Building Brand by Winning Consumer Trust is Crucial for Startup Success: Experts Industry experts emphasized why startups need to think seriously about building a brand and how it will play a crucial role in shaping their long-term success.

As most startup founders would concede, the entrepreneurial journey is anything but easy. From the initial hurdles of fundraising to the challenges of building a brand name, every step comes with risk. According to industry experts, early-stage companies must learn to look beyond day-to-day operational struggles—a part and parcel of any entrepreneur's life—and begin focusing on larger goals of building a brand by winning consumer trust.

Speaking at a recently held Prime Securities event, trade pundits emphasized why startups need to think seriously about building a brand and how it will play a crucial role in shaping their long-term success.

"Irrespective of the situation, brand building, at least in this context, is the key. Even large corporations, when they start a new venture, it is small, and it doesn't even exist. The situation is no different for a startup. The need to develop a customer value proposition is why that particular startup will be preferred over others in the industry, by customers, so that you will be able to charge a premium, bringing you continued profitability. And therefore, startups need to build a brand," said C.K. Venkataraman, MD, Titan Company.

"As a retailer, I get to deal with both legacy brands and startups, and I think Indian consumers need more. Brands are markers of economic well-being. Almost 60% of what I sell in my supermarkets is still unbranded. There is enough potential for startups, but I need to find it attractive. The other part is, the conventional toolkit of building brands is broken. Scale is no longer an advantage, but consumer trust is. Recipe building for brands no longer requires a big kitchen," said Damodar Mall, CEO, Reliance Retail.

Minal Vazirani, co-founder and president of Saffronart, echoed the sentiment that traditional brand-building strategies are no longer the sole path for startups. Reflecting on her journey of launching Saffronart—an online art auction platform—she emphasized the importance of building consumer trust. "We approached it with a very different toolkit," she said. "It was similar to what the financial world calls roadshows," Minal added.

Santosh Desai, author and founder of Think 9 Consumer Technologies, said that lot of startups think of brands as spending money without getting any guaranteed returns and that causes anxiety. That's a misconception as building a brand essentially means how you as a company acts, he said.

"For startups, if they define their brand without doing any advertising, without doing any marketing, it will guide their behaviour in terms of what to do, what not to do. What to launch, what not to launch. What to prioritize, what not to prioritize. Who to hire, who not to hire. So, to be that, if startups change their lens from thinking about brands as communication and the external face of the organization to thinking about it as something that connects who they are on the inside with who they present themselves to be on the outside. That view of the brand is what makes it strategic, and that is essential for any business organization, whether you are in the consumer business or not. So, to my mind, that is the fundamental misperception that needs to be corrected," Desai added.

While building a brand comes at a certain stage, the most essential aspect for any startup is fundraising. When asked if India is a difficult market for getting investments, Jayant Shinha, former MP and president of Eversource Capital, stated that India has the world's third-largest startup ecosystem.

"We have more than a lakh startups. The entire ecosystem is flourishing across many dimensions. From first-hand experience, I can say that any great business here gets funded, provided you tell the right story, have a strong founder, and are targeting a sufficiently large market. If you can demonstrate that you have a scalable, investable model, the funding will follow."