Brand Building for Growth
For startup founders and teams who want to build a high-affinity brand.
The kind that makes you defensible and turns your customers into brand advocates.
Meaning: lower customer acquisition costs, higher conversions, and greater lifetime value.
We cut out all the fluff from the branding process, so you can get right to the steps of building a growth-driven brand.
Course Overview
In Brand Building for Growth, you’ll learn the specific steps you can take to build a startup brand strategically, to drive loyalty and sales.
Brand is often seen as abstract or conceptual, but in this course (unlike others on brand), you’ll see that brand can be very concrete. There are actions you can take, exercises you can do, and tactics you can apply.
And we share the most effective ones.
Instructor Ian Martins, who’s helped dozens of startups use brand to scale sustainably, will guide you through our 3-part framework for strategic brand building for growth. It starts with taking a customer-centric approach, moves through analysis of your category landscape, and culminates with the steps of actual brand creation.
Here’s a sample of what you’ll learn how to do:
- Clarify and articulate your brand purpose
- Create research-backed profiles of your ideal customer personas
- Fill out competitor tables that reveal your true points of differentiation
- Nail your positioning to gain control over how you’re perceived in the market
- Create a mission statement that conveys why your audience should care
- Back up that mission with vision, values, and convictions
- Define your distinct, un-stealable brand persona, voice, and story
- Combine all your coursework into a brand book to guide your entire team
In the interest of cutting out all the “fluffy” parts of brand, we designed the course to be as concise as possible. In 16 bite-sized videos and 6 projects, you’ll learn everything you need to know to create a high-leverage brand strategy.
The kind that builds audience trust, differentiates your company, and stimulates growth.
Cheat Sheet and Projects
Is Brand Building for Growth right for you?
You have a vision, but don’t know how to turn it into a brand that consumers will love
You know your company is special—but struggle to make the world see it that way
You’re at a startup, so you don’t have months to spare on brand building
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You don’t want to spend five figures on an agency that doesn’t know your business like you do
You need all the outcomes of a growth-driven brand strategy, from better conversion rates to higher retention
You want to control your company’s perception—not let the competition define you
What you’ll be able to do after completing this course
Without a killer brand strategy in place, you won’t build trust and emotional resonance with your target audience. And if your prospects don’t trust your company and connect with it emotionally, they won’t buy.
Plus, without the growth acceleration you’d get from a remarkable brand, you’ll have a harder time acquiring and retaining customers.
How do you create a remarkable brand? We can help.
See what our students are saying
Meet your instructor
Ian Martins
Ian Martins is the Managing Partner at Bell Curve, our creative growth agency. He’s helped businesses like Tumblr, Stacker, and Mikra develop their brands and grow.
Before joining Bell Curve, Ian helped launch the award-winning creative agency Abacus, where he worked with many founders to build their brands and take them to market. He got his start in advertising as an account manager, working on a portfolio of over 30 brands for Procter & Gamble and launching campaigns for Gillette, Always, and more.
Course Syllabus
Chapter 1: What is brand?
Learn the basics of brand strategy. Understand why it’s important to take an 80/20 approach to brand for growth, focusing on the 80% of brand building that drives real business performance, and not the 20% that won’t move the needle.
You’ll dive right into your first interactive, hands-on project. You’ll consider your own relationship with brands, uncovering a deeper understanding of brand meaning.
Chapter 2: Define your Human Truth
Follow a 2-step process to find and understand your ideal customers.
Learn about the mistakes we’ve seen other companies make time and again when building customer profiles, so you don’t make the same ones.
We’ve simplified the consumer research process so you can efficiently build a customer-centric brand.
Chapter 3: Define your Category Truth
Differentiate your brand in the minds of customers.
You’ll learn how to conduct high-ROI competitor research that factors in all the alternatives your prospects might consider, not just the obvious ones like your direct competitors.
Then you’ll do an exercise to position your company in its best possible frame of reference, to highlight the points of differentiation that matter most to your target audience.
Chapter 4: Define your Brand Truth
Here’s where you’ll get into the real work of brand building for growth. You’ll learn how to craft elements like:
- A brand story that uses tried-and-true storytelling techniques
- A vision for your company’s future
- A mission statement that articulates why your audience should care about what you do and why you do it
- A brand persona that will make all your campaigns both consistent and compelling
And more.
Chapter 5: Maintain your brand
Once you’ve built your brand, you need to maintain it, even as everything is changing around—and possibly within—it.
- Consumer needs, tastes, and behaviors shift over time.
- Competitors, products, and industries come and go.
- Your company will evolve as it matures.
We provide guidance on how to continuously adapt alongside your consumer, category, and cultural landscapes.
Chapter 5 also covers brand measurement, including the metrics we recommend tracking to gauge brand success.
If you follow the steps in this course, you should start to see improvement in key metrics.
Ready to grow?
Brand Building for Growth
Build a remarkable brand.
$
199
$
199
This Sprint offers:
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Lifetime access to course content: We iterate on our Sprints to ensure they maintain a high level of quality and effectiveness.
Clear-cut, actionable projects: Step-by-step projects guide you through the application of what you've learned, allowing you to walk away with tangible results.
Go at your own pace: Sprints are pre-recorded and self-paced, so you can fit them into your busy schedule. Tune in anytime, anywhere.
14-day refund guarantee: If you're not happy with the Sprint for any reason, let us know within 14 days, and we'll give you a full refund.
Have questions? We’ve got answers
Am I a fit?
We built this Sprint for startup founders and teams. That means you’re a great fit if:
- You’re at a small or early-stage startup with no formal brand strategy in place
- You have little to no brand strategy experience
- Your company is either B2B or B2C
If you’re at a large company with an established brand, or if you’re a super advanced brand marketer, you’ll get less out of taking this course. The focus here is on brand building, not brand optimization or reinvention. That said, you could still be a fit for this course if you’re interested in learning how to build a brand from scratch. Even advanced practitioners should go back to the basics sometimes.
How much does the Sprint cost?
The regular price is $199. We want our Sprints to be as accessible as possible to startups.
Is there a refund policy?
You bet! If you aren’t happy with the course for any reason, let us know within 14 days and get a full refund.
How long does it take?
In under 5 hours, you can watch all the videos in this course and read through all 6 projects. Doing that will tell you everything you need to know to facilitate a high-impact brand strategy process.
Completing all 6 projects will take longer. You’ll probably want to spend time working on your brand, thinking about it, and talking to your peers and colleagues. You may decide to form a “brand committee” to work through your brand strategy. How long that takes will depend on your startup’s unique circumstances and needs.
How long will I have access to the course material?
Forever!
How is this course different from other brand-building courses?
Other brand-building courses tend to fall into one of two camps.
- On one end of the spectrum, some brand courses focus on theory. They tell you why you need a brand, but they dance around how to build it. Even their frameworks are more conceptual than doable.
- On the other end of the spectrum, some courses turn brand into a checklist. Define your brand voice, check. Create a color palette, check.
But brand isn’t either (1) fuzzy concepts or (2) a checklist. To do it right, you need a combination of strategy and specificity.
For instance, you have to understand the strategic importance of positioning your brand. And you also have to know how to do it.
Although our course is heavy on execution, beneath each tactic is a proven strategy. It’s a strategy that’s helped many other companies, and it can help yours too.
Will I create a logo?
It’s beyond the scope of this course to get into actual graphic design work. So although we discuss elements like your logo, colors, fonts, icons, and imagery, we don’t get into step-by-step design guidance. Instead, we share tool recommendations, important fundamentals of quality brand design, and tips on outsourcing design if that’s the route you decide to take.
Who is Demand Curve?
Demand Curve teaches growth to startup founders and marketers. Our popular resources include the Growth Newsletter, which goes out to 70k+ subscribers, our annual Growth Summit that brings together the world’s top marketers, and our tactical marketing playbooks.
Our first course, the Growth Program, has helped thousands of startups and individual creators get traction and scale revenue.
We believe in democratizing access to growth expertise. Startups should have access to the same knowledge as later-stage companies.
We partner with top growth practitioners to teach you everything they know. Successful founders and marketers who have truly done the work and built remarkable companies.
How are Sprints different from other courses?
Most courses are bloated, overly theoretical, and outdated. Some bring in big names, regardless of if they’re actually strong practitioners or instructors. Others are taught by experienced practitioners who don’t have teaching experience. Or worse, they’re created by pseudo-experts—teaching you downright bad information.
In our opinion, most courses have it backwards. They’re looking for ways to charge as much as possible. Things like:
- Hiring famous instructors
- Filming high-production videos on swanky sets
- Creating super long curriculums (because they think offering “100+ hours of video content” is a good thing)
What’s missing? None of these things benefits you.
And we think that explains why most courses have a shockingly low 3-5% completion rate.
So, how are Sprints different? Well, they’re basically the exact opposite of most courses, with:
- Expert practitioners (who have truly been there, done that)
- Low-cost videos filmed in the home offices of our instructors (allowing us to keep Sprints affordable for you)
- Concise, practical, value-packed curriculums (we work hard to cut out all the fluff and help you achieve what you signed up to achieve in as few words and videos as possible)
Sprints are designed for busy people who care more about results than consuming content. People who want to learn from those who have been in their shoes and already solved the problems they’re working on. People who believe it shouldn’t cost thousands of dollars to tap expert knowledge.
In short, Sprints are designed specifically for people who are building and growing startups.
Do you offer team discounts?
Yes. We offer discounts on orders for 5 or more team members. Reach out to us at help@demandcurve.com for more information.
