Lean Branding

Chapter 6. Brand Traction

If you’ve been around the startup world for long enough, the word traction should sound painfully familiar. It seems like investments, press coverage, and—quite honestly—sleep hang on the thread of whether you “reach traction” or not.

Consider a horse-drawn carriage for a moment. These ancient vehicles have been used by human beings for everything from warfare to transportation. Horse-drawn carriages are based on a principle called animal traction: they are pulled around using the power of one or more horses. This idea is at the heart of the original definition of traction: the state of being drawn or pulled.^[54]

Just as horses pull carriages to specified locations, market demand should draw your product or service into a place of growth. When others ask about your traction, they actually want to get a sense of the market’s reaction to your product. In the words of investor Naval Ravikant, “Traction is quantitative evidence of end-user demand.”^[55]

Now every time you think of traction, ask yourself:

Is the market pulling my brand toward growth?

Who is doing the pulling?

How hard are they pulling?

Chapter 5 was all about building an effective brand communications strategy by using different channels to send our message across. This chapter will now walk you through the process of measuring the traction that each of those communications strategy components generates for your brand.

Investors and other actors in the startup ecosystem have come up with a seemingly ...