About

A place for startups & small businesses who want to build strong brands.

Brandalfblog is written for owners and marketers working in startups and small businesses who see the value of strategic marketing as the vehicle to establish strong and sustainably profitable brands.

At first the idea was simply to motivate myself to make the extra effort in my studies to synthesize the various topics and extract the practicalities of them by connecting theories and narratives to real life examples. However, soon I started seeing that this might be useful to more people than just myself — so I kept it open.

There is a weird myth going on out there strategic marketing and brand building is only for large companies, but this is just simply not true. A strategic marketing approach will always deliver better in the long term than feelings-based ad hoc marketing. It’s however easy to see how this myth came to be. Some of the fault lies with brand agencies, some of it lies with the Instagram growth hacking entrepreneurs.

Ultimately, the biggest reason is that strategic marketing and long term brand building is hard. It requires resources such as market research and knowledge of consumer groups that either aren’t attainable or too expensive to attain for most startups and small businesses. Academic research should be a good substitute but sadly a large chunk is hidden behind paywalls and it takes skill and training to be able to spot what research is useful and practical and what is not.

That’s where the value of this blog comes in. I want to try to make this just a little more attainable. By identifying the most relevant and actionable theories and connecting them to real life examples in the form of to-the-point and easily digestible articles, I want to save you the time and effort and provide you with useful information to build a strong brand.

FAQ

I focus on topics that inform marketing strategy like global consumer insights, consumer psychology and long-term marketing activities. You will rarely see post about something like PPC, SEO, or other marketing tactics on this website unless they relate to some bigger picture.

Yes! Send me an email here.

I will start to gradually include affiliate links when relevant and possibly some minimally intrusive banners. I want this website to be free and even more do I want to avoid overloading you with intrusive ads. Affiliate links are a way for me to get something back to cover the costs of this site without ruining the user experience.

A couple of things about how I use affiliate links:

  1. I only use affiliate links of services I have either used myself or that I am otherwise certain are of high quality.
  2. I try to have affiliate products as non-invasive as possible.
  3. When I use an affiliate link in an article, I will let you know.

If you are in the market for a product, I would greatly appreciate if you would go through my affiliate links. At no extra cost to you, you will help me keep this blog going.

You can sign up for an email list but currently I am not intending on doing anything with it in the near future. One idea I have is to later on send out a summary of one academic article (requested and voted on by the visitors of this site) every 2 weeks or so, but at the moment I just don’t have the available time for that.