A new Denver startup launched by two longtime creative executives wants companies to skip agency-led catered lunches and turn to software to determine the future of their brands.
Shane George and Tom Cherrey launched Denver-based BrandTruth nearly two years ago to shake up the traditional agency-dominated creative space. The duo had worked in the industry for decades and realized there was an opportunity to save clients time and money by bringing on a digital element.
“Everything begins with brand discovery, and we realized there’s a very big gap in software service in this space,” George said.
BrandTruth differs from agencies in how it utilizes brand-development exercises. While this process will often involve 15 or 20 top executive stakeholders at a company, BrandTruth’s software was designed to scale with the size of its customers.
Using its platform, thousands of employees can share brand insights by answering initial Five Factor Personality Mode questionnaires. So, rather than just the C-suite having a say in the brand, any employee can anonymously share their thoughts, Cherrey said.
“You can repeat it and do it, not with the top 15 or 20 [employees], you can do it with 100 or thousands, because it’s that efficient,” he said.
Following this brand-discovery process, BrandTruth’s software delivers its findings on where the company’s current brand stands and where it could go. George said the company offers everything from a psychological assessment of the brand to suggestions on communication styles, color palettes, images and fonts.
Both George and Cherrey said BrandTruth’s product is a defendable, science-driven alternative in an industry often relying on gut calls and the opinions of a select few.
“When it comes to the vision, Tom and I are passionate about helping companies be truthful and together,” George said.
“We like to say we have democratized the brand-discovery process,” Cherrey added.
BrandTruth has about two dozen customers across a variety of industries, including Colorado-based Tuff Shed and Xero Shoes. For Xero’s Director of Marketing Bryan Kimbell, BrandTruth provided the company with an actionable way to define parts of the brand that he said were previously “a bit of a mystery.”
“The fact we could include all employees was important to the process in order to get buy-in with the ultimate direction of the brand into the future,” he said. “BrandTruth makes the brand-workshop process accessible to the entire company at a pace the company can manage and a price that is reasonable.”
With eight employees and an early stable of customers, BrandTruth is looking to build on its product by introducing an AI-driven feature that assigns emotion to an image. To do so, the company expects to go out and raise a venture round in the near future, following an earlier friend-and-family capital round.
And while it may seem like a competitor to traditional agencies, George and Cherrey said that BrandTruth can be a helpful additive in an industry lacking software capabilities.
“We know we can be a very good friend to agencies, providing them third-party validation through proven psychology, versus their own gut,” George said.
