WELCOME
TO THE 2022
BEAT FAILURE®
REPORT

WELCOME
TO THE
2022
BEAT
FAILURE®
REPORT

The Beat Failure® Report considers thousands of data points collected during conversations with global brands.

We conducted Beat Failure® sessions with 90 early stage, mid-stage, and late-stage companies across 28 industries, using our proprietary platform Priio®. We asked, simply:

WHAT WOULD CAUSE YOUR BRAND AND/OR BUSINESS TO FAIL?

BUT FIRST,
WTF IS THE
BEAT FAILURE®
METHODOLOGY?

BUT FIRST, WTF IS THE BEAT FAILURE® METHODOLOGY?

ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE METHODS IN STRATEGIC DECISION MAKING.

REVERSE-ENGINEERING SUCCESS.

The Beat Failure® Methodology was inspired by the Premortem. In 1989, The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania found that imagining that an event has already occurred increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.

HOW DOES BEAT FAILURE® WORK?

  1. Identifies potential failures and maximizes clarity.
  2. Creates prioritization based on likelihood and impact.
  3. ASSIGNS CLEAR DIRECTION TO LEADERS, TEAMS, AND INVESTORS.
  4. INFORMS ACTION PLAN FOR RESILIENT COMPANY GROWTH.

EARLY STAGE
BRANDS

EARLY
STAGE
BRANDS

EARLY STAGE BRAND PROFILE

Typically have low awareness in the market (Pre-seed to Series A).

EARLY STAGE BRAND REVENUE

Generating revenue but pursuing additional capital from institutional investors to invest in customer acquisition and business development.

EARLY STAGE BRAND PRIORITIES

Focused on raising funds for product development and preparing for a broader market launch to prove product-to-market fit.

Early stage companies have a lot on their plate—from optimizing their product to building a loyal customer base. But what needs to be prioritized in order for a company to continue their growth trajectory and frankly, survive? The early stage companies we spoke to identified failure points that included everything from competition and recruiting to messaging and product. What follows are three key failure points when it comes to brand building that early stage founders are thinking about today—and some considerations to help Beat Failure®.

WE TALKED TO EARLY STAGE COMPANIES ABOUT POSSIBLE BRAND FAILURES

EARLY STAGE COMPANIES

UNIQUE INDUSTRIES

EARLY STAGE FAILURE POINTS

*Data from early stage brands we talked to in 2022.
EARLY STAGE: FAILURE POINT #1

WRONG BRAND NAME

It's not uncommon for early stage companies to have low awareness, and as they prepare for their next stage of growth, they may be facing uncertainty about their name recognition or how the company name will resonate as the business matures.

The right name is a big differentiator for an early stage company, and a powerful storytelling tool during big inflection points. Nailing down your name and making it part of your IP is important to consider before you begin scaling. The more a company grows, the harder and more costly it is to change. Naming is becoming increasingly competitive across all markets, and it's only going to get harder.

A rigorous naming exercise will consider a multitude of factors: personality, feeling, look, availability, accessibility, pronunciation, language, culture context, history, URL potential, cost, translation to design and identity, employer brand usage, customers, and competitors. The result is a brand name that’s ownable in every sense, that considers where you came from and where you’re going. If you’re debating between keeping or changing your name, weigh the current brand equities against the opportunity to reintroduce your company in the market and inject freshness into your touch points across the brand, business, and product.

EARLY STAGE: FAILURE POINT #2

UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCES

You can never know too much about your audience. Early stage companies may begin with assumptions about who their audience is, but they’ll need to quickly validate those assumptions with data. The strongest approach is iterative: establish a baseline understanding of your audience based on data, then go deeper to reveal sweet spots, sharper segments, and behavior insights. These details spark new approaches for creating conversations and relationships and new ideas and channels for better conversion, which bring more—and more nuanced—audience data into the cycle. Make audience understanding a core practice for your company, and reinforce its value to your team. Always be in test mode: it’s the key to creating products and services with genuine value.

Make audience understanding a core practice for your company, and reinforce
its value to your team.

EARLY STAGE: FAILURE POINT #3

IMMATURE BRAND IDENTITY

Early stage companies don’t often consider identity because their primary focus is on product/service development and creating a path to market and revenue. Companies understand that they need a strong identity, but the process of understanding the diverse and ambiguous offerings of brand agencies and partners, choosing the right one, and embarking on an expensive identity process can be intimidating. To simplify things, companies should think about establishing a foundation.

That foundation is usually a great brand strategy, which builds into a great brand identity. Brand identity is actually one of the biggest keystones to a startup's success. It impacts every touch point with a customer, all marketing and advertising, how talent perceives the company, the product experience—the list goes on. The right creative partner is willing to go on a growth journey: starting with a brand identity that is built to scale and flexible enough to layer in campaigns, activations, and experiences as the brand matures.

WORK CASE

HOW A LEGAL BRAND BEAT FAILURE

A client partner in the legal tech business recognized the need to evolve their brand in order to better communicate their services to customers. In their business, it was incredibly important that their identity represent a level of sophistication that would emphasize trust and empathy for claimants looking for legal support, which can be an emotional, stressful, and confusing journey to navigate. The identity also needed to be highly effective in the digital space, where UX and product design also needed to convey confidence and trust.

Failure Points Shared by Early Stage Leaders

BRAND STRATEGY
BRAND IDENTITY
MESSAGING
BUSINESS STRATEGY
PRODUCT
STAFFING
AUDIENCE
PERFORMANCE
SALES
NAMING

MID-STAGE
BRANDS

MID-
STAGE
BRANDS

MID-STAGE BRAND PROFILE

Have a strong client base with their initial market and insights into other growth areas (Series B-D).

MID-STAGE BRAND REVENUE

Have established a sustainable revenue stream, with funds raised going toward deeper market studies and technology.

MID-STAGE BRAND PRIORITIES

Focused on scaling existing numbers either by growing consumer interest, increasing sales, or breaking into an underserved market.

Mid-stage brands have a strong sense of who they are—and more importantly, their core customer base does too. Internally, the focus is on strengthening foundations with better technology, expanding departments, and more highly skilled staff. Externally, the focus is on expanding awareness and launching initiatives that make noise and increase sales. In industries ranging from legal to SaaS to health and wellness, digital experience, messaging, and content were prominent concerns for mid-stage companies, as well as identifying new audiences, optimizing performance, launching PR campaigns, and recruiting top talent.

WE TALKED TO MID-STAGE COMPANIES ABOUT POSSIBLE BRAND FAILURES

MID-STAGE
COMPANIES

UNIQUE
INDUSTRIES

MID-STAGE
FAILURE POINTS

*Data from mid-stage brands we talked to in 2022.
MID-STAGE: FAILURE POINT #1

POOR DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

At this stage, companies are moving beyond their initial digital product and bringing new needs and insights into the next evolution of digital. Often, they have the benefit of existing analytics, a more mature brand, and sharper insights into audience, sales, and marketing. The pre-planning phase can be highly strategic, and should consider assets and gaps before kicking off.

MID-STAGE: FAILURE POINT #2

WRONG MESSAGING

COMPANIES NEED MESSAGING FUNDAMENTALS THAT ARE SIMPLE, CLEAR, AND COMPELLING.

In addition to customers, mid-stage companies have some additional, highly critical audiences to connect with: employees, investors, partners, and recruits. Messaging becomes more nuanced, and is wielded by more and more messengers. Companies need a solid platform and system to track back to: messaging fundamentals that are simple, clear and compelling.
MID-STAGE: FAILURE POINT #3

NO PLAN FOR CONTENT

Brand should be at the core of content. Look at your overall content strategy and tie it to your runway, and your big spends for the year. Prioritize content that expresses the brand, then find the multiple streams that the content will support. Let people know who you are before moving into features and benefits.

Keep brand and marketing teams in lockstep, and use the “evergreen” brand content as inspiration, and a filter, for future pieces of content. Companies that focus on brand awareness first, then layer on targeted marketing in multiple touch points, see the best and most enduring ROI.

COMPANIES SHOULD TREAT EVERY PIECE OF CONTENT AS A BRAND EXTENSION.

Failure Points Shared by Mid-Stage Leaders

BRAND STRATEGY
MESSAGING
AUDIENCE
BRAND IDENTITY
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE
PERFORMANCE
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
CONTENT
CAMPAIGN
RECRUITING

LATE-
STAGE
BRANDS

LATE-
STAGE
BRANDS

LATE-STAGE BRAND PROFILE

Generally have a well-known product with a strong market presence (Series E, IPO Ready, Enterprise).

LATE-STAGE BRAND REVENUE

Positioning themselves for the next big inflection point: IPO, M&A, new product launch, or global expansion.

LATE-STAGE BRAND PRIORITIES

Raising funds based on performance and liquidity.

As companies mature, the foundations they’ve established allow them to pursue ambitious new initiatives. However, late-stage companies have more executive layers, competing priorities, and logistical dependencies to consider. We’ve worked with late-stage companies in industries from beauty to cybersecurity, and we’ve found that the best foundation for growth is clarity. When the stakes are high, alignment, discipline, and data-driven decision making are more critical than ever, making performance data, thoughtful M&A strategy, and stakeholder alignment key concerns. As in earlier stages, late-stage companies were also often grappling with failure points like brand strategy, messaging, or new audience segments.

WE TALKED TO LATE-STAGE COMPANIES ABOUT POSSIBLE BRAND FAILURES

LATE-STAGE COMPANIES

UNIQUE INDUSTRIES

LATE-STAGE FAILURE POINTS

*Data from late-stage brands we talked to in 2022.
LATE-STAGE: FAILURE POINT #1

UNMEASURED PERFORMANCE

As companies grow, it becomes even more important to make data-driven decisions and demonstrate quantifiable results. Whether you’re in the business of enterprise software sales or DTC ecommerce, measuring performance and implementing optimization programs reveal how the brand connects to revenue and where the opportunities are to improve conversion along the funnel.

LATE-STAGE: FAILURE POINT #2

M&A DRAMA

Not every merger is the same, but they all share an obligation to present a confident identity in the market.

Not every merger is the same, but they all share an obligation to present a confident identity in the market, whether it’s as a house of brands or a powerhouse new entity. The definition process is full of opportunities: to evaluate the strengths of each brand, to redefine the value proposition, and to bring employee stakeholders into the conversation to help create the answers and the resources that will help their peers understand the new environment. Redefinition can be contentious, which is why an external mediator, armed with brand research that grounds the conversation in unbiased data, can help to facilitate the best decisions for the brand itself.
LATE-STAGE: FAILURE POINT #3

STAKEHOLDER MISALIGNMENT

IDENTIFYING FAILURE POINTS LAYS BARE THE REAL OBSTACLES THAT ARE OFTEN WAVED AWAY DURING A CONVERSATION FOCUSED ON SUCCESS.

WORK CASE

HOW A TECH BRAND BEAT FAILURE

As one of our client partners began to map out their path to IPO, the executive leadership team knew their brand and marketing needed to better reflect their maturity and readiness to go public. However, most of these stakeholders had no experience in branding or marketing and had very different ideas from one another on how far to push the evolution.

In situations like this, to avoid the pitfalls of stakeholder misalignment and endless spinning with no decisions, we engage the full stakeholder team in a clarity session to understand their fears, rank and prioritize the potential failure points, and assign a responsibility matrix using the DACI model. We also create strategic points of collaborative alignment during the process to bring stakeholders along the journey, and develop focused feedback questions to guide more actionable decision making.

Failure Points Shared by Late-Stage Leaders

BUSINESS STRATEGY
PERFORMANCE
BRAND STRATEGY
STAKEHOLDER ALIGNMENT
AUDIENCE
MESSAGING
BRAND IDENTITY
PRODUCT
M&A
TIMELINE

THERE ARE A THOUSAND WAYS A BRAND CAN FAIL, BUT THEY USUALLY TRACK BACK TO ONE ISSUE: A LACK OF CLARITY.

The Beat Failure® methodology helps companies establish clarity during inflection points, especially during moments of growth, evolution, or transformation. This approach has been key to our work with client partners across industries and growth stages, including 30+ unicorn-status brands.

Please reach out if you’d like to schedule a conversation with Butchershop, or to facilitate a Beat Failure® session for your business.

THE BEAT FAILURE REPORT TEAM
Aitor González
Ángel Palacios
Anton Gammershmidt
Ashley Camps
Dania Jimenez
Daniel Mora
Diana Mendoza
Hector García
Hugo Morales
Huzzidiel Harrison
Jazmín Silvas
Jean Morlet
José Aispuro
José Bañuelos
Karla Borrallo
Kyle Harrison
Lu Esparza
Maribel Araiza
Marnie Abraham
Melanie Huff
Mo Canales
Pamela López
Sara Cobaugh
Tina Morgan
Trevor Hubbard