The Launch Doctor - Email Newsletter

The Launch Pad
June 2004

Launching a Company

In many of my launch articles and in both of my books, I’ve mentioned that when a startup company launches their first product, they are also launching their company at the same time. Sometimes, larger established companies re-organize, add divisions or expand geographically, and they must go through the same process to launch or re-launch a part of their company. The process is very similar to a product launch, but there are a few differences. Instead of dealing with specific details of a product, you are working at a much higher level – the company as a whole. To illustrate this, let’s walk through the process.

Launching 101
To launch a company, you use the same basic steps as you would use to launch a product. What are those steps? (There will be a quiz at the end, so pay attention.)

There’s an assessment phase, where you consider aspects of the product and market, except that you would analyze the company instead of the product. In the assessment phase, you would gather data and analyze it in order to develop the company definition, the strategic objectives, the customer, the market, and the competition.

During the strategy phase, you develop positioning and messaging, and develop marketing programs (internal and external). You usually capture this information in a marketing plan.

The final phase is the implementation phase, where you form a launch team, develop a launch plan and implement it. (I call this the Just Do It phase.)

When you launch a company, you’re launching all the products in it and all the people who are employed by the company. Rather than look at a lot of details about a product’s features and functionality, you would be looking at the company as a business entity and its reputation, image and performance in the eyes of the industry, shareholders, and employees.

Let’s take a look at how we would do the assessment phase for a company:

Company Definition (Description)
In this step, you define what the company is and does. It may be obvious to everyone, but one way to do this is to describe the company as if a stranger had never heard of it (and if it’s a startup, there won’t be many people who HAVE heard of it). Is it a new company or has it been in business for decades? Is it small or large? Where is it located geographically? What types of products or services does it produce and sell? What industry is it part of? What’s the company’s primary vision or mission?

If you are re-launching part of an existing company or are doing a branding campaign where you’re trying to change the company’s image, it gets trickier. You will have to describe both the current image of the company (or portion), as well as the DESIRED new image of the company (or portion). The strategy and messages will have to support the desired image.

Strategic Objective
What’s the business objective that you’re trying to achieve by launching the company? For a startup, it might be developing initial awareness and to be considered a player in the market space, or to attract investors and key partners. For a larger company or for a re-launch, the objective might be to increase competitive advantage, enter a new vertical market, effect growth, or enter a new geography. There might be market reasons or financial reasons, or even personal reasons on the part of the key executives of the company. Whatever the reason, it’s important to articulate the objective for the launch so that everyone understands why it’s happening and the anticipated results.

Customer and Market
When you’re launching a company, you may have several different customers. To begin with, you’ll have the customers who buy your products. When you launch the company, you may also have new customers who haven’t done business with you before, or strategic partners that might need to know about the company. The question becomes, who needs to know that our company exists? Once you have identified those customers, then you need to answer the question: how will they benefit from us? That becomes the value proposition.

Defining the market means identifying the high-level markets that the company wants to be in. If this is a re-launch, you might want to include existing markets along with the new ones. Once you have identified them, then you examine the trends and characteristics of each market, just as you would for a product launch.

Competition
This one should be fairly easy to assess: who are your competitors now, and if you are going to enter new markets, who are those competitors? When you analyze the competitors this time, you only have to compare at a company level, not a detailed product level. That’s the only difference in the process. Otherwise, it’s the same as doing competitive analysis for a product.

The next part is the strategy phase:

Positioning and Messages
The first step is assessing your place in the competitive environment, otherwise known as positioning. If you’re entering new territory when you launch your company, you will have to figure out how and why you’re different from the competition in order to get some attention from your target customer. If you’re re-launching your company, that may be more difficult and could cause customer confusion especially if you have other ongoing marketing programs that say something different about the company.

When it comes to messaging, the normal process is to develop a hierarchy of messages, starting with the company-level messages first, so that’s all you need in this case. Often, it’s the vision or mission statements that form the basis of some of these messages, so that gives you the opportunity to define your direction or even a new direction if you are re-launching part of a company. When developing messages for launching a company, it’s important to include the people aspect. A company is nothing more than an organization of individuals, and you are trying to reach other individuals who may be your customers, partners, and industry peers. Words like “beliefs” and “commitment” and “serve” work well when trying to humanize messages.

Marketing Programs
For launching a company, the most common types of marketing programs are press releases and public relations events, brochures, trade shows and conferences, and advertising. These are the types of marketing programs that have higher price tags, because it’s more difficult to reach a broader audience, and you have to do that when you launch your company. The same is true for corporate branding and image campaigns; they are quite expensive. However, if you are operating in shoestring mode, you can at least do a splashy update of the corporate website to reflect the new direction.

The last phase is implementation:

Launching the Company
A launch team should be formed to launch the company, as if you were launching a product. When re-launching a company or part of one, you may have higher-level executives on the launch team, or someone who is in charge of corporate communications with the outside world. Those individuals will insure that the brand, image and corporate level messages are consistently applied during the launch campaign. The launch team may also include outside vendors such as an advertising agency and/or a public relations firm.

In a startup situation, where you would be launching the company at the same time as the first product, you would only have one launch team who would do both simultaneously. This situation is more challenging, because two levels of marketing campaigns need to be done: one at the corporate level to create awareness of the company in the overall market and industry, and another campaign at the product level that will reach the ultimate customers. But if the competitive analysis and the messaging have been done at both levels, then all of the information will be there to support the launch. In this situation, you would probably have many different marketing programs that you would roll out at the same time. (For more information, see Chapter 16, page 256, of my book, “From Idea to Launch at Internet Speed” for a suggested list of marketing programs.)

Quiz
You thought I was kidding, didn’t you? Okay, here is the quiz: In the following quick and quirky example, what is the company’s key strategic objective for the launch? (you’ll have to do some reading and scrolling to find the answer.)

Quick and Quirky Example
You are a launch consultant, and you’ve just been contacted by the founder of a small startup in the database software market about helping them launch their company. The founders met while working for a larger company that is now going to be their competitor. They want to launch their startup company on its own merits, leveraging their individual reputations in the industry but diminishing their former connection to the (now) competitor. They already have their first product and early sales, but now they want to increase awareness of their company as a whole.

Because the company doesn’t have enough startup funds, they ask you to help prepare the marketing and launch plan that will accompany the business plan that they plan to pitch to investors. They want you to identify the right marketing programs for the launch and to estimate the cost of each one. The plan would be to then get the money for the launch from the funds that they raise.

You go through the steps of defining the company, strategic objective, and their target markets. Because they have existing customers, they have some preliminary customer feedback regarding their product, and to some extent, feedback on the company’s level of service. You do a detailed competitive analysis, and find six new competitors in addition to the founders’ former employer. When you do the strategy, you find that the biggest differentiator seems to be the cross-platform capability of their software. Another differentiator seems to be the technology savvy of the founders with regard to large enterprise-level databases. Those two differentiators form the basis of the key messages.

The marketing campaign for the company launch will feature a series of press releases, presentations at two industry conferences delivered by the founders, and one or more articles that the founders would write for industry magazines. The company’s website would be completely revamped, with more emphasis on the biographies and technical achievements of the founders. Finally, a small ad would be considered for placement into a trade journal. The ad and press releases will emphasize the cross-platform nature of the product, as will the presentations and articles. Finally, the marketing programs would be affordable and appropriate for a startup company, and therefore more likely to be funded by their investors.

And now, you're done. You're ready to launch the company.

And the answer to the quiz question is…nope. You’ll have to keep scrolling.

Have fun launching those companies….

Catherine Kitcho
The Launch Doctor

Okay, okay. The answer is: To be considered a player in the market space.