The Essential Marketing Advice for Scaling Smaller Brands

Many startup or SME marketing leaders I meet consume a steady stream of educational marketing content. It’s an obvious move - most are stepping into leadership roles early, often without the mentorship of more experienced marketers. But how relevant and actionable is this content for small-business marketers?

The Two Buckets of Educational Marketing Content

Most marketing advice falls into two distinct categories, each shaped by different perspectives:

1. Traditional Big-Brand Marketing. This category is all about brand building and longer term sustained growth. It includes established frameworks, like Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow and polemic professor Mark Ritson 's marketing teachings. There is a wealth of high-quality literature here, along with popular podcasts like Uncensored CMO. These approaches draw on substantial datasets from mature B2C brands, historically the most active marketers, making this advice well-suited for large, established brands.
2. Startup-Oriented Digital Marketing. This content focuses much more on short-term tactical activation to drive growth. It is drawn from the experiences of digital-first startups, often aimed at early-stage companies. Much of it comes from Silicon Valley, via resources like Demand Curve, Reforge, or podcasts like Marketing Against the Grain. Big name influencers like Neil Patel and Gary Vaynerchuk also share tactical insights on content marketing and digital growth. And there are thousands more marketing 'thought-leaders' all over LinkedIn and Youtube. While there’s no shortage of advice, it’s wise to approach much of it critically. Few voices offer evidence-based approaches and many so-called 'Gurus' have limited personal track-record of delivering in the real world.  

It's important to note that currently the majority of well-known content comes from the UK and US. Some of the underpinning studies do look at global datasets but we clearly lack robust understanding of the nuance of applying these foundational principles across our the different market contexts in Asia. While I do believe much of the learning is transferable, I hope to see more APAC specific perspectives coming through as our startup ecosystems mature and more local high-quality thought-leaders emerge.

The Limitations of Digital-first Startup Models of Marketing

While digital and performance-focused content can be valuable for emerging brands, it has limitations:

• Overemphasis on Digital: The recommendations usually tout an online-only approach, making them less useful for brands with physical products, retail presence, or largely offline customer journeys. 
• Highly Tactical: Many tips focus only on optimising specific channels, with a tendency to hype “growth hacking”, making them very tactical in nature - the advice shared can be super useful for early stage businesses wanting to go deep on how to execute in specific areas. But these tactical tips tell us little about how to sustain long-term resilient growth and leverage the full marketing mix for compounding effects. All brands of a certain scale need to transition a more strategic approach to avoid the dreaded growth plateau.
• Performance Marketing Dependence: For brands looking to scale-up, there is an over-emphasis on performance marketing as the go-to lever to scale. This narrow approach has led many startups to broken unit economics and unsustainable burn rate.

The Pitfalls of Big-Brand Marketing Approaches for Smaller Brands

Big-brand models are also imperfect for smaller brands. Large brands focus on incremental market share growth and improved profit margins, supported by substantial budgets. This stands in contrast to smaller brands, which often operate with low market penetration, limited brand awareness, and a need for rapid growth.

Many big-brand strategies don’t translate for smaller brands. For instance, while a 60%+ budget allocation for brand building is often recommended for large brands, it’s generally unsuitable for smaller businesses. Similarly, advanced tools like marketing mix modelling (MMM) and regular brand health tracking are often overkill or out of reach for smaller companies. Working with budgets that are smaller by an order of 1000s means a very different approach to things like campaign planning and media buying and a much reduced ability to work with strong external agency partners.

Some big-brand experts, like Mark Ritson, are now tailoring advice for smaller businesses, offering more accessible insights but this type of content remains limited. 

The Two Tribe Fallacy: Neither One is "Right"

The divergent approaches have unfortunately resulted in two distinct “marketing tribes”, each far too dogmatic about its own philosophies. The split often pressures marketers to pick a side: traditional big-brand thinking or startup-style growth hacking. And this binary choice is especially unhelpful for marketers in the scaleup phase, who have outgrown early-stage hacks but are not yet ready for a full big-brand approach.

In reality, neither approach is right or wrong. Each has relevance depending on the category, life-stage, context and goals of your business. But each also has blind-spots. The sweet spot for small-brand marketers is to take the most relevant elements from each model. This requires understanding the theories and evidence behind both schools of thought and using critical thinking to determine what fits your business. 

To help with this, I’ve synthesised seven principles that I believe are most relevant for scaling smaller brands.

Seven Universal Principles for Scaling Smaller Brands

Whether you’re marketing a consumer product or a B2B service the following seven principles are key to scaling your small brand. They won’t write your marketing plan for you but by sticking to them you will undoubtedly improve the quality of everything you do across your marketing mix. 

1. Research: Thankfully, both marketing tribes agree on the importance of knowing your market, competition, and especially, your customer. While large brands conduct costly qual-quant studies, smaller brands can use more affordable methods—starting with simply talking to customers as much as possible. For deeper insights, boutique providers or freelancers who can conduct targeted research quickly and affordably and this getting faster and cheaper all the time with new technologies and modalities.
2. Tight Targeting: While many startups emphasise the size of their addressable market for investors, it’s crucial to define a tightly focused target audience for marketing. This focus is even more vital for smaller brands to maximise their marketing budget. Having a very tight target, and positioning to it, leads to stronger conversion rates, better retention and more advocacy. Understanding your audience deeply using psychographics as well as demographics, allows you to target more precisely, reduce wastage and develop more resonant and effective content.
3. Differentiation: With limited resources, small brands face an even greater challenge in standing out. Big brand thinking focuses on being distinctive rather than needing to be meaningfully different. But smaller brands must identify clear points of difference to capture attention and consideration from potential customers. Eating the Big Fish by Adam Morgan offers some excellent insights for smaller brands on standing out against larger competitors.
4. Customer Experience: Digital-first marketers prioritise customer experience, a focus that’s valuable for smaller brands across all categories. While loyalty alone won’t sustain growth, smaller brands can benefit from efficiencies through increasing lifetime value (LTV) and encouraging advocacy-driven growth. Providing a more human experience is an area where smaller brands can often outperform larger ones. 
5. Leveraging Behavioural Science Insights: Many of the behavioural science principles that inform big brand marketing—like social proof, loss aversion, and price relativity—are just as relevant for small brands. These principles help you optimise across your marketing mix, often improving effectiveness without requiring additional spend. The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton is a solid primer on using these concepts.
6. Balancing Activation and Brand Building: The Long and the Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Field shows that balancing short-term activation (performance marketing) with long-term brand building drives the greatest growth. However, the big-brand standard of a 60/40 split favouring brand building doesn’t hold for smaller brands. For them, the ratio flips to focus on activation, as the lower hanging fruit is harvesting existing demand before building new pools of demand. Econometrician Grace Kite has a great course for scaleups that tackles the topic of performance versus brand building very well. Some of the content was shared recently on an open access podcast.
7. Agility versus Consistency: Big brands preach consistency, and for good reason, but for smaller brands, a more nuanced approach is necessary. While consistency definitely aids brand building at the right time, younger brands benefit from the freedom to test and iterate on their positioning until they find the optimal fit. The key is to avoid excessive tweaking; instead, use rigorous approaches to testing, document what works and then commit to it, bringing in consistency as you scale.

Looking Forward

It's important for marketers to keep up-skilling on the latest theories and best-practices to short-cut their learning curves. There is loads of robust, intelligent and evidence-based education content out there but there is also a lot of rubbish. The key is not to blindly follow advice but read a broad range of sources and do the hard-work to figure out what is relevant for your own unique situation.

Ultimately, I hope as a profession we can bridge the gap between the two non-sensical marketing “tribes.” Thankfully, the distinction is already starting to erode as big brands are increasingly digital and tech startups become market-leading players. Famous companies like AirBnB are a great example of a tech-startup turned consumer mega-brand and are leading the conversation of the balance between short-term performance and longer-term brand building. Merging the best of both will provide marketers a richer, more versatile toolkit to navigate an increasingly complex marketing landscape and most importantly improve the effectiveness of our craft.