In an insightful conversation about brand building and growth, Lucy Woolfenden shares her wealth of experience working with challenger brands and scale-ups. As a fractional CMO and founder of The Scale Up Collective, she offers great insights into creating meaningful brand connections.

Lucy defines brand with nuance: "Fundamentally I think brand means slightly different things to different people but really it's the emotional connection that we can create between a product and service and the people that are going to buy it and what that perception is people have." Her work with Starling Bank exemplifies this approach. At a time when "you were more likely to get divorced than you were to change your current account in the UK," the challenge was about building trust beyond traditional banking narratives.

One of Lucy's most insightful experiences came from her time at Skype, where she transformed the platform from a simple communication tool to a cultural phenomenon. With 300 million users, the challenge was to move beyond occasional international calls to becoming a daily communication platform. Lucy and her team achieved this through innovative brand positioning, focusing on "getting closer to things you love."

The brand's creative approach included remarkable marketing initiatives. They partnered with Marvel for simultaneous movie premieres, connected children's hospitals during film events, and even worked with high-profile personalities like Robert Downey Jr. and Joe Biden. These strategies went beyond traditional marketing, creating emotional connections that transcended the product's basic functionality.

When asked to differentiate between brand and marketing, Lucy provides a clear perspective: "Brand is how you make somebody feel about the product. And marketing is how you communicate that and how you get to them and deliver that message." She elaborates that the brand encompasses elements like tone of voice and values, while marketing tactics include specific channels like "social media or your SEO".

Lucy suggests a strategic approach to marketing spend, particularly for startups: "60-40 performance to organic paid is a good way to split" investments. However, she notes this isn't a static model: "As you scale, you should be getting more of your acquisition from organic, from non-paid sources, and less of a percentage of your acquisition from paid."

The goal is creating what she calls "growth loops" - mechanisms where "more and more people are hearing about you and more and more people are choosing you because other people do". This approach is crucial in a competitive marketplace, moving beyond simply being the loudest voice to creating genuine, sustainable connections.

Lucy warns against a common pitfall businesses encounter: "Where they don't listen to their customers where they're just talking about what the latest feature is." She emphasises that success isn't about shouting about features, but understanding "how the core product helps someone get closer to achieving what they're trying to do."

She highlights brands like Liquid Death and Surreal as excellent examples of companies that have cut through market noise. Liquid Death, for example, transformed the seemingly mundane product of water into a "punk rock" brand, while Surreal reimagined breakfast cereals by tapping into childhood nostalgia and creating a fun, sarcastic brand personality.

When Lucy first launched her business, she started as a solo part-time Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Her initial brand was closely tied to her personal identity. However, she quickly realised the need to evolve. "When I first started actually, I was going to be a company of one and very much the first real sort of brand iteration we had was when we started to build the team."

As the business grew, she needed to transform the brand from being centered around herself to representing a broader team and collective expertise. This meant moving beyond a personal brand to a more comprehensive business identity that could showcase the diverse skills of her growing team and partners.

Lucy strongly advocates for customer-centric brand development. "We do everything which is insights based," she explains. This means conducting thorough research - "three rounds of desk research and internal research, qual and then quant" - to truly understand customer needs. The goal is to take away any perceived risk and build trust, making potential clients confident in the value you provide.

Perhaps her most profound insight is about the long-term approach to brand development: "Not everything you're going to do is going to immediately drive leads. But if you keep doing it, consistency is the important part." In a world where "we're supposed to see around 5,000 different brand products and brand messaging a day," creating a distinctive, meaningful brand isn't just marketing - it's a strategic priority that requires patience, insight, and steady commitment.

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