1. Female Entrepreneurs Emphasise Fulfilment Not Just Profit 

A common media trope about entrepreneurs is that they are obsessed with profits. From Silicon Valley’s ‘overnight billionaires’ to rags-to-riches stories of company founders, the media narrative often emphasises profit. For many entrepreneurs, financial reward is only one part of what drives them and often not even the core part. A lot of entrepreneurs are driven by factors such as a social purpose, fulfilling a big vision, helping a community, benefiting from more flexible working patterns or embracing the need to be their own boss simply because conventional ‘work’ or ‘employment’ doesn’t meet their needs.

Female entrepreneurs are more likely to emphasise fulfilment than their, traditionally described or identified, male counterparts, according to research [1]. A drive for fulfilment is a powerful motivator to ensure that a business develops its brand strategy to enable personal and social fulfilment. For example, brand purpose, brand vision, brand mission and brand values are guiding principles which help embed a pathway to fulfilment in the brand strategy.

Image via Notonthehighstreet.com © From Babies with Love

A case in point is From Babies With Love, founded by female entrepreneur Cecilia Crossley. It sells organic baby clothes, with all profits going to orphanages in developing countries. 

Cecilia’s philosophy around personal fulfilment alongside profit is transparently evidenced across all her other commitments too as Board member of Duchenne UK, Ambassador for the Meaningful Business 100, and Board Member of the Gaia Foundation, a global, small and feisty organisation that revives bio-cultural diversity, to regenerate healthy ecosystems and to strengthen community self-governance.

Related: Top 5 Reasons Why Brand Purpose is The Essential Growth Driver in a Fast Changing World

2. The Power of Community Matters to Female Entrepreneurs

Community comes more naturally to female entrepreneurs than those who identify as male entrepreneurs. Engaging positively with people regardless of their status or possible utility, and treating people as human beings rather than just as possible business customers or associates, is something that effective entrepreneurs do regardless of their orientation or gender identity. However, it is a skill set which research suggests further helps many female entrepreneurs to succeed.

Related: 21 Brand Trends for 2021 You Can Leverage to Achieve Higher Revenue

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely, demanding journey. Supportive female entrepreneur groups are a helpful means of encouragement, advice and practical help. But in an age when digital behaviour has come to dominate so much brand activity, an understanding and appreciation of community is helpful in other ways. Understanding how a community works and what it needs enables female entrepreneurs to match their brand communications to changing trends and customer sentiment in the world in which their brand lives. 

Related: 7 Key Elements for a Successful Brand Refresh When Your Market is Changing Dynamically

Image via © Wovoyage

A B2C service case study is provided by Rashmi Chadha, an entrepreneur based in Delhi. She runs a female-friendly travel company called Wovoyage. Responding to the demand slump caused by the pandemic, she has used her community of travellers and influencers to create new content relevant to pandemic-era travel, emphasising staycations [3].

A B2B service case study is Going for Growth. This organisation, founded by Paula Fitzsimons, centres around supporting female entrepreneurship. It’s designed to support women who are serious about growing their businesses with the philosophy that entrepreneurs learn best from each other. 

© Going for Growth

Accordingly, the initiative is based on interactive roundtable sessions that are facilitated, not by consultants, academics or professional trainers, but by successful female lead entrepreneurs, so they can pass on their wisdom and expertise to help other women succeed. 

One of its recent initiatives, alongside its monthly working sessions led by successful female entrepreneurs, is ‘Voices from the Community’. Female entrepreneurs who are members of the community meet each month, with the focus around a topical issue, to share their ideas, experiences and collaborate. This helps them to grow more successfully and faster together even with lean resources. 

Related: Female Power And The Growing Influence of Branding for Women

3. Female Entrepreneurs use Adaptability to their Advantage

It is a cliché that women are better than men at juggling multiple skills to adapt well to different situations. Clichéd though it may be, research supports that interpretation. As an entrepreneur, often there is a wide range of tasks which are pressing at the same time, but the business lacks resources for support from a team. That is why using different capabilities to adapt to a wide range of situations is such a helpful skill for entrepreneurs.

Multiskilling is important to entrepreneurs, and it is often a useful attribute when devising and implementing a brand strategy. Especially for a young brand when there are multiple demands typically in parallel: brand positioning, brand building, brand communication and defining brand culture, for example. These are not isolated, but feed into each other to some extent. So the ability to multi skill enables female entrepreneurs to develop a rounded, holistic brand strategy which can support premium pricing, for higher profits.

Image via © yasminvorajee.com

A B2B service case study is Yasmin Vorajee, of Tiny Time Big Results. This very family centric business model is based on the concept of working 20 hours a week. Yasmin left the corporate world to build a flexible business model around her young family and now teaches others how to excel in 20 hours a week.

This is an invaluable skill for any business leader, especially if you want to simply reduce the time you give to one particular area of ‘work’ in a given week as a mother, carer, empty nester or somebody who contributes as a non-executive director or wants to build another business.

Related: Building a Resilient Brand and Business, 10 Lessons From Brands That Have Thrived Through Market Stress

4. Female Entrepreneurs Reap the Rewards of Creativity

Entrepreneurs are typically highly creative regardless of their gender identity. However, the research shows that female entrepreneurs tend to be especially skilled at taking a creative approach to business. This is a skill that has become increasingly valued in the commercial world. Entrepreneurial businesses often seek to tackle new challenges, or old challenges in new ways. Creativity underpins innovation, the lifeblood of all organisations, large and small. With resource constraints, they are often forced to come up with creative solutions to significant challenges.

Creativity is an essential skill when it comes to successful brand strategy. Brand strategy is a structured approach to generating and using a set of brand assets to help a business succeed. But for a brand strategy to work well, it often relies on a high level of creativity, in everything from evaluating go to market strategies and brand activism, to more obvious outlets for creativity, such as the brand style guide and tone of voice.

A B2B service case study is Get the Shifts, a temp staffing agency set up in 2016 by female entrepreneur Hannah Wrixon. From its pun of a brand name to its funky tone of voice online, the company is a creative breath of fresh air in the often staid world of recruitment agency branding.

© Get The Shifts

Related: Branding, Creativity without Strategic Rigour is a Waste of Budget

5. Focussing on Customers Helps Female Entrepreneurs Succeed 

Client relationships are something which the research suggests are better managed overall by female entrepreneurs than by their male identified counterparts. Understanding what customers want and need, and building a relationship with them over time, is essential to make almost any business more successful. Even businesses which aren’t obviously customer-facing benefit from relationship building skills amongst their people, stakeholders, suppliers and customers.

This focus on customers is a key part of successful brand strategy. That is why a lot of brands use purchaser personas and user personas. These enable brands to bring the voice of the customer into the heart of their brand decision-making process, resulting in a brand strategy which will resonate better in the real market. This helps turn a service or product into a relevant and differentiated brand, which can help sustain profitable pricing.

A B2B service case study is award-winning, Drogheda-based Paycheck Plus, founded by Anne Reilly. The outsourced payroll management company provides a solution to a common pain point for customers, managing their payrolls. A key insight which helps the brand succeed is that by taking care of this pain point for customers, those customers can focus on their own business, not administering their payroll.

Related: 4 Ways You Can Be More Customer-Centric to Grow Your Business

6. Empathy is Key to Successful Brand Strategy – and Female Entrepreneurs Excel at It

Empathy is another character attribute which is more visible amongst female entrepreneurs. Understanding how other people think and feel – not just users, but also staff, neighbours, suppliers and other stakeholders – is important to any brand’s success.

That is why branding strategy emphasises internal branding, as well as customer-facing branding. As empathetic entrepreneurs understand, how staff feel and think about the brand influences their own engagement with it, as well as their ability to represent it to the wider world. This has come even more to the fore in the current more challenging work environment, particularly with teams of all sizes working remotely. 

Entrepreneurs are in the perfect place to reflect on and maximise the benefits of strong internal branding: while a company is small, nimble and open to change, it’s much easier to define or change its brand culture. It’s more difficult later as the company gets larger and typically also more set in its ways. 

Dr. Tanya Pergola is a great example of a female entrepreneur who puts empathy at the heart of her brand strategy as clearly evidenced in her businesses and foundation. She’s a successful award-winning author, speaker, anthropologist, sociologist and well-being therapist who combines cutting-edge science with the ancient wisdom traditions into bespoke, practical regimes. 

© Dr. Tanya Pergola

Her experience living amongst the Maasi healers in East Africa for over ten years and her very successful foundation Terrawatu, one of the most respected NGOs in Tanzania set up over twenty years ago, is a great example in how empathy, commonality and value in cultural diversity enriches lives. She believes through empathy, understanding and mutual respect indigenous and modern society can learn from each other for a more peaceful and equitable world.

You can discover more about how empathy underpins Dr. Pergola’s female entrepreneurship evidenced in how she has married the strengths of these very different perspectives through the Terrawatu Foundation, The Healing Safari and The Pergola Method here.

7. Family Links Help Female Entrepreneurs Build their Brands

Male entrepreneurs are more likely to keep family members at a distance from their business, whereas female entrepreneurs are more likely to involve them. Clearly there are pros and cons to involving family members in building a brand.

Image via © Double Dutch

One advantage is that a family is an extended network of people who already know you and how much they can trust you. That can be helpful in building a grassroots business. That is why many multilevel marketing companies like Mary Kay and Avon emphasise the importance of female entrepreneurs not only in their brand story, but in the practical delivery of their brand amongst their own family and social circles.

Image © Double Dutch

A B2C product case study is Double Dutch, a startup based in the U.K. and founded by two Dutch sisters, Raissa de Haas and Joyce de Haas. Starting in the increasingly crowded market space of premium mixers for drinks, the family link and brand story (gin was invented in the Netherlands), has enabled the brand to develop a successful brand strategy.

Related: 6 Ways To Use Family Business Branding To Drive Growth and Maintain Relevance Through The Generations and Adversity

8. Strong Storytelling Builds a Brand and Female Entrepreneurs Lead the Way When Sharing Their Stories

Great brands have great stories. Storytelling is an art and female entrepreneurs are better at it than male entrepreneurs, the research shows. 

Stories have a key role in brand strategy. Getting a brand’s tone of voice right helps it sound attractive to its target users. The brand stories a brand has, enable it to communicate what it wants target users to understand, across a variety of touchpoints. A great B2B service example is MGI Learning. 

Image via © MGI Learning

MGI Learning’s brand story starts back in the late 1990s when Shona Cooper, managing director and co-founder, was frustrated by the lack of clear tangible evidence that investment in the development of so-called soft skills could really drive improvements in business results. Investment in training relied on taking a leap of faith that it was the right thing to do and proving cause and effect was not common practice.

The truth is though, if you’re running a business or any professional organisation it’s not enough just to have to take a leap of faith. We all need to be able to measure and validate improvements whether its people development or brand strategy application to support the commercial imperative.

This lack of ability to make a clear connection between training and outcomes was a source of increasing vexation to MGI Learning because they wanted to be able to give their customers certainty — an essential factor that’s even more valuable in the current hostile market conditions. 

Their visionary drive to underpin everything in the business with a clear evidenced based cause and effect is what became the catalyst for the creation of their unique IP developed through working with leading authorities in their field. 

That driving purpose ‘to help people develop strong, influential and positive relationships, to give them the ability to thrive no matter what comes their way, so they can live a better, more fulfilling lives both professionally and personally’ is still central to the business’s core brand strategy — and the secret to their lasting success working against all the odds with customers worldwide. 

Related: Rebranding Strategy, Why Your Rebrand Must Embrace Storytelling

Final Thoughts

What insights could you learn from these inspiring female entrepreneurs about how to use brand strategy to achieve higher revenue whilst also enriching society at large?

The focus isn’t just on profit, as evidenced by all these female leaders who have looked for a wider sense of fulfillment alongside their commercial imperative. The truth is though, this isn’t only unique to women because you can see patterns of the same philosophy amongst male-identifying entrepreneurs too — it’s just more strongly apparent amongst female entrepreneurs globally. Leveraging and valuing your natural skills such as empathy, multiskilling and creativity help underpin the commercial rationale, so you can build a more powerful brand strategy. 

Similarly, developing your abilities and emotional intelligence to understand and collaborate with other people of greater diversity aren’t just essential human skills. It also enables successful entrepreneurs to understand their customers more deeply, so they can provide better solutions to solve their problems.

So the question is if you reevaluate your business today, what could you adapt or change to catalyse innovation, identify new opportunities, enhance society at large and achieve higher revenue?

Questions to Consider

1. How clear are your brand purpose and brand mission?
2. How well do you understand the wants and needs of your customers?
3. What are the top five skills your brand strategy will need to succeed? Who in your team excels at them? 
4. Is your internal branding strategy as well-considered and structured as your external branding endeavours?
5. What is your brand story and how do you tell it to engage your ideal customers?
6. Could you use a brand audit to enable you to better identify your strengths, vulnerabilities and opportunities for innovation and growth, so you can achieve higher revenue?

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1. When you work with us, we’ll create a customised brand-building plan and strategy with clear investment for you tailored to your specific requirements and preferences
2. You’ll know each step of your brand building journey before we start because we’ll discuss it, document it, and agree on it with you before work commences
3. You’ll have timelines, key milestones, and deliverables to evaluate and approve for each stage and part of your brand building process
4. Because we know the unexpected sometimes happens we can make adjustments along the way if you need it and if something extra is requested we’ll ensure you’re fully appraised about what that entails before committing
5. As we achieve pre-agreed objectives you’ll be able to evaluate your brand building work and strategy in progress, coupled with the outcomes to ensure return on investment

Get in touch today because we’d love to enable you to re-evaluate and build your standout, powerhouse brand, so you can Be The One — increase your profits and leave your competitors way behind. 

Email us [email protected] or ring us +35318322724 (GMT 9:00-17:30) and ask about our VIP Brand Strategy Re-Evaluation.