‘Everything is a blank sheet of paper’: One marketer on going from big brands to a startup

A large marketing organisation will have dozens of colleagues, and any new starter will be presented with brand codes and guidelines going back years, even decades. But at a startup, there is often no rulebook, with lone marketers trusted to establish the roots of the brand.

Alice Tendler is one marketer who has made the transition from large established brands, namely OVO and BT Group, to a startup where she was the first marketer. In April, she joined challenger utilities brand Alfred as CMO before launch, giving her responsibility for establishing the brand, team and marketing operation from the ground up.

Rather than seeing this as daunting, Tendler sees this role as extremely exciting.

“It’s been such a privilege, as a marketer, to join a startup,” she tells Marketing Week. “Actually literally laying the foundations of what the brand is going to be pre-launch.”

What is a real luxury, from a marketing perspective, is to be able to use this period to test and learn.

Alfred functions differently from other utility brands. For a membership fee of £195 per year, customers then only have to pay wholesale usage prices for electricity, gas, broadband, mobile, and insurance.

It has now soft launched with a waitlist and is targeting a full launch in the final quarter of the year. Its pre-launch marketing has so far centred on earned media, a referral programme and building its social presence.

“What is a real luxury, from a marketing perspective, is to be able to use this period to test and learn,” she says. “To trial things, see what works, develop our own voice, which is something I really believe in, and gradually build that sense of who Alfred is and how we get out in the world.”

Consistency and effectiveness go hand-in-hand, and, in previous roles, one of Tendler’s key duties was maintaining previously established brand consistency. Things are different in a startup like Alfred.

“Now that’s all on me, because it doesn’t exist,” Tendler says.

That makes the next stage of Alfred’s marketing particularly important. As the business moves from waitlist to launch, Tendler wants to turn the experimentation of the pre-launch period into a consistent brand experience.

“I think it’s starting to roll that out with real consistency,” she says. “Starting to see people recognise what Alfred looks and feels like, and making that a really consistent experience through our product.”

For Tendler, that consistency needs to extend beyond communications.

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The advantage of joining this early, she says, is being able to shape that across the whole business, “from product design, UX, to also culture internally”.

“I think generally the thing that I found really refreshing is the sense of anything is possible because there’s no established ways of doing things,” she says.

“There are no generational legacy decisions that have been made that you’re living with. Everything is a blank sheet of paper.”

While established businesses may have brand books with tight guidelines, a startup like Alfred has founders, who are obviously extremely invested in the work of the marketing department.

“You’re inevitably working very, very closely with those founders, who are every bit as emotionally engaged in the brand as you are,” Tendler says.

“You get much more attention, much more love, and much more passion for the brand than perhaps you get when you’re working on an incumbent brand that’s existed for decades.”

Alfred is a very different environment from the established businesses Tendler has previously worked in.

“The pace of a startup is really different to the pace of working in a bigger organisation,” she says. “That is very liberating as well. You have to work in a much more fluid, collaborative way.”

Tendler is a well-established marketing leader, who previously led a team of around 30 to 40. However, at Alfred the set-up is very different. In the initial stages of her role, she was the only marketer. Her team has grown, but you can still count the number of marketers at the business on one hand.

Naturally, this changes what leadership looks like.

“You have to be prepared to roll your sleeves up and do more yourself,” she says.

There’s a lot more crossover and a lot more fluidity between roles and the way that people work.

“If something needs to be done, that’s probably me who’s going to do it. And I’m going to have to look around and work out how I do this thing that perhaps I’ve never done before.”

While working at a startup involves a degree of getting stuck in as a leader, she has brought in specialist expertise where needed, including an experienced editor and writer to help develop Alfred’s tone of voice.

At large brands, silos can quickly establish between different functions. At Alfred, no such divisions exist, with product and finance teams being highly invested in brand.

“Although you’re suddenly working with a tiny team and resources are much smaller, there’s a lot more crossover and a lot more fluidity between roles and the way that people work,” she says.

As well as requiring a degree of flexibility, Tendler’s role at Alfred requires her to be more visible than what she is used to.

As it establishes itself, the company is leaning on using its founders and wider team across LinkedIn, earned media and social.

“As a marketer, you’re sort of behind the brand usually. You’re not the brand,” she says. “Whereas in something as small and as new as Alfred, you have to get comfortable with being in front of the camera.”

She says the level of internal engagement has made employee advocacy particularly powerful during the pre-launch phase.

“Because you know, we’re still relatively small, if you work for a startup, I think you feel very passionately engaged,” she says.

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“You think about it all the time. There’s just no other way. You’re living and breathing it.”

This is one element of her new role that has surprised her, with Tendler gaining an appreciation for “the power of word of mouth”.

The experience has also given her a view on what established businesses could take from startup culture. The business has the approach of proactively coming up with ideas and making them happen quickly, she says. This “refreshing mindset” is something that could and should be adopted in bigger businesses, she says.