Column: Your Company Has Three Brands, Not One

Brands are valuable, regardless of company size. That is well understood.

What is less well understood, especially among startups, is that there are as many ways to think about your brand as there are recipients on the other end of that brand positioning. I want to propose an easy framework for startups and their marketers to consider when building and marketing brands: A company's brand has different meaning to its consumers, to its business partners, and to current and future employees.

First, there is a company's brand in the eyes of the consumer. Let's look at the example of Netflix. The streaming service wants its consumers to think of it as easy to use, full of great shows, and a reasonable value for the price.

Of course, there is overlap between these three segments, and the brand positioning therefore can sometimes combine to create an overall brand perception. Still, it's important for marketers to think about each of these three expressions of your brand, and how the combination of them creates a mosaic that people use to form an impression of your company.

Large companies are able to have separate marketing functions for each of these audiences -- frequently at large companies there is a VP of Brand Marketing (focused on consumers), a VP of Trade Marketing (focused on businesses), and sometimes someone in HR or in recruiting who focuses on employer branding.

But startups don't have that luxury — the CMO (and frequently the CEO) have to manage all aspects of brand building to the various audiences.

Once you bifurcate (trifurcate?) your brand-building exercises into these three target markets, you can then create programs for each.

For example, a company that wants to make its employer brand be more focused on engineering and tech might create a new tech blog where their engineers can write long-form posts to highlight a company's tech cred. Similarly, that company might choose to webcast its hack-week demo days, or post on its social media platforms more information about what it's like to be an engineer at the company.

A company that wants to make its brand appear more friendly to its business partners might create white papers highlighting case studies of collaboration with its long-time clients.

The more that marketers realize they are crafting their brand in different ways for different audiences, the more bespoke their tactics can be to address each audience individually.

Spencer Rascoff is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire and dot.LA, and served as Zillow's CEO for a decade.