Brand and communications efforts can both be powerful contributors to the growth and success of small businesses. ‘Brand’ encompasses the collective perceptions, experiences, and promises that shape how an organisation is perceived. ‘Communications’ refers to the strategic orchestration of messages and channels that engage target audiences and advance business objectives.

If you want to have any chance of addressing challenges and enabling successes in startups and scaleups, you’ll need a unique form of adaptability and strategic thinking – something that pairs perfectly with high-growth, rapid-change environments.

1. Evolution in real time

What's true about your business today might be different in three months. Heck, it might be different by close of business. Maintaining coherence during periods of significant strategic change is complex and involves constantly revising and updating positioning as the company pivots to find product/market fit. For a profession grounded in consistency and solid foundations, this can be difficult and frustrating. Established companies typically evolve their positioning gradually, but startup positioning can shift dramatically as product-market fit gets closer. This demands agile thinking – and action.

2. Building the plane while in flight

Many communications professionals join a startup as the first comms hire, greeted by the absence of any established infrastructure. No templates, no guidelines, no previous examples to work from. That brings with it a real operational challenge. It means simultaneously creating and implementing essential materials – from tone of voice guidelines to visual brand systems – because there's no time to wait before real-world work. This parallel development and execution differs markedly from established companies where existing frameworks are often inherited, optimisation trumps creation, and new brand campaigns are painstakingly crafted before launch.

3. Unwinding the speed vs quality tension

The startup pressure to move quickly creates an inherent tension with the ways of working synonymous with consistent communications and brand quality. You have to develop frameworks that enable rapid execution while maintaining sufficient consistency and quality. This often requires a careful balance between what's perfect and what's possible, which will be a painful compromise for some.

Focus has to be on systems that ensure good enough outcomes at speed, but are built to enable iterative improvement. Don’t be unreasonably demanding, set the bar high enough, and then keep nudging it higher. Because what’s good enough today won’t be good enough tomorrow.

4. Metrics when you're building for the first time

Building brands in new markets or categories presents unique measurement challenges. Lack of historical data can result in difficulty making data-driven decisions or proving ROI. Without established benchmarks, brand professionals must develop alternative approaches for justifying their proposals, as well as frameworks for measuring success and demonstrating value that are initially anchored in market benchmarks, rather than internal precedent.

5. Building market credibility when you have limited history

How do you establish credibility when you have a limited track record or proof points behind the brand? That's literally going to be your job, so you have to find a way. Brand professionals must develop strategies for building trust and authority through alternative means, leveraging unique market insights, technological innovation, or founding team expertise. The experience you do have, whatever the scale, has to be harnessed – in the form of testimonials, case studies, or anything else you can create.

6. The resource allocation puzzle

In startups, brand and communications competes for resources against revenue-generating, or product-market-fit-finding, activities. Brand professionals must develop compelling cases not only for longer-term brand investment but for critical shorter-term goals too. This creates particular tension in pre-revenue companies where traditional ROI frameworks may not yet apply.

And making it even more complicated, communications professionals must keep a watchful eye over the expectations of their work. In the long run, no business can rely on communications to mask a failure to find product-market fit. There will be times when brand and communications really should get a smaller slice of the resource pie, challenging you to think creatively as you try to achieve more with less.

7. Wearing all the hats

Take a look on LinkedIn and you'll find no shortage of posts complaining about roles that require folks to handle everything from social media to PR to internal communications to event planning. Bad news if that's you, because that's exactly what's going to happen. Multi-role is a reality of communications in startups, meaning that unlike their counterparts in established companies, startup brand professionals rarely experience specialisation. See this as a problem? It’s probably not for you. Looking to learn and have more influence by working across everything comms? Strap in! Your breadth of responsibility is going to require versatility, careful prioritisation and resilience.

8. Futureproofing your work

Rather than just solving for immediate needs, brand professionals must develop systems and processes that can grow with the company. This requires careful balance between rapid action and building sustainable frameworks – creating brand architecture that supports both current operations while also being suitable enough, and flexible enough, for future growth.

9. Convincing everyone they're part of the brand team

While you might be the only dedicated brand and communications hire, everyone's a member of the brand team. That's because your brand is your reputation, and everyone influences that. However, your teammates with limited or zero brand experience may need some convincing, or may simply not want to hear it. Brand professionals in startups face the additional challenge of educating entire organisations about brand value and management, teaching those fundamental principles to teams while simultaneously implementing them. That requires education and execution skills, as well as diplomacy.

Finding the path forward

Brand and communications in startups and scaleups demands a fundamental shift in mindset. The challenges outlined in this article aren't hurdles to overcome – they're defining characteristics of the role that require specific strategies. Your success hinges on the ability to find the sweet spot between speed and consistency, advocating while executing, and building a strong working relationship with your founders.

The most effective startup communications professionals tend to share key traits: being at peace with ambiguity, the ability to iterate, and perhaps most importantly, the capacity to distinguish between what truly matters for business growth and what are merely ‘nice-to-haves.’ They understand that brand perfection matters less than maintaining momentum, that good enough today beats perfect next quarter. They get that their role is to enable rather than restrict business growth.

As your company evolves from startup to scale-up, these challenges will evolve rather than disappear. The solutions you develop – from your brand architecture to your communication frameworks – need to be robust enough to scale but flexible enough to adapt. But the real secret? You need to enjoy each challenge, treating it not as an obstacle, but a unique opportunity to do demanding yet impactful work that directly enables your business’s success.