Small but mighty, the “about” blurb is the boilerplate copy that serves as the cornerstone to your startup’s brand. Although widely used by companies both young and established, this essential piece of content is too often misunderstood. As the official external description of your company, this short piece of text does a lot of heavy lifting. It must work for every audience (customers, partners, investors, media, and employees), easily adapt to any purpose (sales, public relations, recruitment), and be polished and comprehensive enough to represent your brand on its own.

Building a brand tends to be an overwhelming and often overlooked task for young companies. It’s a daunting process made all the more intimidating by the lack of a shared understanding of what a “brand” actually is. Is it a product? A logo? A feature set? Is it the same as a company vision? A brand isn’t any of these things, but it encompasses all of them. A brand is hard to define because it’s fundamentally personal. It’s the perception, associations, and affinity than an individual has for your product or company.

No one can predict the future, but that doesn’t means brands can stop planning for it. As we finally close the longest and strangest Q2 most of us have experienced to date, many of us are ready to survey the landscape and figure out how to move forward. Yes, it’s all in flux. True, we’re not on the other side of this thing yet. And yeah, none of us knows what comes next. That’s why now is the time to reach out and talk to people and listen to what they’re experiencing, doing, and wanting.

On Friday, March 20th, dozens of founders and marketers from the FUEL portfolio dialed into a Zoom call for a frank conversation about how to manage marketing in the age of coronavirus. Jamie Viggiano, FUEL’s Chief Marketing Officer, invited marketing virtuoso Sumaiya Balbale (Jet.com, Shake Shack) to tackle the toughest questions about running a brand in the age of coronavirus.

A company’s vision, mission, and values - collectively defined as a company’s ethos - are inextricably linked to its brand. Your company’s values help define codes of conduct, your mission keeps employees focused, and your vision keeps them inspired. In the aggregate, the mission, vision, and values all help employees validate why they show up to work every morning and guide their decision-making. It’s these decisions that ultimately determine how your brand comes to life.

Humans can sometimes seem irrational, can’t they? A person who drives a $75,000 car but won’t pay $2 to park it for an hour. Parents who feel less guilty when they have to pay a “fine” for picking their kids up late from school or daycare. People who prefer to wait in long lines yet they become exasperated when waiting in a short line. This behavior starts to make a lot more sense when you look at it from a human psychology perspective. You quickly come to realize that we all act unpredictably at times given our unique experiences, perspectives, emotions, and inclinations.