How to launch a brand properly

A launch is not an announcement. It is the first three months of a position you intend to hold, and the announcement is the least important part of it.

Most launches are built backwards. The date is set, the film is made, the influencers are booked, and the question of what the brand actually stands for is settled somewhere in the edit. Then the noise happens, and two months later nothing has changed except the budget.

What has to be true before launch day

• The position is written down in a sentence somebody could disagree with. If it could belong to a competitor, it is not a position.
• The distinctive assets exist. Not a logo. A colour, a shape, a phrase, a sound, a layout, applied consistently from day one, because recognition starts accumulating at the first exposure.
• The destination works. The site, the product page, the enquiry route and the tracking, tested on a mid range phone. Driving launch traffic to an unfinished destination wastes the one moment when attention is free.
• The proof is ready. Whatever substantiates the claim: the data, the demonstration, the first customers, the certification.

Sequencing the ninety days

Weeks minus four to zero. Quiet work. Brief the press who actually cover your category, prepare the people who will speak, seed to a small group who can say something credible, and get the destination finished. Earned coverage needs lead time and almost never arrives on request.

Weeks one to two. The loud part. Paid reach, coverage, creators, whatever the plan contains, concentrated rather than spread. A launch that trickles out over six weeks reads as a series of unconnected posts.

Weeks three to twelve. The part everyone skips. Keep the same idea in market, in different executions, with the budget tapering rather than stopping. This is where the launch either becomes a brand or becomes a memory. The argument is in audacity and tenacity.

Where the money goes

Roughly: a third on making the thing properly, because a weak asset cannot be rescued by spend. A third on the concentrated first fortnight. A third held for weeks three to twelve, protected in writing so it does not get spent early when the launch week numbers look exciting.

Resist spending the entire budget on day one. The most common launch failure is a brilliant week followed by silence, and silence is where the recognition you just bought goes to die.

What tells you it worked

Not launch day impressions. Branded search volume four weeks later, compared with the baseline you recorded beforehand. Direct traffic. Unprompted mentions. Whether anyone can describe the proposition back to you without prompting. Revenue matters, obviously, and in most categories it arrives after the signals above have already moved.

Record the baseline before you launch. Almost nobody does, and without it every subsequent claim about the launch is unfalsifiable.

The mistake worth naming

Launching the brand and the product at the same time as the website rebuild and the new positioning, all in one week, so that when something works nobody can tell which thing it was. Stagger them. The learning is worth more than the tidiness.