The comment that stung
Andy Hayes started Plum Deluxe because he thought selling tea would be fun. (His words, not mine.) Years later, he had a hundred and fifty blends, a direct-to-consumer business, and a Facebook community where he goes live, knows people by name, and still recognises customers who have been buying since 2016. He can mention a recipe on a Tuesday and watch people make it that same afternoon. Plum Deluxe is full of heart, and most of it is his.
Then an advisor told him something that stung. Andy was excellent at marketing products, the advisor said. But he was not as good at marketing the brand.
It stung, Andy told me, because the brand was the best thing he had made. The community, the warmth, the people who treated the Facebook group like a kitchen table.
That advisor missed something, though - Andy built that brand. You don’t grow a tea company into a community that calls itself family by accident, and you don’t do it without knowing, in your gut, how to talk to people, and how to market what you offer.
What Andy was struggling with was how to do it now, at the size the business had reached. The instinct that got him here wasn’t going to get him any further on its own.
This is a specific stage in a business's life, and I call it the adolescent brand.
The fix that feels obvious
When the marketing stops doing its job, the first instinct is to assume it is a look problem. The usual move is a visual refresh: new logo, updated palette, sharper photography. It’s the most reasonable move in the world, because the visuals are the part you can see, and a brand that has grown up often does look dated next to the business it has become.
Plum Deluxe had already done this when I met Andy. They’d brought in a designer, toned down the signature purple, introduced the hummingbird, and rolled out a full colour palette. But they hadn’t gone anywhere near the messaging.
They’d been treating the copy as something to tack onto the visuals, rather than an asset that does its own work. The pictures got the upgrade, while the messaging stayed where it was, describing a smaller, earlier version of the company.
A lot of the founders I work with start exactly here, with the visual refresh, because it is tangible and it feels like progress. It does move things along, and the company looks more current for it. But they leave the harder question untouched: what is this brand for now, and who is it talking to?
What an adolescent brand actually is
An adolescent brand is one whose business has grown up while its messaging is still speaking for an earlier, smaller version of itself. The company has changed shape, and what they’re saying hasn’t caught up.
You can usually feel it. The marketing team keeps reaching for a way to describe what makes the brand special, but it feels confused. (Andy's team did exactly this, which is part of why he came looking for help.) The offer has widened, the audience has widened with it, and holding it all together feels harder than it used to. For Plum Deluxe, that meant a base of fiercely loyal long-term customers and a younger audience arriving at the same time, both needing to be spoken to without either feeling left out. Meanwhile, your customers start using you in ways you never planned for, and the brand begins to mean things to people that have nothing to do with you (which means you’re not capitalising on it).
Somewhere along the way, the brand develops an identity of its own, bigger than any one founder can voice single-handedly. The thing you built to express you has become something other people feel ownership of too.
None of this means you have failed. By definition, you’ve grown, and the disorientation that comes with it is an unwelcome post-start-up tax. Knowing the stage has a name, and a shape, is the first step to doing something about it.
How your messaging catches up with your business
We start by finding out what your brand already is, in the words of the people who love it. Andy had a hunch about this himself. He had his data team pull reports on his customers, and what struck him was the gap between who he thought they were and who they actually turned out to be. (That gap, between the story you tell about your audience and the story they tell about themselves, is where most of the useful material lives.)
So I talked to his customers, and the brand was right there in things that had never made it onto the website. The welcome email Andy once sent to a new customer in Wisconsin, where he had looked up the local weather and opened with a line about the snow. The card and gift that the team sent to a customer whose mum had died. The woman who said that she would be lost without Plum Deluxe, and the regulars who describe the community as family. None of that was on the website. All of it was the brand, being lived, while the copy talked about tea.
The job from there is building positioning that the whole business can stand behind. Language that fits the company Plum Deluxe had become, with room to speak to the loyal regulars and the newer, younger customers at once, without flattening either of them into a generic middle. Once that exists, everyone from the founder to the newest marketing hire has the same thing to reach for. The brand stops living in one person's head and becomes something the team can actually use.
So what to do now?
If you’ve read this and thought, “Oh cr*p, it’s us”, then here’s something you can do this week. Pull up your homepage and the last few emails you have sent out. Read them back as though you had never met your business, and ask whether they describe the company you are running now, or the one you started.
And, if they don’t, you can book a chat with me here, and we’ll work out what to do about it!
The Growing-Up Files goes out once a month, exploring how a brand's messaging evolves as the business behind it grows up. Next month: why unclear messaging shows up on the balance sheet long before anyone notices there’s a problem.
You can find out more about Peta and Free Range Marketing at freerangemarketing.co.uk
