The art of building legendary brands

Arielle Jackson, a former Google and Square marketer who now serves as marketer in residence at First Round Capital, shares her approach to building brands for early-stage startups. The conversation covers naming products and companies, a brand development framework built on purpose, positioning, and personality, and practical advice on PR and when to hire a marketer.

01Key learnings

• Start with product positioning before anything else, since positioning drives most downstream marketing decisions; Arielle says she would never write code without it.
• Run a structured naming process: write a naming brief, brainstorm hundreds of rough ideas, then screen candidates against trademark, domain, distinctiveness, timelessness, sound, and visual fit.
• Prefer suggestive or evocative names that hint at what the company does, but accept that empty-vessel names like Eero can work if you invest heavily in marketing over time.
• Give a company a purpose sentence that explains the change it wants to see, independent of money, and use it as the header for the about page and for internal alignment.
• Pressure-test positioning with the 'bar test': say how you'd describe the product to a peer over drinks, using everyday language rather than jargon like 'leverages' or 'empowers'.
• Define brand personality by picking two of five dimensions (sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, ruggedness), then writing five 'we are X, but not Y' attributes that add useful tension.
• Keep a brand creative brief that combines purpose, positioning, and personality so copy, visuals, and new employees all draw from one source of truth.
• For early PR, get your story straight in one sentence, set realistic expectations for exclusives, and consider local outlets and customer-hero angles rather than only national press.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.