Within seconds of our VC money hitting the bank, we started hearing the same question over and over again: have you hired a head of marketing? This was extremely confusing to me because a) I had a pretty good marketing background as far as 29-year-olds go and b) we had a fabulous head of marketing who had already proven that she could make marketing mountains out of molehills by getting millions of women to flock to our site by a stealthy combo of PR, field marketing, strategic word-of-mouth and general scrappiness.
What our investors meant by marketing is what some call consumer marketing, digital marketing, paid marketing, mobile-internet marketing and essentially means spending millions of dollars on search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO) and many other three-lettered acronyms meant to help your startup scale. Everyone, except our actual team, was convinced that the only way Rent the Runway was going to scale was via these tech-savvy marketing strategies, many of which are funded by the VC world. Brand marketing was fine at launch but clearly it couldn’t have legs long-term. The PR would one day stop and traditional marketing was dead — or so they said.
Read more about why you should not discount brand marketing for start-ups here.
