FOUNDERS CALL BRAND “SOFT. BUYERS PUT A NUMBER ON IT.

I get asked some version of this all the time by founders and business leaders: “When budgets are tight and runway is short, how much should we really be investing in brand right now?”

It’s a fair question because every dollar has a job. And, we have thoughts… a lot of them. Luckily, we also have the stories and the numbers to back them up. Startups are really good at investing in the things we can count. Product. Tech. IP. Distribution. CAC. Revenue. Headcount. And they should be because we all know those aren’t optional. You have to build the business. But brand and a solid marketing campaign still somehow end up in the “we’ll get to that when we’re bigger” bucket.

Here’s the part we think gets missed: Waiting isn’t free. The money you don’t spend getting the brand clear doesn’t necessarily stay saved. You don’t avoid the cost. You relocate it. You save it in one line item and quietly spend it across five others. Teams work harder because the story underneath the brand isn’t doing enough of the work. A sales team explains the company five different ways. Creative starts over because there’s no system to build from. Websites get rebuilt. Messaging gets rewritten. Campaign dollars drive people into an experience that doesn’t quite deliver on the promise that brought them there. And founders, leadership teams and really talented people burn time and energy solving questions the brand should have already answered. Not investing in brand shows up in slower decisions because every new idea reopens old questions.

Who are we really for?

Who are we competing with?

Why are we different?

What do we lead with?

What do we call this?

How should this feel?

That’s your missing brand. Brand = Understanding your competitive set well enough to find the white space. Brand = Being meaningfully different. Brand = Educating people quickly. Brand = Standing out in a crowded category and then carrying that promise all the way through the customer experience so what people actually get feels like what you sold them.

And while you wait, you’re also losing something harder to get back: Time. Time to build recognition. Trust. Preference. Loyalty. Reputation. These things compound if you start earlier. You don’t suddenly manufacture them when an investor or buyer shows up. And when they do show up? All that “soft stuff” starts looking pretty damn tangible.

When e.l.f. acquired rhode for approximately $897.5 million, its acquisition accounting assigned $276.3 MILLION to rhode’s trademarks alone. Not inventory. Not formulas. It was because of the trademarks.

PepsiCo paid $1.95B for Poppi and called it a “magnetic brand,” pointing to its cultural cache, loyal consumer base and capacity for growth. It also paid $1.2B for Siete and talked about an authentic Mexican-American brand rooted in heritage, family and culture. 

And we’ve seen this firsthand working on multiple brands and clients. Brave's client, ebbu was acquired by Canopy Growth in a deal reported at more than C$425 MILLION. Of course the science, technology and IP mattered enormously. But Canopy also said it pursued the acquisition because of ebbu’s “core ethos of building consumer trust” and talked explicitly about “brand power.” The buyer said it, not the branding people. 

Another Brave client, Eon attracted Mark Cuban as an investor and is part of the Mark Cuban Companies portfolio today. Investors like Cuban are betting on growth, scale and future value. Brand matters because it helps determine whether a company can actually earn attention, trust, preference and momentum as it grows.

We have other clients navigating acquisition conversations of their own at this exact moment. So we have had a pretty close seat to what gets valued.

Of course buyers and investors care about the numbers, the product, the IP, the technology, the revenue, the growth, the distribution. They should. We do too.

But they’re also looking at something much harder to recreate overnight: Trust, preference, differentiation, loyalty, reputation, culture, meaning, a place in people’s heads and hearts that belongs to you. That is brand.

And there’s quantitative proof behind it too. Kantar reports that high Demand Power brands capture 9x higher volume share, consumers spend 2x as much on brands with high Pricing Power, and high Future Power brands are 4x more likely to grow value share.

So if raising, scaling, acquisition or an eventual exit is anywhere in the plan… don’t treat brand as the thing you invest in once you finally have more money. Because you can’t get back the years of brand equity you chose not to build. And you may spend a lot more along the way making everything else work around its absence.

The brand isn’t the pretty thing you wrap around the company once it becomes valuable. It’s part of what makes the company valuable.

With heart ❤️, Brave & Co