Arielle Jackson
Brand and marketing consultant, marketer in residence at First Round Capital, former Google and Square marketer
Where to hear and read about Arielle Jackson1 episode or test
Arielle Jackson is a brand and marketing consultant, marketer in residence at First Round Capital, and a former Google and Square marketer who has named over 30 companies and worked with 100+ early-stage startups. The most useful thing to learn from her is to write positioning first, then let purpose, positioning and personality drive the name, copy and press.
i really believe that positioning dictates so much of your marketing and should always be the first thing you do
The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, First Round Capital)
Arielle Jackson: the story and the lessons
1Arielle Jackson's path from jewelry side hustle to startup brand consultant
A jewelry side hustle led her to Square. She sold jewelry at craft fairs, took cash and PayPal invoices, then tried a Square Reader and sold more. She emailed two Google friends at Square about it, and both asked her to interview.
Having been a small merchant helped her understand the customers Square first marketed to.
She volunteered to run the Square Stand launch with no product managers. Square had about 140 people, no product managers and a hardware team running the show. She seeded about 15 metro areas with coffee shops and donut shops, and negotiated deals with Best Buy and the Apple Store.
The launch event was at Blue Bottle, with the head of hardware unveiling the product. She was 30-something weeks pregnant at the time.
She brought big-company launch experience from Google and Square. She spent nine years at Google and helped take Gmail from a side project to hundreds of millions of users. At Square she was one of the first marketers and helped launch and scale Square Reader.
She left a seven-person startup to help other small startups. After Square she joined Cover, a seven-person Android startup later acquired by Twitter, then chose to help other small startups. Every friend she emailed said yes, and First Round asked her to help its companies in a three-month project.
Nine years later she still works half time at First Round on naming, positioning, brand identity, a website and launch. The last step is usually hiring the first marketer. Clients include Patreon, Eero, Maven and Sprig.
2How Jackson builds startup positioning
Jackson writes positioning before naming, branding or writing any code. Her naming, PR and website work all start from a finished positioning statement. The words in the statement become raw material for the naming brainstorm.
A second or third time founder in her class said he would never write a line of code without doing positioning first.
She tests positioning by asking ten people what the company does. She interviews about 10 people, from execs to customer-facing staff to a few customers. Small variations are fine, but wildly different answers mean a positioning problem, and so does being unable to answer in one sentence.
Founders used to take 30 minutes to explain their company to her. Now clients fill out a worksheet first, writing a paragraph on what they do, which she pushes down to one sentence.
She narrows the market to a nameable audience and one persona. Concentric circles run from total market down to the audience you will actively acquire over the next 18 months, with one named model persona at the center. Eero targeted 'tech savvy dads' and modeled a St. Louis sales VP with teenage gamers.
Pick an audience big enough that dominating it would make a giant business. People outside the circle can still buy. You just do not target them. "the worst thing you can do is try to be everything to everyone"
Jackson distills five questions into the classic positioning statement. The questions cover who it is for, their problem, how they cope today, what you make and how it works. The statement reads: for [target] who [need], [product] is a [category] that [benefit], unlike [old way], because of [differentiator].
The format is 40 to 50 years old and she learned it at 22. The old way can be a workaround, not a rival startup: Square Stand was set against the ugly old cash register.
Her bar test turns corporate copy into words people say aloud. Imagine two target customers having drinks. One says 'I just started using X, it's a category that does Y,' and the other says 'tell me more.' If it sounds stilted, rewrite it.
First drafts are full of 'leverages' and 'empowers'. Square Stand's benefit, 'turn your iPad into a point of sale', is what she wanted a small business owner to tell a friend.
3Jackson's framework: purpose, personality and the brand bible
Jackson says a brand is who people think you are. Volvo's logo and colors are boring, yet it owns safety in cars. It earned that by acting on its purpose, such as giving away the three-point safety harness instead of patenting it.
Its logo dates from its days as a ball-bearing company, so it says nothing about cars.
She replaces mission and vision with one 'we exist to' sentence. A good purpose states the change you want to see beyond financial gain, lasts about 10 years and sounds natural in a keynote intro. Drop 'we exist to' and the rest can head the about page.
Examples: Stripe's increase the GDP of the internet, and Logic Loop's make operations data work harder than operations people. "people can only remember one thing and it's your purpose"
She drafts purpose from cultural tensions and the brand's best self. List the zeitgeists relevant to the business, then ways to describe the brand when the product delivers perfectly. Then finish 'the world would be a better place if' before 'we exist to'.
For Alt, the tensions were interest in alternatives, 90s nostalgia among people in their 30s and low interest rates. That led to a purpose about transparency and liquidity of alternative assets.
Jackson builds personality from two of five dimensions plus tension. Using Jennifer Aaker's research, pick two of sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. Then write five 'we are X but not Y' statements, where Y is X taken too far. It takes about an hour.
Google is sincere and competent, and 'playful but not silly'. Mountain Dew is rugged and exciting, and 'daring but not stupid'. "brands need tension to be interesting"
Her style guide covers why you exist, not only logo and colors. She adds the purpose, five personality attributes and about ten lines of sample ad copy. The result is a creative brief shared with agencies, writers, co-marketing partners and new hires, and revisited at each new product.
The brief also holds visual and written examples you like and dislike.
She budgets about three weeks for brand strategy. Starting from nothing, the whole process fits in about three weeks. Companies with existing branding move slower because of sunk cost.
The time pays back in faster company decisions and web copy that almost writes itself.
4How Jackson names a startup
Jackson prefers evocative names that hint at what the company does. Seesaw suggests work moving between teacher, parents and student. Maven is a Yiddish word for one who understands through acquired skill. Empty vessel names like Yahoo or eero work but cost years of marketing.
She avoids trend endings like '-ly' and dropped vowels so the name does not sound dated in 10 or 20 years. She can date Optimizely and Flickr by their trends.
She runs a one-hour, two-round brainstorm with outsiders. Five to seven people join, including a writer or a friend who speaks several languages. Round one works the meaningful words from the positioning statement. Round two covers 7 to 10 Jeopardy-style themes.
The aim is hundreds of bad ideas and a few good ones. She then browses Wikipedia and library books and returns 10 to 25 concepts.
She rates names red, yellow or green and keeps three to five. Criteria include trademark, domain, distinctiveness, timelessness, ease of saying and spelling, appearance and length. Lattice was rejected for a company selling by phone because it sounds like lettuce and is hard to say and spell.
Never carry one favorite: it may fail the trademark check. The .com is not essential, and many companies use variants.
She tells founders to use a ridiculous code name until naming is done. Founders often pick a name fast to incorporate or raise a seed round, then get attached. Some come back after finding a trademark conflict.
Her rule: a code name "so ridiculous that you won't ever launch a product like that".
Jackson keeps product names plain when the company name holds the equity. Square Register, Square Stand and Google Maps are boring and descriptive on purpose. Brands diverge only for something new, like Cash or Android.
She says a good company outgrows a mediocre name. Disney, Volvo, Nike and Apple would not be picked from a spreadsheet of names. Years of marketing gave them meaning.
Avoid dated or indistinct names, but do not stall a launch chasing a perfect one.
5Jackson on early press and the first marketing hire
Jackson sends founders back to positioning before any announcement. A reporter who cannot grasp the company in a sentence cannot explain it to readers. She also warns against sending traffic to a name you may scrap later.
Founders often ask for announcement help, then need 30 minutes to explain what the company is.
She pitches one outlet an exclusive and uses funding as a hook. Embargoed briefings to three to five outlets no longer work for early startups, and seed funding alone is not news. Pair the raise with product availability, reference customers, momentum or a partnership.
Vitable Health sells care to hourly workers for about $50 per person per month. She tied it to the Great Resignation and landed a Sunday-after-Christmas Philadelphia Inquirer story. "no reporter is going to cover you next week it just doesn't work like that anymore"
She makes customers the heroes of local press stories. Local outlets are hungrier for stories than national ones, and most tech PR firms are not experts in them. At Square, turning customers into heroes for local press was a huge thing for the company.
"don't sleep on local press"
Jackson says hire a marketer when marketing becomes ongoing work. For marketing-driven businesses that is usually around 10 people, when founders are doing marketing badly or juggling freelancers and agencies. Sales-driven businesses should first have a repeatable sales motion.
Naming, positioning, a website or a Google Ads test are one-off projects. She favors a T-shaped marketer, deep in one function and dangerous across the rest.
The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, First Round Capital)
Arielle Jackson explains how to name a startup, build a brand from purpose, positioning and personality, and earn early press. She has named over 30 companies and worked with 100+ early-stage startups, and says a full brand strategy can be done in about three weeks.
A jewelry side hustle led her to Square. She sold jewelry at craft fairs, took cash and PayPal invoices, then tried a Square Reader and sold more. She emailed two Google friends at Square about it, and both asked her to interview.
Having been a small merchant helped her understand the customers Square first marketed to.
She volunteered to run the Square Stand launch with no product managers. Square had about 140 people, no product managers and a hardware team running the show. She seeded about 15 metro areas with coffee shops and donut shops, and negotiated deals with Best Buy and the Apple Store.
The launch event was at Blue Bottle, with the head of hardware unveiling the product. She was 30-something weeks pregnant at the time.
She brought big-company launch experience from Google and Square. She spent nine years at Google and helped take Gmail from a side project to hundreds of millions of users. At Square she was one of the first marketers and helped launch and scale Square Reader.
She left a seven-person startup to help other small startups. After Square she joined Cover, a seven-person Android startup later acquired by Twitter, then chose to help other small startups. Every friend she emailed said yes, and First Round asked her to help its companies in a three-month project.
Nine years later she still works half time at First Round on naming, positioning, brand identity, a website and launch. The last step is usually hiring the first marketer. Clients include Patreon, Eero, Maven and Sprig.
Jackson writes positioning before naming, branding or writing any code. Her naming, PR and website work all start from a finished positioning statement. The words in the statement become raw material for the naming brainstorm.
A second or third time founder in her class said he would never write a line of code without doing positioning first.
She tests positioning by asking ten people what the company does. She interviews about 10 people, from execs to customer-facing staff to a few customers. Small variations are fine, but wildly different answers mean a positioning problem, and so does being unable to answer in one sentence.
Founders used to take 30 minutes to explain their company to her. Now clients fill out a worksheet first, writing a paragraph on what they do, which she pushes down to one sentence.
She narrows the market to a nameable audience and one persona. Concentric circles run from total market down to the audience you will actively acquire over the next 18 months, with one named model persona at the center. Eero targeted 'tech savvy dads' and modeled a St. Louis sales VP with teenage gamers.
Pick an audience big enough that dominating it would make a giant business. People outside the circle can still buy. You just do not target them. "the worst thing you can do is try to be everything to everyone"
Jackson distills five questions into the classic positioning statement. The questions cover who it is for, their problem, how they cope today, what you make and how it works. The statement reads: for [target] who [need], [product] is a [category] that [benefit], unlike [old way], because of [differentiator].
The format is 40 to 50 years old and she learned it at 22. The old way can be a workaround, not a rival startup: Square Stand was set against the ugly old cash register.
Her bar test turns corporate copy into words people say aloud. Imagine two target customers having drinks. One says 'I just started using X, it's a category that does Y,' and the other says 'tell me more.' If it sounds stilted, rewrite it.
First drafts are full of 'leverages' and 'empowers'. Square Stand's benefit, 'turn your iPad into a point of sale', is what she wanted a small business owner to tell a friend.
Jackson says a brand is who people think you are. Volvo's logo and colors are boring, yet it owns safety in cars. It earned that by acting on its purpose, such as giving away the three-point safety harness instead of patenting it.
Its logo dates from its days as a ball-bearing company, so it says nothing about cars.
She replaces mission and vision with one 'we exist to' sentence. A good purpose states the change you want to see beyond financial gain, lasts about 10 years and sounds natural in a keynote intro. Drop 'we exist to' and the rest can head the about page.
Examples: Stripe's increase the GDP of the internet, and Logic Loop's make operations data work harder than operations people. "people can only remember one thing and it's your purpose"
She drafts purpose from cultural tensions and the brand's best self. List the zeitgeists relevant to the business, then ways to describe the brand when the product delivers perfectly. Then finish 'the world would be a better place if' before 'we exist to'.
For Alt, the tensions were interest in alternatives, 90s nostalgia among people in their 30s and low interest rates. That led to a purpose about transparency and liquidity of alternative assets.
Jackson builds personality from two of five dimensions plus tension. Using Jennifer Aaker's research, pick two of sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. Then write five 'we are X but not Y' statements, where Y is X taken too far. It takes about an hour.
Google is sincere and competent, and 'playful but not silly'. Mountain Dew is rugged and exciting, and 'daring but not stupid'. "brands need tension to be interesting"
Her style guide covers why you exist, not only logo and colors. She adds the purpose, five personality attributes and about ten lines of sample ad copy. The result is a creative brief shared with agencies, writers, co-marketing partners and new hires, and revisited at each new product.
The brief also holds visual and written examples you like and dislike.
She budgets about three weeks for brand strategy. Starting from nothing, the whole process fits in about three weeks. Companies with existing branding move slower because of sunk cost.
The time pays back in faster company decisions and web copy that almost writes itself.
Jackson prefers evocative names that hint at what the company does. Seesaw suggests work moving between teacher, parents and student. Maven is a Yiddish word for one who understands through acquired skill. Empty vessel names like Yahoo or eero work but cost years of marketing.
She avoids trend endings like '-ly' and dropped vowels so the name does not sound dated in 10 or 20 years. She can date Optimizely and Flickr by their trends.
She runs a one-hour, two-round brainstorm with outsiders. Five to seven people join, including a writer or a friend who speaks several languages. Round one works the meaningful words from the positioning statement. Round two covers 7 to 10 Jeopardy-style themes.
The aim is hundreds of bad ideas and a few good ones. She then browses Wikipedia and library books and returns 10 to 25 concepts.
She rates names red, yellow or green and keeps three to five. Criteria include trademark, domain, distinctiveness, timelessness, ease of saying and spelling, appearance and length. Lattice was rejected for a company selling by phone because it sounds like lettuce and is hard to say and spell.
Never carry one favorite: it may fail the trademark check. The .com is not essential, and many companies use variants.
She tells founders to use a ridiculous code name until naming is done. Founders often pick a name fast to incorporate or raise a seed round, then get attached. Some come back after finding a trademark conflict.
Her rule: a code name "so ridiculous that you won't ever launch a product like that".
Jackson keeps product names plain when the company name holds the equity. Square Register, Square Stand and Google Maps are boring and descriptive on purpose. Brands diverge only for something new, like Cash or Android.
She says a good company outgrows a mediocre name. Disney, Volvo, Nike and Apple would not be picked from a spreadsheet of names. Years of marketing gave them meaning.
Avoid dated or indistinct names, but do not stall a launch chasing a perfect one.
Jackson sends founders back to positioning before any announcement. A reporter who cannot grasp the company in a sentence cannot explain it to readers. She also warns against sending traffic to a name you may scrap later.
Founders often ask for announcement help, then need 30 minutes to explain what the company is.
She pitches one outlet an exclusive and uses funding as a hook. Embargoed briefings to three to five outlets no longer work for early startups, and seed funding alone is not news. Pair the raise with product availability, reference customers, momentum or a partnership.
Vitable Health sells care to hourly workers for about $50 per person per month. She tied it to the Great Resignation and landed a Sunday-after-Christmas Philadelphia Inquirer story. "no reporter is going to cover you next week it just doesn't work like that anymore"
She makes customers the heroes of local press stories. Local outlets are hungrier for stories than national ones, and most tech PR firms are not experts in them. At Square, turning customers into heroes for local press was a huge thing for the company.
"don't sleep on local press"
Jackson says hire a marketer when marketing becomes ongoing work. For marketing-driven businesses that is usually around 10 people, when founders are doing marketing badly or juggling freelancers and agencies. Sales-driven businesses should first have a repeatable sales motion.
Naming, positioning, a website or a Google Ads test are one-off projects. She favors a T-shaped marketer, deep in one function and dangerous across the rest.