Earlier this month, Matt joined Kimberly Whitler for a discussion on how startups should better manage marketing within their organization and the key pitfalls to avoid. This interview originally appeared on Forbes.

Kimberly A. Whitler: In your current role, you’ve come across a number of startup firms. One of the biggest challenges CEOs face is driving growth — or finding new customers and creating more loyal customers. This is especially a challenge for startups. One thing I’ve noticed is that some startups devalue marketing expertise, waiting until a later stage of development to bring in marketing expertise, rather than giving marketing talent a founder/partner position. They then are surprised when they can’t find a market for their product. Have you seen this? What insight can you provide as to why so many startups mismanage marketing?

Matt Hirst: That’s a great point. So much of this is a misunderstanding of what marketing is and can do. First, companies need to focus on their product’s truth and the outcome it provides or the need it serves. At West, we have this saying around ‘Build for Impact’. The impact you have or the purpose you serve is the core tenant of your brand. Marketing is a key driver in crystalizing that message and disseminating it out into the world.

Organizations that hold a heavy product or engineering bias can run into the most trouble. I actually experienced this firsthand during my time at Google. There was a mindset along the lines of “hey, we (engineers) have built this product, can you go market it for us?” The team was essentially asking for someone in marketing to draw up creative assets and drive (or create the need for) adoption. Of course, the marketing team’s reaction at that point should be to take a step back and ask, “What was the insight that drove (you to create) the product?”, “Who is the audience?”, “Why should they care?” The issue, of course, is that all of these questions needed to have been asked much further upstream.

Whitler: It seems that marketing teams are pulled in right at the end because startups prioritize that initial engineering and technical talent needed to build without considering the long-term need for brand-building. Any insight on why this occurs?

Hirst: In the engineer’s defense, they have access to a lot of powerful data, which they use to drive their decision making in real-time. But user data is only one part of a successful product development strategy. The marketer’s role is to help extol the value of consumer insight, helping product teams see around corners and build products that address truly unmet needs. Teams love to build, iterate, and push their updates out into the wild, none of which is bad.

But all of that energy is lost — and conflicts or frustrations with the marketing teams arise — when what they’re building does not meet a true consumer (or technological) need.

This isn’t just true of product development — creating features, use cases, adoption and ongoing engagement. We live in a world where in any given category there are a number of apps, widgets or services, thus ‘Brand’ and brand resonance is critical. And given that brand is synonymous with a product experience, then the brand (its differentiated functional and emotional positioning) needs to be built deep within the product DNA — its not simply a wrapper.

This is a long way of saying that marketing needs to be at the table from day 1. For many organizations, this is a big pill to swallow.

Whitler: What are the other things that marketers need to be aware of in engineering-heavy cultures?

Hirst: Look at how data is collected, used, and emphasized by organizations. For my money there has been an over rotation towards measuring and quantifying in order to justify action and implementation. This in part has led towards the over reliance on sources and mediums that can quantify (i.e. performance marketing). Being able to quantify CAC (customer acquisition cost) on a dollar in perspective versus an impressions/engagement out perspective is very seductive, but it’s not how you build a brand. I often use the example that the best things in life such as friendship and love can’t be quantified (and those emotions underwrite the relationships with our favorite bands), but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. While intellectually most people, marketers especially, understand that to be true, it can be very hard for their organizations to make that leap.

Whitler: What advice do you have for startups? How can they do a better job leveraging marketing to achieve success?

Hirst: Successful companies have been those that allowed CMOs to have seats at the sales, retail, brand / product design, etc. tables, rather than purely acquisition or traditional brand. This requires a certain type of CEO and a significant amount of discipline and trust by the organization in their marketing partners. These are the brands that everyone wants to emulate (Airbnb, Red Bull), but while many copy their output and stylistics, few understand that it is their structure that creates the brand.

The full conversation was first published on Forbes.

This is the first post in a series on the topics that are top-of-mind for founders and the bite-sized building blocks needed for success.

In a recent Quora Session, our Managing Director, Stacy Tarver Patterson, addressed a number of questions on building startup brands and the future of marketing. Today we’re sharing her takeaways on the initial strategies needed to create consumer brands in 2020.

1) Build Community

Get your audience and community profile down to a point that it is so specific and distinctive. Become absolutely obsessed with getting everything right for that well-defined community. On this point, before you do anything, read the short essay ‘1000 true fans’ by Kevin Kelly. Read it weekly, even (call me crazy, but I do).

My simple approach to doing this only requires some light Internet stalking. Find the 10 people who are the best representatives of the consumer you want your brand to serve. Not just 10 people who fit your demographic, but the 10 people you would nominate to be the *spokespeople* for this community. What’s their personality and behavior on key digital platforms? (Keep detailed notes!) Take a look at everything they’ve posted. What are the common buckets of themes and occasions? What is their fashion/lifestyle attitude? How do they express themselves, at what times, and how do they talk about their style? Who are they following? (Make a list in a spreadsheet.) Whose posts do they like, share, comment on? Do they have haters or enemies online? Follow these 10 people, comment on their posts, encourage them, engage them in conversation, make them feel loved and appreciated, and then share your values and vision/what you are building with them.

Repeat this process everyday until you can no longer handle it, and if you’ve laid the groundwork well enough, it should be relatively easy to handoff this process.

2) Embrace who you are NOT for

Always be sharpening what it is you stand for as a brand.

This should be relatively easy (and fun) to do if you’ve built a strong community (see above). One (fun) tool we employ for sharpening brand platforms at West is a hypothetical drinking game. Explain what your brand is about in one sentence. Then pretend you’ve had a drink, and do this again. Now how would you explain it after two drinks… then three drinks? Write each of these down and repeat them out loud. It’s usually the “three drinks” statement that sounds best and lives on.

You'll also have to be so convinced in this direction that it won't bother you when people don't get it. Some people will even hate it –– that's when you know you have a strong POV that is worthy of people's love and attention.

3) Strive for a benchmark-setting end-to-end experience

Shopping is an emotive experience, especially in the world of fashion. Even convenience shopping and Amazon fall into this category for me, because frustration is an emotion and it sits on the other side of failing to provide convenience.

Understand what emotion(s) you are optimizing for when you are building your commerce front end. What mindset are your customers coming in with and what do you want them to leave with? If you can remember back to a foot traffic and B&M shopping time, the experience of shopping had evolved so much.

It is still surprising to me that when it comes to e-commerce, white background gridwalls still largely prevail, with only a handful of really successful experiences starting to change that. This is getting quite tactical, but experiment with things like video on your product detail pages and collection pages (or better yet, a unique format you can own) to evoke the right type of emotion you want shoppers to feel when they are shopping your brand.

Remember that there are 5 senses. Outside of your own platform, fully map out everywhere your community can and will come into contact with your brand. Then complete the same exercise of identifying which emotion you are optimizing for at each touchpoint, and make sure you are addressing each one adequately. My colleague Jeremy Lind at West has a great template available for this exercise here.

For more takeaways on marketing and startups, follow Stacy on LinkedIn.

West’s Arthur Gallanter on our talent practice and approach to building teams. This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

My colleague, Matt Hirst, recently spoke with Forbes and Kimberly Whitler––former CMO and current Associate Professor of Business at the UVA’s Darden School of Business––about marketing talent and the pitfalls startups should avoid when hiring their first senior marketing leaders. It’s a great read for marketing professionals and CEOs looking to hire world class marketers. As the former Global Head of Brand Experience at Google and Head of Culture Marketing at Red Bull, Matt has a wealth of knowledge on the range of disciplines that marketers bring to the table (brand, product, growth) and how founders should correctly hire for the immediate and long-term needs of their business. 

I wanted to pause here and take this opportunity to talk more broadly about West’s recruiting practice and our approach to building teams. 

For those who don’t know, West is a venture studio. We are a team of brand and market experts that have investor discipline and an investment fund. We work with companies in our studio first––focussing on only the most critical components of building an impactful brand and creating true defensibility––and then selectively invest in them through our venture fund to double down on that growth.

A little over a year ago, founders from our studio & portfolio companies started asking us to help them recruit for key marketing and sales roles. The request for help came naturally. As brand builders, we want to ensure that our studio partners have the team in place to continue executing on their vision and the growth plans we created together. As investors, we have aligned interests in finding the right talent that will help drive growth for our companies. 

Though this was a new practice to West, we found that our unique venture studio model provided us with advantages and an ideal partnership with founders. It also yielded a better candidate experience. During our studio engagements we are core members of the team, and thus are able to generate excitement for the positions and better articulate the opportunities to potential future hires. We gain a deep understanding of a company’s culture and can effectively share this insight with high potential candidates.

Today, West offers contingency recruiting services for our clients and investment portfolio companies. Our recruitment services focus primarily on hiring for executive talent, as well as key roles in Marketing, Operations, Finance, and Sales. During that process, we also counsel founders on recruiting and talent processes, best practices, commission, equity, titles, and more. We help our founders build and reinforce their employee brand to enable them to create a flywheel for recruiting beyond our engagement. 

Personally, it has been an incredible experience leading this new practice at West. I describe myself on LinkedIn as a conversationalist because I enjoy how connecting with people can lead to new beginnings. I feel privileged that I am able to work with founders on finding the right talent for their teams and how I get to spend every day meeting incredible people who are looking for the next step in their career.

I encourage you to take a moment to read Matt’s thoughts specifically on marketing talent here. 

If you’re looking for a new opportunity, don’t hesitate to reach out directly at arthur@west.ventures or send me a note on LinkedIn.

West Portfolio CEOs on Playing Offense and Defense

Visionary and bold founders build for the future. The potential to shift the collective experience with a vision for a fairer, better, or faster future is what we love most about this industry. To achieve this vision, companies require leaders who can simultaneously play defense and offense, and COVID-19 has increased that necessity tenfold. In the past six months, leaders have been asked to manage cash and cut expenses while looking for new market opportunities in a world that is still spinning. In sports, most players excel at one or the other; early stage and startup CEOs must play both, at once.

With travel restricted for the foreseeable future, West recently converted our planned day-long June LP Summit into monthly zoom panels, offering our LPs a chance to hear directly from our portfolio companies on a specific topic. For our first session, we gathered portfolio startup CEOs TJ Farnsworth, CEO of Inception/Prelude Fertility, Jean Brownhill, CEO and co-founder of Sweeten, Denis Mars, CEO and co-founder of Proxy, and Lily Kanter, CEO and Founder of Boon Supply, to discuss how each are leading through unexpected challenges and embracing the changing landscape. Below are some of the key insights that these leaders shared about executing a robust response to the unexpected opportunities and challenges this year.

Trust Your Vision And Stick To It

Sweeten founder and CEO, Jean Brownhill, has always been adamant in her vision that the future of construction would be digital-first. In 2019, she doubled down on the company’s digital experiences. From payments to video conferencing in the app, the improved UX is now paying off exponentially. The average homeowner is 35 years old, expects seamless digital experiences in all aspects of their life, and Jean knew that home renovation was no exception. Even when faced with resistance from general contractors who were initially hesitant about the shift to digital, she prepared her company for this future vision. 

“We’ve seen 3-to-5 years of tech innovation happen over night as far as the adaptive challenge of getting our general contractors to really embrace technology. Every ounce of resistance is now gone.” – Jean Brownhill, Sweeten 

Lily Kanter’s Boon Supply experienced a similar acceptance of our fully digital world when schools closed. Founded to elevate fundraising and give organizers choice over the products sold and the charitable causes they championed, Lily believed in a future where school fundraising wasn’t constrained to paper forms and bake offs. The fundraising business is a massive industry that has been largely untouched by technology as individual school reps  accounted for most of the business. 

“We were holding on to the old legacy world. At this time we have an opportunity to leap frog and accelerate. So, I’m leaning a lot more on the vision that I have had and my gut on where to go. The old has slipped out from under us and we’re taking advantage of this opportunity to embrace what is truly new.” – Lily Kanter, Boon Supply

Find Opportunity by Leading the Response

Prelude Fertility, the fastest-growing network of fertility clinics in the United States, was required to close all in-person activities following guidelines to suspend fertility treatment for patients, putting a hold on the fertility journeys of thousands of hopeful families. As the largest network of fertility clinics across the country, this was not only detrimental to Prelude’s business, but also to the lives of so many of their patients. 

So TJ Farnsworth founded and led an industry-wide coalition to reinstate the urgency and essential nature of these services. Together with other fertility clinics, experts, and thought leaders, he formed a new professional society to negotiate with and educate policy and government officials. His leadership reversed the policy and allowed clinics to re-open earlier than expected. TJ’s experience highlights the importance of going on the offensive to really make change happen. 

Proxy––the provider of digital identities for the physical world––was in the midst of rapid expansion with corporate real estate providers. Companies like Doordash, Dropbox and Accenture all enable their employees, visitors and tenants to use their Proxy signals for frictionless smartphone-based access throughout the workplace. As offices closed, so did immediate opportunities for growth. However, founders Denis Mars and Simon Ratner have always stuck to their vision for a frictionless world and this larger opportunity is the reason West invested earlier this year. From our house and car keys to driver’s licenses, building doors, and gym fobs, Proxy is building a frictionless, personalized future, and is at the forefront of helping companies safely re-open with touchless experiences for employees. 

Unlock Growth With A Strong Offense

This first half of 2020 was a stark reminder that sometimes the best plans must be scrapped and revisited. A vertical strategy shifts horizontal, a primary growth channel closes, a key account vanishes. By playing offense and defense, sticking to their founding visions, and leading when others sat back, these startup CEOs accepted the obstacles ahead and found alternate routes to keep marching forward. 

We are thrilled to welcome Carlton Evans as Director of Production to the West team. 

A visionary film festival founder, curator, and entrepreneur, Carlton brings nearly two decades of creative production experience for a range of clients including Cisco, Facebook, Oakland Museum of California, and Mountain Hardwear to our studio. As we continue expanding our creative capabilities in pursuit of building impactful brands, Carlton’s extensive experience leading multi-faceted teams in producing films, animations, websites, and other creative and marketing assets is already impacting our studio work. In his short time at West, he has already jumped in on a range of projects from website development to video reel productions with studio and portfolio companies. Tackling the complexities required to translate a vision, feeling, and message into a digestible experience for the viewer is where he shines.  

 “What particularly excites me about the opportunity at West is bringing my passion for film and animation to our creative capabilities. I’m thrilled to be providing assets to our clients that can help move audiences to action, potentially making all the difference for their businesses.”

An independent producer, Carlton’s documentary and narrative productions have screened at notable festivals worldwide including Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Palm Springs, and Rotterdam. He holds a PhD in Art History and Film Theory from Stanford University and co-founded the Disposable Film Festival in 2007, which celebrates innovation in new media filmmaking internationally. At West, we are brand builders to our core. Defining and communicating a brand’s purpose is critical to our work, and Carlton’s collective talents will further amplify the stories we seek to tell.  

“I’m also very inspired by the venture studio model, which I believe makes so much sense, and establishes a deep alignment that can’t exist in traditional creative agencies. That alignment isn’t solely between agency and client, which of course is fundamental, but within West itself. It reduces tensions that can exist between strategy and creative in other contexts and creates a true partnership between our team and the companies in our studio.”

When not in the studio, Carlton lives in Berkeley with his wife Emi, and three-year-old daughter Karina. A voracious record collector, he’s enjoyed watching his daughter’s music tastes evolve and recently switched up his electric guitar for an acoustic, which is much better suited for picking out and playing Karina’s favorites. You can find Carlton over on IG @Carltone.

We are pleased to announce our investment in VergeSense.

Our world is flooded with data and insights. From bits, bytes to gigabytes and more, we take stock and we study. But for the ubiquity of buildings, we have never collected the data and analyzed their usage patterns.

Zero-ing in on the workplace, remote workers, distributed teams, and flexible multi-tenant office space are just a sampling of the numerous ways our office dynamics have transformed over the last two decades. Open layouts, team placements, conference rooms, and even napping pods are all decisions that have historically been based on accumulated wisdom and rough guesses, but rarely on hard data. COVID-19 brought in another layer of complexity and rapid change. We know that our offices will never disappear, but the way we interact with and use our office will evolve. With so much transformation, little has been done to determine the efficacy or impact of these changes. 

Starting with building and workplace design, VergeSense combines deep-learning sensors with space-intelligence software to help existing corporate real estate owners better understand their current space, as well as the new era of designers and space providers build purposeful spaces that work for our changing world. The team has already established a beachhead in the corporate real estate market and partnered with dozens of Fortune 1000 customers all over the world to unearth opportunities to make smarter use of their space. With easy-to-install and best-in-class sensors that meet the needs of a range of companies and environments, VergeSense delivers superior functionality and is igniting a new era of data and insights. 

The challenge was to develop a brand that could match VergeSense’s technical leadership, and speak to large enterprises while magnifying the company’s fresh, innovative approach to understanding physical spaces. Working with the team on two phases of their brand development, West partnered with VergeSense to unlock their market opportunity by   establishing a brand foundation and executing the design of assets that reflect this new positioning. With new visual and verbal designs, we made space for VergeSense to take hold of their market opportunity and lead their industry. Investing in the company was a natural progression of our partnership and captures the efficacy of our venture studio model. 

“Even before COVID-19, we saw how powerful VergeSense's technology could be in helping us experience and envision buildings and spaces in entirely new ways. With so many companies also now trying to figure out how to use and design office spaces in order to comply with new health precautions, and more generally as what we demand from our offices and office spaces changes, we are excited about the opportunity ahead and our partnership thus far.” 

-Matt Hirst, West 

“When building a company, it’s not always enough to have a great product. Equally as important is how you communicate that product to the market. We were looking for a partner that could help us think holistically about how we position ourselves, both visually and verbally, and how we show up in the market. West helped us do just that.

We were impressed by the West team and their ability to think both creatively and strategically and have a solid grasp of our business challenge. When the opportunity arose to bring West on as investors, it was a natural fit.”

-Dan Ryan, VergeSense

Companies thrive when the people within them thrive. In a world where we are deeply affected by our surroundings, and spend a large majority of our day working, we are blind when it comes to measuring and understanding efficacy and impact. Without these insights, how do we decide what shapes and defines our work environment? In using technology to make the built environment a happier, healthier, and more productive place, VergeSense is helping us design and build with purpose.

We at West are deeply saddened by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. It is without a doubt and yet another example of the institutionalized racism that continues to plague America and we stand with all of those who feel saddened, angered, and seek change.

The challenge facing this country will only be solved when we, as a society, take a long term, deliberate and systematic effort to eradicate racism in all of its forms. In adding our own voice to the current dialogue, we seek to create space for conversation and to take action that ignites change. It would be against our brand values - Truth-telling, Uncommon, Relentless, Brave, Optimists - to simply watch from the sidelines.

As a Venture Studio, we are literally in the business of designing and funding the future. Minute by minute, day by day, we make decisions that guide and shape the sort of future that we all want to live in. As such, we have always believed that diversity of people, and therefore their voices and perspectives, are a better perspective.  We have always governed our own business with that in mind.

We are intentionally building our own team to be as diverse and representative as possible. Our portfolio includes a number of women and minority founded businesses. But these are table-stakes. This is only the start.

Instead, we pledge to do more, to always ask what more can be done, today and long after the emotion from the current state of events has subsided for some. And so as founders, partners and leaders of your own communities, we ask that you join us in building an intentionally diverse future.

• We need to acknowledge and be aware of our biases. We need to be deliberate in bringing diversity and underrepresented races into our business.
• We need to be aware of the limitations of our own networks in hiring and actively seek employees, partners and vendors outside of them.
• We need to continually educate ourselves on the topic of systemic racism, oppression and unconscious bias, and create safe working environments where we are comfortable having uncomfortable conversions.
• We need to make diversity a business-critical KPI and be unswerving in socializing and reaching that goal.

In respecting and acknowledging the deep injustice of the murder of George Floyd and the countless other lives that have been lost as a result of institutionalized racism, we want to use this moment to urge our networks, partners and friends to use their power, standing and voices to be sustained, and intentional agents for a more diverse, fair and representative future.

We don’t have all of the answers and we know that the type of change we are talking about will take substantial effort and commitment––much more than anything we have previously done–– but that is how we, at West, will live our pillars to their fullest extent and how we are committed to building for impact.

-West

I recently had the chance to “sit down”, in the Covid world, with Bob Sommer, a West board member.  Bob is a leading advisor on government relations and public affairs. He advises now at Awsom Associates after having built and sold a national public relations firm and then serving in government and as a senior executive of an NHL franchise. Bob also teaches graduate level public affairs and media relations courses at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

Bob understands the importance of government and public relations and how the best ideas can quickly go awry without the right communications strategy. What began as a conversation more focused on PR and communications, transformed into a much broader discussion about the impacts of COVID-19 on business strategy and core communications practices. A lot of good advice was packed into our conversation. Bob is an incredible advisor to West and we’re grateful to be able to share some of his insights below.

Before you dive in, be warned, this isn’t a “how to” on PR basics and you won’t finish this read having learned the fundamentals of pitching your most recent funding news. Rather, it’s a strong reminder that,  for growing startups, communications and public relations shouldn’t be an isolated (often outsourced) business unit, or a one-off effort. They are essential components of how your brand shows up in the world, and how others perceive your mission, vision, and impact. A strong communications strategy requires integrating the team at the heart of your business and setting a tone of voice consistent with your brand.

So! Without further ado, here are the key takeaways from our conversation.

Throw out the old playbook.

From now on -- whatever industry your business is in -- you’re going to need some level of governance sign off, approval, or endorsement. Whatever side of the political spectrum you fall, COVID-19 has revealed the sweeping power of government. To ignore this in your planning or choose to proceed at all costs and “ask for forgiveness” after-the-fact is no longer going to fly. 

“Moving fast and begging forgiveness after is no longer a viable strategy for high-growth, venture backed businesses. Government is inserting itself more in our space than it has in many of our lifetimes and so startups must make government their partners. Part of the journey for any young company now has to include a rest stop at your federal and state – and perhaps local governments to make sure the right people know what you’re doing and what you’re building. As a founder or CEO, you have to be confident about whether or not that you're going to get crushed by a government ruling just as you are getting started.”

Speak up to stand out.

Rightfully so, companies big and small are often afraid of saying the wrong thing walking a fine line of political correctness. But not saying anything at all or chiming in with the current wave of similar messages is equally as damning. 

“Leaders need to take stock of what they’re saying across different mediums from web to any aspect of their Customer Journey. Do away with ‘in these difficult times’ and the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, and focus on what is most relevant for your business and your audience. Companies are afraid of saying the wrong thing, so they fall back on, ‘we'll get through this together’. The first three or four messages like that out of the box we’re OK, but now everyone has the same message and consumers aren’t buying it. Right now, you can't tell the difference between Verizon, Ford, Facebook and Amazon. It's all the same.

...However, most younger startups have a unique vantage point. They can push the envelope on messaging and they have a more direct, human relationship with their customers. To be able to talk about what you will try to do for your customer when we get to the other side, that's smart stuff. Risky, yes. And it could be wrong, but you’re at least sending a message. Push a little bit to talk about where the journey is going as opposed to where the journey currently is. The present is safe, but it’s also boring and monotonous.”

 Speak like a human (!)

Companies need to prioritize their human, authentic voice. That doesn’t mean it’s the CEO pontificating or incorporating emojis into every company tweet. Being human is about speaking directly to your customers and constituents in a way that’s consistent with your brand values and pillars. It’s opening up and being transparent versus defaulting to corporate speak or jargon. Look at your Customer Journey and pinpoint the moments where information isn’t as clear as it should be. Does your FAQ sound like it was written by a robot? Is information on your site easy to find and navigate?

“Not only do most startups have a better 1-1 connection with their customer(s), but they have a bevy of smart people working for them! Cultivate those diverse voices and showcase them. Ask your team, “Who's got what to say about where we might be on the journey a couple months from now?” If somebody wants to speculate about that, I think that's pretty cool, and it differentiates you from the rest of the pack.”

Bonus Round

Play offense. There’s opportunity to be found and had. Especially in a crisis, you need to lean into what inspired you to in the first place with a focus on how you can win. This takes a strong fortitude, but it is what ultimately separates the winners from the losers.

“The ones who can understand and really truly digest the changes occurring, either on a business level or on a personal level, will see opportunity and go after it. Instead of burying your head in the sand and constantly playing defense, try to move with the times and see where it takes you. Maybe all of your original plans were perfect, but dwelling on that is time wasted as competitors explore the opportunities ahead.”

Ultimately, your communications strategy is integral to your business strategy. It cannot be an afterthought, nice to have, or side initiative. It needs the interest and engagement of the CEO and leadership team. Most importantly, you shouldn’t wait for inbound interest or until you are in crisis mode to start sketching out your communications strategy. If you wait, you will miss opportunities when time is of the essence. When communication is done right, it will become a core document for your business, setting the tone and strategy across sales, marketing, customer support and more.

That tone should also be a reflection of your brand pillars. At West, we are Truth Tellers, Uncommon, Relentless, Brave, Optimists (TURBO) and these pillars anchor every aspect of our business. As a leader, you consistently make rapid decisions to prepare your company for an uncertain future. Staying grounded and consistent in how you communicate your company’s vision, execute on your mission, and engage external stakeholders is critical.

- By Eva Pullano, Communications Director at West

If you’re like any of the founders and teams I’ve spoken to in the last week, you probably fall into one of the following four groups – 1) Feeling defeated (change is so hard; it was so perfect before!) 2) Feeling stuck working on another draft of yet another update email while the world continues to change faster than you can type 3) Feeling a random, aimless shuffling of your business elements like a Rubik’s cube or 4) (If you’re lucky) Feeling fortunate that your product is now even more desirable. 

We understand. Know that for almost everyone this is hard - really, really hard. 

Whatever group you fall into, our advice is to revisit the basics, starting with your customer’s perspective - by mapping their journey. Unlike a Product Roadmap, a Customer Journey Map examines every moment across your entire product and brand experience, specifically zeroing in on the elements that meet the needs and wants of your customers and your business. It’s a technique and exercise that allows you to take a wide aperture view of every part of your business––helping your organization become more fluid, adaptable, and delivering immediate value to your end customers. 

So why now? Over the past few weeks, every single customer experience has shifted. These shifts will carry on for the foreseeable future. It’s too early to predict the “new normal” and any grand re-write will only be temporary at best. Right now, your customers need a brand that can deliver on and respond to their changing needs. Zero-ing in on the small steps and moments allows you to react on a much more nuanced level, consider multiple perspectives, and most importantly, account for your customer at every step.  

Customer Journey Maps are actually CEO dashboards 

This isn’t a marketing-only exercise. Over many years working alongside our studio and portfolio companies, I’ve been surprised to see hundreds of Product Roadmaps but comparatively very few complete Customer Journey Maps. For those that do have them (it’s often the more successful companies that do), this map often serves as the CEO’s dashboard, ensuring they are steering the business forward with the customer always at the center. When done right, they become effective decision trees for entire teams and organizations, the rationale for deciding where resources are allocated, and the reason for marketing, product, and experience changes. 

Conversions, frequency, advocacy, engagement, and loyalty are just a few of the things that a holistic and well-thought-out Customer Journey Map can deliver. The theory is that every element you choose to outline on this journey should be created and designed to deliver value and delight, remove friction, and build your brand overall. The more detailed you make brand and product moments (and critically, the spaces between them), the more unique, thoughtful, and impactful the journey you create for customers. If you’re only focused on one area or moment, (just the conversion moment or just the mission-critical), you are most likely missing most of the moments that create a beloved brand and a healthy, well-rounded business. Right now, this is more important than ever.

Widen your aperture with a Customer Journey Map

Okay, so how do I create one? 

If you have never made a journey or don’t know where your last one is (!), we created a quick template to get you (re-)started. It can be used as a starting point for any customer journey (and the basis of the one the West team often references when working on Journey Maps for our own studio partners and portfolio companies). On the template, you’ll see an area to add your brand’s purpose and pillars. Remember to reference these pillars throughout in order to infuse each element of the journey with your unique brand. If one of your pillars is “Trusted”, how can you translate moments of trust to the customer’s experience? 

To help organize your initial efforts, we’ve also included a few rows to grade and indicate priority for each moment. 

Acknowledging that this week was entirely different from last month, as you walk through this exercise either by yourself or with your team, consider how the following questions and themes might change or alter from your original vision: 

Underlying Brand:

• What is now irrelevant or unrealistic?
• What do we need to stop, pause, change?
• What are our customers saying and asking for? (ask them!)
• In what ways and for what moments can we really show our purpose and what we stand for?

Customer Engagement

• How can we maintain or encourage community engagement?
• How can we replace the awareness and engagement we received from offline events?
• In what new ways should advocacy be encouraged without physical word-of-mouth?
• For what moments can we add real human interactions?

Customer Experience 

• Are our packaging and onboarding experiences considered and relational?
• What new routines and rituals can we create, model and encourage?
• How can we respond to their current needs and wants?

Lastly, don’t give up – you might be surprised what your brand can become for customers in these new times. 

-Jeremy Lind, Managing Director

If you have any questions about this article or are interested in our help developing a Customer Journey Map for your brand contact us at studio@west.ventures.

Welcome Proxy––the future of digital identity.

West is pleased to announce our investment in Proxy, the provider of digital identities for the physical world. Proxy started with a simple idea that technology should empower us as we move throughout our day. This notion propelled co-founders Denis Mars and Simon Ratner to create a new paradigm that puts people in control of their own unique signal and identity.  Proxy closed on $42 million in a Series B financing bringing the total raised to over $58 million from leading investors including Scale Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Coatue and Y Combinator.

The rapid expansion of our physical and digital worlds has created too many high friction IDs. The average person has upwards of 80 forms of ID spanning these worlds. Everything from our house and car keys to driver’s license, employee or building key card, and barcode for the gym. Each one represents a unique identifier, but these markers are siloed and we don’t own or control them ourselves. 

Proxy is addressing this issue by giving individuals a better way to manage and convey their digital identity. Today, the company is transforming workplaces and buildings by authenticating and interacting with Bluetooth-enabled devices––letting people forego their key cards for a more personal, unique solution. Proxy gives companies and organizations the ability to let their teams navigate seamlessly through the workplace with a personal, unique signal that becomes the identifier, resulting in a more reliable, more enjoyable workplace experience. With Proxy, people can interact with devices in the real world from building doors to cars to connected devices, just by being themselves. It’s why Proxy is already working with the likes of Uber, Cloudflare and Accenture to create more seamless and secure experiences for employees. 

As part of our investment criteria, West is working directly with the Proxy team on the full company brand platform, including critical employer brand artifacts and initiatives that will help empower this next phase of growth. We work with founders and founding teams at inflection points, ones that are building brands with impact, and we couldn’t be more excited about Proxy’s current and future impact on the way we interact with our space. 

"Innovation requires two things. Inventing something people love, and being able to describe it to people. The second is just as important as the first. So we’re excited to partner with West and work closely with their team to help us tell our story and to share our vision of a frictionless world.” 

- Denis Mars, Co-Founder and CEO | Proxy

A Forbes 2019 Next Billion Dollar Startup and Fast Company Most Innovative Honoree, Proxy has just touched the surface of what’s possible for their technology and the future of identity management. Learn more about Proxy here.

After coming through the worst of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, China seems to be experiencing mild success restarting its economy and is being looked to as a positive leading indicator for the rest of the world, including in the US where experts say unfortunately the worst is still 2-3 weeks away. The reality of COVID-19 on the US economy and US businesses remains serious and should not be underestimated. For companies big and small, it’s likely been an incredibly tough week, and in those circumstances, it is hard to see beyond what's just in front of you. But as well as making tough decisions, in times of crisis, leadership requires you to have optimism and hope and an ability to confidently envision what the future holds.

“Please don’t sell this crisis back to me”

Until about a year ago, I was living in China leading digital marketing for Nike’s Greater China (mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong) business. I spent a total of three years in China with my then fiance and now-husband. People often ask us what life was like living and working in a place that for a lot of people feels so foreign, and my common response is that I now feel like I have the cheat codes for the future of marketing everywhere else. As a marketer in the digital era, life in China is like drinking from a firehose - every minute of every hour of every day.

Stanford economist Paul Romer once famously stated, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” I’d held a hunch that Alibaba and Tencent are informing marketing strategy for the next decade here, but seeing new behaviors emerge during shelter-in-place, I now think the stealable tactics may extend even further. Don’t get the wrong idea and this tragic global pandemic shouldn’t turn into a marketing brief. But now more than ever before, it’s the time to LISTEN to your employees, customers, consumers and communities, LEARN from them, and RESPOND with what might end up being some of the greatest innovations of our time, think Alibaba post-SARS in 2003.  

This week and last, I did just that via check-ins or comforting messages from former colleagues and friends. These quick catch-up conversations brought me back to all the ways Internet-life in China was somewhat of a precursor to what is happening here and now. So here are my 5 learnings from China that may “stick” in a current and post-COVID United States:

1) Double-down on social listening and community engagement, and recalibrate infrastructure to be nimble to your customer’s new reality.

During a recent evening reflection, my husband and I talked about how our life during this shelter-in-place period feels familiar to our first winter in Beijing. In the fall of 2016, Beijing issued its first Red Alert––the highest pollution warning––sparking school closures, odd-even driving restrictions, and similar stay at home measures. That winter was the worst pollution season ever on record for Beijing. My colleagues and I would cringe every time we were forced to cancel an outdoor Nike Run Club or Nike Training Club event, flushing tens of thousands of marketing dollars down the drain. 

But during that time, an interesting societal behavior emerged in Beijing, which internally at Nike we lovingly called “DEAR” (Drop Everything And Run): Any time the real-time air quality index (AQI) reading would drop below 50 - a “good” AQI, akin to L.A. on an average day - people would flood the streets and parks on bikes, on foot, with kids and sports equipment in tow, no matter what time of day or day of week it was. Some innovative and empathetic startup companies even started officially allowing a “fresh air leave” benefit. 

This newfound appreciation for the outdoors may certainly be what’s in store for us this summer, but if future pandemics come as frequently as some experts predict, this ‘seize the moment’ way of life could also become our new normal. For startups and scale-up companies of today, how does your current brand platform and customer journey map or dashboard support the new reality for customers? Look for opportunities where you can inject flexibility and authenticity into the foundation of your brand so as to support our shifting sense of normal for today and tomorrow.

2) Explore ways to enable a more customer and front-line friendly service experience.

It’s pretty widely known that China’s mobile POS or proximity mobile payment penetration rate far exceeds the rest of the world, largely due to the leapfrog effect from their never having meaningfully adopted credit cards. Led by tech giants Alibaba (Alipay) and WeChat (WeChat Pay), China’s mobile payment adoption rate is conservatively estimated to exceed 35% of the population, compared to ~8% in the U.S. [Statista].

In this vein, I received an email yesterday evening from a local shop in SF where I take my dog for grooming, alerting customers that effective immediately, all locations are going cashless in an effort to protect the health and safety of their teams and communities. If that is a broad change happening in more than just Mission Bay––and I have a hunch it is––mobile payment adoption may accelerate to catch up with the amount of disruption to consumer and retailer experience this phenomenon has caused for China.

3) Every moment is a content moment. Prioritize timeliness and authenticity over production value. 

Cord-cutting may finally happen en masse, including more frugality around cable media in general, which is the dominant market trend in China.

The reality is, as those same companies run up against a shortage of original programming, and live events and IRL meetups are simultaneously eliminated, more than ever before, we will all miss… the fear of missing out. With screen times up across the board, livestreaming brings that feeling of FOMO back to an at-home world, manufacturing digital flash mobs and injecting a false sense of scarcity to things like flash sales, driving impulse buying and online shopping as a highly social, leisure activity. Beyond livestreaming, as consumers are spending more time on screens, there is more direct load to brand sites than ever before. Refresh your owned platforms to ensure your content is up-to-date and engaging to both your customers as well as investors.

We're already seeing individuals and communities coming together through live stream and video in grassroots ways. This past Saturday, DJ D-Nice’s Instagram Live story peaked at 100k+ viewers, as he spun nine hours straight for the likes of Michelle Obama, Oprah, Diddy, Ava DuVernay, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden, who had all stopped by “Club Quarantine.”

In China’s major cities, public gatherings are heavily regulated (all the time). So online hangouts are ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Alibaba’s TMall has a livestream session, called “2nd Floor” every night that’s meant to feel like gathering your friends and going to the mall. Different brands sponsor it each night. As shelter-in-place continues, new and more sophisticated solutions -- driven by brands and platforms -- will arise that might take a page out of China’s playbook. The platforms that successfully combine the best aspects of OTT + innovative commerce (ex. iQiYi’s shoppable hit shows) or livestreaming + sophisticated e-commerce tools (ex. Alibaba’s Taobao) will surely be the winners.

4) Build a tight community by selectively working with the right influencers who can lead authentic conversations for your brand.

If you didn’t read our previous blog post about the rising cost of influencer marketing, you should. KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing - as it is known in China - has been an ever expanding bubble over the course of the last few years, and every day I worked there I kept thinking it would burst. It didn’t. The market is flooded with so many KOLs, you could easily think that brands and paying companies have all the bargaining power. However, it’s the opposite. 

As the number of KOLs increases, so does the specificity of the niches they cover, providing brands with a very detailed level of targeting (especially among micro-influencers and those with even smaller yet highly-engaged audiences). As a way to increase their enterprise marketing offerings, the major platforms (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) have formed or struck up exclusivity deals with mini conglomerates of KOLs called Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs) to offer up to brands as an integrated feature of their ad targeting suite. 

Just as we are starting to see here in the US, better targeting and better tools means higher cost of acquisition. As things like the California Consumer Privacy Act come to the forefront and third party cookies become a tool of the past, it is yet to be seen whether the major platforms here will unionize and command more top-down control of the nascent U.S. version of MCNs and the landscape at-large, folding it in with their already growing power. But on the supply side, one thing we can be certain about is the appeal and flexibility of an influencer or KOL existence, and as external forces (ahem, quarantine) shine a light on the perks of a flexible at-home schedule, we may just see an influencer economy bubble that mirrors China’s.

5) Revisit your privacy policies now as guidelines and mindsets around community engagement shift dramatically and quickly.

In true West fashion, this last one is more of a provocation, but is worth taking a moment to dive into what this means for your business and your community. It’s no secret that privacy is less of a concern amongst individual consumers in China, (especially when combined with the value of convenience and entertainment above all). Contrast that mentality to here, where most would argue that GDPR/CCPA are an optimistic step in the right direction. How many people have taken action using these new tools at their disposal, and how many average citizens are even able to interpret the .csv file that they receive when they request their data from a company? 

It seems that people will always make concessions out of a need for convenience, value, and now safety, and will continue to do so even more. As you navigate your brand through these changing times, take appropriate pauses to check those policies - they are after all, part of your brand. Don't wait for your consumers to demand policies from you, be in the driver’s seat and, as best as possible, set the tone yourself. 

As travel procedures implement health screenings and workers at larger companies ask questions like, “Will all employees be tested before we are allowed back to the office?” perhaps a bit of that same laissez-faire approach to data privacy is allowed to enter our minds. We are having to reckon with issues at an individual and an organizational level that we never have before, and with every “so-and-so got tested” and celebrity who posts from their quarantine bed, I wonder if this new level of openness and authenticity might be our new normal?

More thought starters from China:

• Gaming and Esports - The number of mobile gamers in China is almost double the population of the United States. Here, numbers may spike as more “casual” gamers will spend more time exploring platforms and app stores.
• Delivery - By far the thing my husband and I miss the most about China (industry titan Meituan Dianping even has social features that allow you to see and order the same lunch as your favorite influencer) delivery is picking up in a big way across the United States. Catalyzed by COVID-19, on-demand or scheduled delivery will become even more popular and productized as brands provide more flexible options to deal with higher demand.
• Social Commerce - China’s S-commerce industry already sits at 2 Trillion CNY, and includes popular features such as team buying and commerce-enabled chat groups. Here, more people are feeling compelled to assist others and have time to spend turning hobbies into side-gigs, which will require more sophisticated social commerce tools to power.

Nostalgic for the Future, Realistic About the Present

In a moment of work from home despair earlier this week, I took to social media to listen, learn, and respond, and I was greeted by photos of friend gatherings in Shanghai and Beijing - in the outdoor shopping villages, in the parks, together at hotpot. Many of the posts featured bicycles, or fresh kicks, or sweaty, smiling faces. It was an uplifting moment for me, as I realized the new sense of appreciation we are collectively going to have for all sorts of things that just three weeks ago we all probably took for granted. I responded to a friend’s post to ask if life there was getting “back to normal,” and she responded with a mountain of insight about turning business back on. It was a good reminder - don’t just allow CNN to play all day in the background as you navigate remote work life; phone a friend or colleague in China to hear what it’s like on the ground. You might get a surprise jolt of optimism out of it.

-Stacy Tarver Patterson, Managing Director, West

It has certainly been a week unlike any other. 

Alongside our portfolio companies, founders and partners, the West team is adjusting to a new working environment, daily routine, and so much more. So as we calibrate to this new “normal”, we’ll use this space to share our thoughts, musings, and reflections on the journey. Read on for thoughts from four of our West team members.

"I have been texting, calling, and scheduling video calls with those who I care deeply for but have been too busy to catch up with. A short text message takes <10 seconds but can spread lots of positivity and deliver a smile on someone's face.

Also sharing that a former West team member, Sejal Parekh, and her partner started this grassroots effort called #helpyourhood (IG handle @helpyourhood). Our local businesses are the fabric of our daily lives and I want to call on myself and others to support our communities as best we can during this weird time."

- Jess Wen

"Something that gave me a reason to smile this week:

With everything going on and probably too much news playing in the background, I was struggling to get into a focused mind space and “get into character” for a copywriting exercise. Searching for a quick hack to channel my inner mother and knowing that the rest of my family in Detroit and New Jersey were similarly sheltering in place, I reached out to both my own mom and stepmom and asked if they would take a few minutes to jot down ~100 words about their experience of being a mother. Maybe each of them just had some extra time to think these days, or perhaps as a mother one just has this exceptional stream of consciousness constantly at the ready. (I wouldn’t know, I am so far just a dog mom of a 5 month old cockapoo puppy.) Either way, the responses I received absolutely blew me away in their loving rawness.

My takeaway? Motherhood, like love, is a verb. And now I am curious to know others’ hundred word definitions of motherhood..."

- Stacy Tarver Patterson

"I recently stumbled upon this Nat King Cole compilation album called, The Unforgettable, and I've been listening to it on repeat this week. There’s something about the romanticism of the 1950s captured in the lyrics and the lushness of the orchestral arrangements and that have been soothing during these uncertain times. Maybe it will help you too."

- Brandon Hightower

"I have a couple friends in the restaurant industry and this week it has been my personal goal to support each one of them. We had dinner from Bon Nene last night (I recommend the Maguro Bowl) and it was such a delight to see the team. Tomorrow we are planning a "date night at home” and ordering Che Fico (my best friend, Allie, works there) for dinner. It isn't much, but it feels like a small step to supporting the businesses we love.

In our work, dial-ins don't always need a purpose. A co-worker and I have had a daily 1:1 where we just check-in for 15 minutes. This gives us a cadence of communication that doesn’t feel forced, and is a substitute for our in office banter. Another colleague and I use a dial-in for work sessions. This means that our videos are on and we are sitting together for a couple of hours, but there isn’t an agenda and sometimes we aren’t speaking at all––-just sitting and working in silence “together”. Having that presence (even digitally) is comforting. This kind of collaboration models sitting in a conference room together. It makes space for creativity and brainstorming. My takeaway here is that if you have a nut to crack, treat it the same way you would treat in-person collaboration, just include a video call link. Sit together, throw ideas at the wall, and don't feel the pressure to always talk. It's okay to just sit with each other."

- Delfina Sitar