Ghada Ismail
In this second part, Abu Zannad turns to the resource startups actually have plenty of: creativity. He explains why “out-noticing” the competition matters more than out-spending them, and why so many founders confuse visibility, reputation, and meaning when they talk about “building a brand.”
How can startups use creativity as a competitive advantage when they cannot compete with larger companies on advertising budgets, resources, or brand recognition?
I think we first need to stop treating creativity as incidental, as this magical thing that occasionally happens when a talented person walks into a room. Creativity is becoming a much more important competitive capability precisely because AI is making so many other capabilities abundant.
Today, almost everyone can produce more content, more variations, more designs, more headlines and more analysis, faster and cheaper than ever before. So producing more is becoming less interesting. The competitive advantage increasingly lies in seeing something other people did not see.
I often describe it as the difference between information and insight. Two companies can have access to exactly the same data and come to completely different conclusions. Same data. Different eyes. That difference is human judgement.
And I don’t think insight has to be left to luck. There are conditions that make it more likely. Experience gives you patterns. Curiosity makes you notice what does not fit. Scepticism stops you accepting the first explanation. Contradictions reveal where reality is behaving differently from the category’s assumptions. Connections allow two things that normally live separately to collide.
Sometimes even constraint helps. I call that creative desperation: when you genuinely cannot solve the problem in the conventional way, you are forced to find another path. That is why startups may actually have an advantage. A large incumbent can often buy another media plan. A startup cannot. It has to notice something the incumbent has stopped noticing.
Look at the extraordinary group of younger businesses emerging around us:
Dollar Shave Club did not beat the shaving establishment by producing a more expensive shaving commercial. It understood internet humour and attacked the seriousness of the category.
Liquid Death looked at bottled water and asked why water had to behave like bottled water at all. It borrowed from punk, heavy metal and entertainment culture.
PRIME understood that creator communities themselves could become an extraordinary distribution system.
Crumbl turned cookies into something closer to sneaker drops; weekly anticipation, scarcity, reviewing and participation.
Sleep or Die looked at the soft, calming visual language of the sleep category and contradicted it completely.
And Dubai Chocolate may be one of the most fascinating cases of all. Someone created an unusually sensory product: “the crack of the chocolate, the colour of the pistachio, the texture of knafeh and a platform discovered that people could not stop watching it”. The algorithm accelerated the phenomenon; it did not originate the human fascination.
I think we should stop treating cases like these as amusing stories about things that “went viral.” They are evidence. We are watching something close to a new applied science of cultural creativity develop in front of us.
Every platform is producing an enormous live laboratory of human behaviour. Every unexpected breakout gives us something to study. What was the human tension? What cultural code did the brand recognize? What category convention did it violate? What community carried the idea? What made somebody want to participate rather than merely watch? What behaviour did the platform reward? What made the idea travel from one subculture into another?
Those are not questions only for advertising people anymore. They are questions for founders, anthropologists, behavioural scientists, strategists and technologists. And over time, we can begin building frameworks around them; not formulas for producing virality, because culture will never be that obedient, but better places to look for the unexpected.
That distinction matters. Creativity is not a formula. But neither is it magic. We can study it. We can develop our intuition. We can accumulate cases. We can recognize patterns. We can learn the grammar of a platform, a category, a culture or a subculture; and then have the courage to break that grammar when the human insight tells us to.
This, to me, is where AI becomes enormously useful. Let the machine search wider. Let it retrieve more cases, make more connections, generate more possibilities and accelerate experimentation.
But the human still has to ask: Which one matters? Which contradiction is interesting? Which observation is merely strange… and which one reveals something genuinely human? Which idea deserves to exist?
Because AI can increasingly generate ten thousand possibilities. The scarce capability is knowing which possibility is worth pursuing.
So my advice to startups would be: don’t try to out-produce the large companies. You probably can’t. And increasingly, there is little advantage in doing so anyway. Out-notice them. Out-understand them. And then use creativity to turn what you noticed into something the culture cannot ignore.
What do you think startups misunderstand most about building a brand: is it about visibility, reputation, or creating an identity people want to associate with?
I think what startups misunderstand most is the word brand itself.
They often think the sequence is: Build the product. Acquire customers. Grow. And when we become big enough, we will “do the brand.” Usually that means a new logo, a brand book, perhaps a large campaign.
But the uncomfortable truth is that you are building the brand from the first day whether you intend to or not. The first product experience builds it. The first customer complaint builds it. The way your founder speaks builds it. The price builds it. The packaging builds it. The people who choose you build it. The things you repeatedly say, and the things you repeatedly do, build it. So visibility, reputation and identity are not really three competing answers. They are three different layers.
Visibility means: I know you exist.
You can buy visibility. You can hack it. You can go viral and acquire enormous visibility almost overnight. But visibility is not a brand. We are surrounded today by things that became very visible and disappeared six months later.
Reputation means: I have learned what to expect from you.
You deliver. The product works. You keep your promises. There is consistency between what you say and what actually happens. Reputation takes longer because it has to survive contact with reality. And then there is something more interesting.
Meaning.
At some point, the strongest brands begin to signify something beyond the immediate utility of the product. Choosing the brand says something. Sometimes it says something to other people. Sometimes, more importantly, it says something to ourselves.
That is very close to the argument I make in AdEntity. Modern advertising became powerful because it taught objects to carry meaning. A watch stopped being only an instrument for telling time. A car was not only transportation. A pair of shoes was not only protection for the feet. Commercial objects became signals through which ambition, taste, rebellion, belonging, care or achievement could become socially legible.
And AdEntity does not argue that brands invented those desires. It argues that the surrounding system; the brand, product, image, celebrity and media environment… helped teach people how those desires could be recognized.
That is why I would hesitate to tell a founder, “Create an identity people want to associate with.” It is almost right. But it can lead to another mistake: inventing a beautiful brand personality with no relationship to the actual business.
Meaning has to be earned through product truth.
If Liquid Death behaved like a rebellious entertainment brand but the product, packaging and every interaction reverted to conventional bottled-water behaviour, the mythology would eventually collapse.
If Apple talks about creativity but produces experiences that feel careless, the symbolism weakens.
A brand cannot indefinitely advertise a meaning that the business itself does not substantiate. And this is where I think startups face a particularly modern trap. Startups live inside dashboards: ‘CAC. ROAS. Conversion. Cost per click. Retention. Downloads. Funnels’.
These numbers matter enormously. I would never advise a founder to ignore them. But because they are visible every morning on a dashboard, they begin to acquire psychological authority. What we can measure immediately starts to look more important than what is accumulating slowly.
And brand accumulates slowly. Memory accumulates. Familiarity accumulates. Trust accumulates. Distinctive assets accumulate. Meaning accumulates. This is why performance marketing is so seductive. You spend today and something happens tomorrow.
Brand building is more like compound interest. For a while, it can look as though very little is happening. And then one day people search for your name instead of the category. They recommend you without being paid. They recognize you before they see the logo. They forgive you a small mistake because there is accumulated trust. They consider you before the performance ad arrives. They may even pay slightly more because the alternative does not feel equivalent.
That is an economic asset, not a communications indulgence.
Airbnb gave us a fascinating demonstration of this. When the company dramatically reduced marketing during the pandemic, traffic recovered to roughly 95% of its 2019 level before marketing expenditure fully resumed. By the fourth quarter of 2020, more than 90% of traffic was direct or unpaid. Brian Chesky’s conclusion was essentially that Airbnb had become culturally established enough that the brand itself was generating demand.
That is what founders should aspire to. Not necessarily becoming a verb. But getting to the point where every customer does not have to be rented again from an advertising platform. Because if every sale requires another paid impression, another promotion and another retargeting message, you may have built an efficient acquisition machine. You have not necessarily built a brand.
There is another problem that optimization culture creates for startups: they change too much. New headline. New proposition. New design. New tone. New campaign. New audience. New creative every week because something performed 4% better. Experimentation is essential for discovering what works. But once you discover something valuable, brand building requires the opposite capability: the discipline to repeat it.
Memory needs consistency. And let’s not confuse consistency with repetition.
The Ehrenberg-Bass work on distinctive assets is useful here. Colours, sounds, shapes, characters, packaging and other recognizable cues only become assets when people repeatedly learn to associate them with one brand. They are built and protected over time; they do not become distinctive because somebody declared them distinctive in a brand guideline.
So perhaps I would give founders a very simple architecture: Be visible enough to enter the mind. Be good enough to earn a reputation. Be consistent enough to become remembered. Be meaningful enough to stand for something.
And make sure the product continuously earns the story you are telling.
Because a brand, in the end, is not the campaign. It is not the logo. It is not the number of followers. It is not even what the founder says the company stands for. A brand is the memory and meaning that remain when the advertising disappears. That is what startups should start building from day one.
