Arielle Jackson
[04:04] From making jewelry as a side hustle to launching products for Square: Arielle’s background[12:32] What makes a good name for a product or a startup[19:17] How to come up with a great name[24:59] How to run a naming brainstorm for the best results[31:09] Bad names and naming mistakes[34:17] Arielle’s brand development framework and when founders should implement it[36:02] How do you know when brand development is completed?[41:17] How long should branding take?[42:42] How to build a brand purpose that ignites excitement[48:51] Specific tactics for building your brand purpose[51:12] How to master your positioning[55:22] Why it’s important to stay niche when you’re mastering your positioning[59:15] The process of positioning and Arielle’s bar test[1:02:38] How to build a brand personality using the five big brand descriptions[1:07:39] Where to put brand and product positioning documents so they’ll actually get used[1:09:14] How startups can get PR[1:14:49] When should you hire a marketer?—Production and marketing: https://penname.co/.
Hiring & Teams Skills
Open-ended questions about past pride and external observations reveal a candidate's values and taste.
"Tell me about a project you're proud of. Tell me about a project you're proud of, is just really open-ended and get to hear a lot about a lot of things that way. And then maybe runner up is tell me ab..."
Marketing Skills
Positioning is the foundational element of marketing that should precede product development and all other marketing activities.
"I really believe that positioning dictates so much of your marketing and should always be the first thing you do. I had a student in my last class... He goes, I'll never write a line of code without d..."
Effective positioning ensures a unified understanding of the product's role across all stakeholders.
"Positioning is the space that you occupy in your target customer's mind and everything you can do to influence how they describe your product. You have a positioning problem if I ask 10 of your custom..."
A structured 'four-statement' framework helps define the target audience, the problem, the category, and the unique differentiator.
"That statement is for target audience who there's a statement of need or opportunity. And then you say our product name is a category that has a benefit, unlike the old thing they were doing, our prod..."
The 'bar test' ensures that positioning and messaging use natural, human language rather than corporate jargon.
"The bar test... you pretend to be someone in your target, having drinks with someone else in your target at a bar and you have to be able to say, hey, I just started using product name. It's this real..."
Brand is the external perception of a company, and strategy is the intentional effort to shape that perception.
"Your brand is who people think you are and developing a brand strategy is what do you want to be? What do you want people to think you are? And what are you going to do to help shape that perception?"
A company's purpose should be a 10-year North Star that explains the change the company wants to see in the world.
"Your purpose is why you do what you do. It makes people want to root for you. And it has a big role in aligning people to come want to work for you and to have employees all feel like they're part of..."
Defining a brand personality requires choosing specific dimensions to 'spike' in and creating guardrails to prevent those traits from becoming negative.
"Strong brand spike in two of the five [dimensions]... sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness... you want to write them as statements that say we are X, but not Y, where Y is..."
Modern PR for startups often requires offering an exclusive to a single outlet rather than a broad embargoed release.
"For early stage startups, we're almost always running the launch announcement as an exclusive, which means you give the news to a single outlet. And they're the only ones who get to write about it."
Funding is a news hook, not the story itself; it should be used to highlight product availability or customer momentum.
"Don't do a straight funding announcement. A lot of founders raise money and they're like, cool, let's announce. It's like, no, we'll use that funding announcement as a news hook to tell a larger story..."
Local press can be more accessible and effective for startups with regional impact or physical customers.
"Don't sleep on local press. If you have a local business or a local story or local customers... We turned all of our customers into heroes and went after local press."