How to Avoid Brand Drift
Founders must define their startup’s brand positioning, or someone else will

You know what your company is all about: your vision and values, your mission, and all the ways you’re different, the impact of your products.
But does your audience?
I bet you think so.
But what if you asked them? Better, what if you asked their friends? Across how many hops would your message stay intact? Without clarity and focus, the fidelity of a company’s messaging degrades quickly, leading to brand drift.
Brand drift is when the mix of customers, competitors, and the market define you, rather than you defining yourself.
Brand drift is bad for several reasons:
- you spend time redefining yourself, often in light of a competitor or peer, rather than leading with high-impact messaging that emphasizes your vision and values
- your key messages become diluted the further they spread from you, rather than self-perpetuating like a dividing cell
- you end up spending more time and money getting the flywheel spinning, losing out on momentum and leverage
Why does brand drift happen?
It happens when a startup isn’t following a brand strategy. I get it: strategy is squishy and hard to define, and probably seems like something that can wait till later.
It seems like there are more important decisions, like choosing a tech stack. Those are the choices you make deliberately. They seem concrete and permanent. Who wants to re-platform in 12 months?
With brand stuff, it doesn’t matter, right? You can just delete a blog post or redesign the landing page.
They’re just words, right?
And if we just say enough things, won’t they somehow add up to a strategy in retrospect?
Here’s the reality:
Impressions and misconceptions last, and they persist through the network, even if you’ve updated the source.
Brand confusion doesn’t self-correct once you update your site copy or write a clarifying blog post. The perception is already in minds of the market, and it takes time for the new message to propagate through the system.
In other words, it’s worth getting it right from the start.
The good news is that there are several steps you can take to get back on track.
4 steps to preventing brand drift
- define your startup’s brand positioning statement
- develop 3–5 key messages built on top of the positioning statement
- incorporate those key ideas into all of your messaging, including websites, press releases, tweets, blogs, talks, emails, and everything else
- say them all the time
The key to avoiding brand drift is clarity of messaging coupled with discipline in repeating the key messaging across all channels. This kind of repetition might seem like overkill, but successful communicators know repetition is key to getting your message across.
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner agrees:
A former colleague of mine described it this way: In order to effectively communicate to an audience, you need to repeat yourself so often that you grow sick of hearing yourself say it, and only then will people begin to internalize the message.
Like entropy, the threat of brand drift is ever-present. But if you define your strategy, create key messages, then repeat those messages every chance you get, you can help ensure that your startup’s messaging is carried by the network with minimal degradation.

