From Launch Pad to Legacy: Where are you on our Brand Impact Maturity Scale?

Welcome B2B innovators, pioneers and trailblazers! Whether you’re just firing up your brand or you’re already orbiting the galaxy, this guide will help you understand and navigate the different levels of brand maturity.

We’ve put together this model and guide from years of experience in working with brands at every level of our scale, but we’d love to know if you’re facing different challenges on your journey. Let’s get the conversation started.

But first, where are you now? Let’s find out…

An entrepreneur’s journey begins with a spark—an idea, a vision, a dream. This is likely spurred by an extreme frustration with the status quo, something that’s not working in your industry, in society, or maybe even in the world.

This becomes your purpose—and boom, your business is born! But usually, it will be a while before your brand is (that comes in the next stage).

Why?

Because Launch Pad is all about proving your concept, identifying your clients and testing your market fit. For this, all you need is a ‘Minimum Viable Product Identity (MVI)’. This stage is less about perfection and more about iteration—launching with just enough features to engage your first clients and get crucial business-building feedback.

Top 5 Typical Challenges:

1. Budget and resource constraints: You’re likely to be pre-revenue at this stage. And with no team, you’re probably wearing 20 different hats — doing everything from sales to fulfilment. 
2. Limited reach: Starting from scratch means you’re unlikely to have much of a pipeline or following. 
3. Lack of proven results: Right now, your business relies on finding clients who believe in you as the founder and are brave enough to trust a start-up. 
4. Building confidence: You have no idea if your business idea will work or whether you’re even describing it coherently. You know you need to stand out to get noticed, but this is when you feel the most pressure to fit in amongst your more established competitors. And, you may not naturally relish being in the spotlight. 
5. Becoming investable: Many Launch Pad brands will need to secure investment to move on to the next stage. 

Top 5 Strategies for Growth:

1. Minimum viable identity development: Start with the essential elements (logo, brand name, key messaging). Enough to resonate and capture initial interest but knowing that everything you create at this stage is likely to change. Focus on your value, emphasising the single most powerful benefit your business brings to your clients. Put this at the heart of your strategy. 
2. Attract early adopters with ‘almost too good to be true’ offers: Identify and engage potential early adopters. This initial business will help you build a portfolio of case studies and testimonials—the proof points needed to strengthen your brand and appeal to more cautious clients and investors. Use their feedback to refine your offering and your messaging. 
3. Iterate based on feedback: Be prepared to adapt and refine quickly based on feedback and lessons learned. 
4. Agile wins this race: There are lots of decisions to make here, but make them fast and move on. Perfection doesn’t exist in Launch Pad (or maybe anywhere). Make swift changes and move forward. 
5. Consider coaching or mentoring: You’re already accomplished in your field, but we often need to work on our internal identities as founders before we can step into the shoes of successful business and brand leaders.

In other words, start small, think big, and get ready to adapt as you lift off!

By now, you’re fully airborne, and you’ve proven your concept. You know who your clients are, and with a little digging, you can find out what they value most and why they love working with you. NOW it’s time to build your brand.

This stage is about laying foundations—building blocks that create a blueprint for everything you produce into the future.

Top 5 Typical Challenges:

1. Limited time and budget: You find yourself managing competing priorities and juggling wildly different yet equally important parts of your business. You may not be sure where to focus your efforts for the best return. 
2. Communicating what makes you different: Distilling a potentially complex solution into a clear-cut value prop that separates you from your competitors and helps you to charge full prices. 
3. Resonating effectively: It’s becoming easier to explain your business in person but how do you get your message across when you’re not in the room? 
4. Persuading people to take a chance on you: Convincing potentially risk-averse prospects to embrace your innovative solutions even though you haven’t much of a track record (yet). 
5. Clarity and consistency: Maintaining a clear, cohesive and consistent brand identity across all touchpoints when everything is moving so damn fast!

Top 5 Strategies for Growth:

1. Focus on building a brand that is Differentiated, Authentic, Resonant, and Expressed at Every Touchpoint: This is Firestarter’s very own DARE formula for creating brands (you can learn more here: https://firestarter.live/dare/). Following it will ensure your brand stands out, is true to itself, connects deeply with your audience, and is represented consistently. Get valuable feedback from your early adopters. Use these insights as free consultancy to create your brand. 
2. DIFFERENTIATION | Find a way to sum up your true value: This means articulating your unique value proposition to explain in a nutshell how you solve your clients’ problems in a way no one else does. This is the single most important message to get right. 
3. AUTHENTICITY | Get clear on your purpose, mission, vision and values: Define why your business exists, what you do to create transformations for your clients, and how things will look when you are successful. Then establish the fundamental principles that will guide your actions and decisions. 
4. RESONANCE | Create profiles for your ideal clients: Get to really understand the people you most want to serve—identify their drivers, preferences, and pain points. This will help you resonate more deeply. 
5. EXPRESSION | Define your brand personality and voice. Decide how your brand will show up, visually, verbally, logically and emotionally. Then, build everything into a Brand Bible. This definitive guide will ensure that your whole team knows how to communicate in the style of your brand, enabling you to achieve a clear and consistent brand presence.

By focusing on DARE, you’ll chart your own flight path to becoming known, liked, trusted… and remembered.

By now, you have a brand identity whoop! But perhaps no one else knows this yet. The foundations are in place, and you have clarity around why you’re here and what you stand for. But strong foundations are just the beginning. To go stratospheric, your brand needs fuel—assets and content that will power your journey to the next level. 

This stage is all about building your brand in a way that ensures consistency, drives growth, and deepens your connections.

Top 5 Typical Challenges:

1. Growing your pipeline: What’s the best way to get people into the funnel? And, how do you nurture them right through to signing on the dotted line? 
2. Building out the right brand assets and tools: Investing in assets that move the dial. How to ensure powerful and consistent representation across all your client and team touchpoints. 
3. Getting prospects to trust and believe: This can be especially tricky in B2B, where you usually need to convince whole teams and jump through additional hoops to secure a new client. 
4. Finding the right people as you grow: Attracting talented individuals who are ‘IN it’ as much as they’re ‘ON it’. Building a team that aligns with your brand promise, culture and values. 
5. Fear of people stealing your IP: This is a catch-22. On one hand, you want to share enough information to generate interest, yet on the other hand, you’re reluctant to put too much out there for fear of competitors poaching your secret sauce. 

Top 5 Strategies for Growth:

1. Plan your ideal client journey: Develop a brand-led marketing strategy and plan that maps out customer experience from first contact to conversion. This will help you understand the tools and assets you need to produce. Don’t forget to include customer loyalty and referral programmes. Make your clients feel like they’re part of something special, and they’ll happily refer you. 
2. Build your brand jigsaw: Develop a suite of brand assets and tools that reinforce your identity at every step of your client journey. Think of every touchpoint as a piece of your brand jigsaw, building deeper understanding and growing to create an ever-more-rewarding customer experience. 
3. Codify your methodology and protect your IP: Take time to unpack your methodology so that it becomes a powerful sales tool. Work out how to clearly describe, illustrate, present and brand it to help people understand how you do what you do. Then secure your brand and intellectual property with patents and trademarks. This becomes increasingly important as you grow and gives you the confidence to share more to entice interest. 
4. Build proof and credibility: Now’s the time to build out your portfolio. Collect and showcase testimonials, reviews and success stories. These serve as powerful social proof to convince buyers and increase your brand’s value. 
5. Cultivate your people strategy: As you prepare to scale your team think clearly about your value proposition to candidates. Just as with your client-facing brand, your employer brand needs to be Differentiated, Authentic, Resonant and Expressed clearly and consistently (DARE). This will help you attract people who are already aligned with your values and culture and who believe in your vision. 

In other words, strengthen your core, expand your horizons and fuel your brand to help you reach new heights.

As your brand transitions into the Growth Stage you’re already widely known in your sector. Congratulations! 

This stage is not just about maintaining momentum but becoming a leading industry influencer. With strategic innovation and strong brand leadership, you’ll deepen the impact of your brand within your market and, excitingly… beyond.

Top 5 Typical Challenges:

1. Leading the charge on innovation: By now you may be feeling the pressure to stay at least one step ahead as newcomers and challenger brands enter your market with exciting new offers. The challenge here is successfully innovating to keep all eyes (and £££s) on your business without losing sight of what makes your brand unique. 
2. Balancing diversification with specialisation: Navigating the challenges of entering new markets and diversifying products and services without compromising your brand or hard-won niche. 
3. Elevating your brand influence: Working towards being seen as the voice of an industry, not just another service provider. 
4. Getting a handle on CSR: Figuring out how to make your increased social and environmental commitments a core part of your strategy. 
5. Growing organically yet operating at warp speed: How to grow your team and operations without diluting your culture and values.

Top 5 Strategies for Growth:

1. Strategic innovation and diversification: Keep your vision and core brand values front of mind while you continue to innovate. Consider diversifying into complementary areas that enhance your brand’s ecosystem. Don’t forget to regularly review and expand your intellectual property portfolio to protect new innovations and brand assets. 
2. Brand leadership and influence: Position your brand as a leading voice by contributing valuable insights and sparking industry conversations. Publish reports and white papers, record podcasts, host webinars, or participate in panels to share your expertise and vision. 
3. Inject CSR into your core business strategy: Integrate sustainability and social responsibility into the fabric of your brand. Communicate your commitments transparently, showing your clients the tangible impact of their support. This ethical approach will enhance your brand reputation and increase brand loyalty. 
4. Cultivate brand culture as you grow: Actively invest in team engagement and development. Ensure new hires align with your values and keep communication open and inclusive. Implement a brand-led operating model to ensure your brand promise and values are felt at every stage of the business. 
5. Build brand belonging: Deepen relationships with your existing customer base through personalised engagement strategies and by building a community around your brand. Create exclusive experiences, offer insider access, and build platforms for customer interaction and feedback.

In other words, lead with purpose, innovate strategically, build a community and get ready to shape the future of your industry.

Bravo! Legacy is at the very pinnacle of our Brand Impact Maturity Scale. Your brand is no longer that of just another product or service provider but an unstoppable force for change. 

Here our focus shifts to longevity and legacy—how to keep the fire burning for future generations. Inspiring action, innovation, and change on a global scale.

Top 5 Typical Challenges:

1. Going global: How to create a cohesive brand experience across different regions and cultures while respecting local nuances. 
2. Staying relevant when everything’s changing: Carefully adapting to new trends (while avoiding dead-end fads) and keeping on top of ever-changing consumer preferences to stand the test of time. 
3. Keeping everyone in line: Like handling octopuses in a string bag—how do you ensure that multiple and diverse stakeholders are carefully managed and fully aligned with your brand’s long-term goals and values? 
4. Managing perceptions: Navigating the double-edged sword of public and media scrutiny that a high-profile brand attracts. And doing good well—effectively managing charitable initiatives to amplify positive impact without diluting brand focus. 
5. Securing a great getaway: Making best plans for the future, whether through succession, mergers or other exit strategies. And bringing in new blood—preparing the next generation of leaders to uphold your brand values and vision while benefiting from their fresh perspectives.

Top 5 Strategies for Growth:

1. Achieving brand consistency around the globe: Develop a comprehensive global brand strategy that includes local adaptations. Train regional teams to drive cohesive brand experiences that resonate with your audiences locally. 
2. Maintaining brand relevance: Conduct ongoing research to understand trends. Adapt your messaging and marketing strategies to meet evolving client preferences while staying true to your brand’s core identity. 
3. Aligning stakeholder interests: Engage stakeholders through transparent communications. Connect their interests with your long-term goals and keep them up-to-date with your progress. 
4. Protecting public perception: Proactively manage your brand’s reputation. Employ social listening. Keep communications transparent and work on a crisis management plan to address potential public and media scrutiny. Align philanthropic activities with your brand’s mission and measure their impact to ensure they amplify positive outcomes. 
5. Planning for legacy and exit strategy: Explore exit strategies that align with your long-term goals and ensure any transition preserves your brand legacy. Develop a comprehensive succession plan and mentor future leaders to uphold the brand’s vision and values.

In other words, create a lasting impact, inspire global change, and set a powerful example for others to follow.

Conclusion

Every great brand starts with a spark. By understanding where you are on our Brand Impact Maturity Scale, you can put together targeted strategies to drive growth and get you further faster. Transforming from that spark into a brand that generates impact far into the future.

Are you ready to take your brand to the next level?
BrandSight:360 is your very first step. Contact us to find out more.