3 Ways Brand Can Guide, Support and Accelerate Hypergrowth

Hypergrowth is a tempting position to be in. In theory.

A term first mentioned in Harvard Business Review 15 years ago, Hypergrowth points to the rapid expansion of a business (at least more than 40% CAGR) as it scales. While it can be an enviable position to be in, such businesses have many different and unique challenges to overcome. And this is even before they’ve turned a profit.

The likes of Amazon and Uber are well-known examples, while many other companies and industries experienced hypergrowth during the lockdown: witness sales of sneakers rocketing, the huge growth for food delivery services and the home fitness market.

Hypergrowth companies may have got to where they are with a fascinating product, or perhaps they were first to market. But in the rapidly-changing and competitive world we live in now, driven by tech developments and consumers who increasingly know what they want, how can an organization equip itself for the next level of growth?

By focusing on brand, an organisation can not just manage hypergrowth but also identify further opportunities to enable it to scale faster.

Leader of the pack

Brand drives category leadership, helping an organization and its product or service to stand out among intense competition. Brands can go beyond a product-centric offering to truly deliver holistic experiences for users.

Brand and product work hand in hand: offering both functional and emotional benefits which create and sustain brand loyalty.

In the case of Instacart, the once ‘grocery-only’ platform evolved into a multi-channel ecosystem during its pandemic boom, with partnerships ranging across cosmetics, health and more, helping to truly differentiate itself in a crowded, grocery-led product market. 

Gaining a foothold in the future, now.

Hypergrowth isn’t just about fast growth, however. Underpinning this is a clear vision of not just where the business wants to be but also when it wants to get to this stage. It’s about future-proofing the business - and brand plays an important role here, driving strategic decision-making across the organization to ensure its positioning is not just relevant in the future, but is differentiated and has a clear POV across everything it does.

With constant market tailwinds, intentionally aligned business choices are paramount to a hypergrowth organization’s success. But how can a firm truly flex across internal and external touchpoints with coherence and ownership?

This is one area that an organization's brand can turn to its advantage. It can create its ‘North Star’ for all critical considerations, whether that be a new product or development of an offering, talent acquisition, communications, operations and more.

As Instacart demonstrated during its hypergrowth period in 2021 and 2022, with quickly growing ambitions across audiences and channels, it leveraged its aligned brand ethos across all touchpoints - social media, experience, in-store, to name a few, including a wildly successful marketing campaign with Lizzo. The ‘World is Your Cart’ showed how the brand was not just about making shopping convenient and hassle-free, but also about discovery and inspiration, adding a different dimension to the online shopping experience.

Scaling talent

Talent is also key to a hypergrowth organization's success - the concept is as much about scaling growth as it is about scaling culture. You need to rally teams for the ride and the part that brand can play here is critical, driving alignment across a shared belief system.

Out of necessity, most founding leaders continue to build the plane as they fly it. But as an organization continues to scale in hypergrowth with new team members joining, it becomes more critical than ever to create organizational alignment for the purpose of culture building and business execution. But as anyone involved with hypergrowth companies knows, the quicker you recruit and increase headcount, the more likely it is that culture takes a back seat.

To truly manage a hypergrowth organization’s next chapter of growth, leadership and implementation teams need to be in lock-step - from the North Star that guides to the detailed approach of day-to-day workstreams.

With a mutually shared set of values, actions and behaviors, brand can facilitate understanding across every facet of the organization, so that no one and no one thing - including culture - gets left behind.