Brand Equity

Another entrepreneur recently mentioned to me that he thinks his startup is now achieving added success merely because they have been around long enough to receive inbound leads. I mentioned to him that I had noticed a similar trend with ArrayFire several years after we started.

I had noticed around year 3 that we didn’t have to work so hard to accomplish things. Our brand had naturally permeated out into our market and we had begun to reap those benefits. I have written previously about how that is related to slow persistence.

I read another post today by Tomasz Tunguz on the topic of brand equity. He mentioned:

When confronted with an important product or marketing or sales decision, if each member of a startup asks, how can we build our brand equity with this?, then a startup’s management team can rest easy knowing the company is building a long-term competitive advantage, a culture to recruit great talent, a loyal customer base and an asset of compounding value to the business. Even if they can’t measure it.

Brand equity is something I think about a lot for our business. I think we do a pretty good job at it relative to comparable companies and it has paid dividends over time.

What are your thoughts on brand equity?