When the first years of your business were a boom and outgrowing your start-up phase is on the horizon, scaling up becomes the next logical step. Forbes highlights a few indicators that help identify whether you're ready to scale up, but they overlook one important indicator that can keep you from scaling, which is your brand.

Over the course of helping numerous B2B clients during their scale-up journey, be it on local or international levels, we've noticed a troubling lack of awareness among business leaders about the impact and importance of good branding.

Clients often approach us with specific "symptoms" they believe hinder their expansion, such as "We struggle to reach a broader audience," or "We don’t have a clear direction for the layout and application of the brand," or even "Our website seems overly technical and doesn’t convert." While they might think they need isolated fixes, focusing solely on the bottom of the conversion funnel neglects the comprehensive impact a well-developed brand can have on their overall success. 

Proving that, an impressive report by JKR & Ipsos points out that only 15% of the brand assets are distinctive, while almost $5 trillion is spent yearly on marketing. This means that potentially 85% of marketing spend is wasted on work that goes misattributed or unnoticed.

A blind spot for crucial brand aspects, dismissing them as "not relevant to my company", when in reality, they play a pivotal role, can perpetuate a chaotic start-up mindset as the business expands. As the organization grows, the chaos and inconsistency multiply, especially when more individuals join the team without a clear brand direction. 

Faced with this challenge, we decided to develop a tool that would help to put the branding into the perspective of scaling up. We called it the “Brand Maturity Scan”. The name stems from the notion that a brand must reach a certain level of maturity to successfully facilitate scaling.

While we understand that perfection is not always achievable, akin to the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) in lean start-ups, it is essential for a brand to attain a specific level of maturity to truly empower business growth. We defined that brand maturity level as an ‘Established brand’, which falls in the middle of the entire brand maturity spectrum. 

The brand-building process might not always follow a linear path, but as the brand matures, it aligns with the establishment of better processes, as emphasized by Forbes. Before progressing to the advanced funding stages, it becomes crucial to assess whether your brand is still in its development phase or if it has evolved into an established brand

With our free brand maturity scan you can quickly assess where it stands and get an insight into what steps you need to take in order to advance.