an autonomous life learner. Don't wait for your company to offer training or a class. Log on and start doing yourself. Tinker and try. Knowing the core marketing and branding skill sets will be more important than ever. Such as: listening and anticipating on behalf of customers for the development of new products, distribution to make it easy to learn about about and access them, the experience you create in their delivery and service, plus how you communicate about them. Marketing (aka branding) can be the meaning that flows through it all. Respect these skills and learn them faster. Find people who can teach you sooner. Ask them now.


There is an emerging battery of writing on the changing role of marketing. As my own role merges social media, marketing, product and service--the old labels seem too limiting. I focus a lot on this, including the post Marketing is a Tax. For a really thoughtful look about how this ambiguity applies to the marketing function, please read: Building a New Agency OS by Mel Exon the Managing Partner and Founder of BBH Labs (@melex). I discovered the original quote from Cathy Davidson from Mel, one of my on-going must reads. In addition, I recommend Rishad Tobaccowala's piece on The Five Keys to Marketing in 2012.
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Added January 20, 2012
Fantastic article by Seth Godin on this topic:

"Now that the industrial economy is over, you should forget about doing things just because it's assigned to you, or "never mind the race to the top, you'll be racing to the bottom."

However, if you're different somehow and have made yourself unique, people will find you and pay you more, Godin says.

Instead of waiting around for someone to tell you that you matter, take your career into your own hands. In other words, don't wait for someone else to pick you and pick yourself! If you have a book, you don't need a publisher to approve you, you can publish it yourself. It's no longer about waiting for some big corporation to choose you. We've arrived at an age where you choose yourself."

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Added April 10, 2012
Interesting article today on Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman's new book "The Start Up of You." I haven't read the book yet. But it appears to cover many of these same concepts. The book has actions and next steps to help rather than just diagnosing the changes. Here is a link to the article.


"The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true" -- Ben Casnocha.