Getting Your Face Out There Might Be the Best Business Investment You Can Make

There are two kinds of businesses: those with CEOs who are intertwined with their companies and, well, those who aren't. I call the latter faceless brands.
Faceless brands include big companies like American Airlines, Adidas, Chase and Visa. On the flip side, Richard Branson with Virgin, Marc Benioff with Salesforce and Marc Zuckerberg with Facebook represent brands where the founder has made a conscious decision to get his face out there from day one.
Let’s call brands that are indistinguishable from their founders founder-led brands. When you look at media coverage for founder-led brands, they seem to get a lot more of it -- and most importantly, a lot more interesting coverage than their faceless competitors. For example, when was the last time you saw anyone from American Airlines on the front cover of a magazine? Richard Branson is on at least one major magazine cover each month.

6 Steps to Planning a Free Startup Event and Making a Splash

As an ecommerce startup -- selling a socially conscious jewelry line from Kenya -- and a business with a limited marketing budget, we devote a lot of energy to thinking up ways to creatively (i.e., cheaply) yet effectively market our company and expand our customer base.

We’ve found that planning promotional events is one of the best ways to meet our customers face-to-face and simultaneously control our brand messaging, thereby accomplishing something so important for a young company without an established brand: speaking for itself.

Viral marketing and word-of-mouth marketing are two of the most underrated and least costly marketing strategies. As we thought about how we could raise brand awareness and create buzz around our mission, we drew upon the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge” and the Dark Knight Rises viral video campaign for inspiration.

When we launched a grassroots PR stunt in Central Park last year and asked people to share their dreams with us, we discovered how to deliver our message to engage with potential customers and also gathered behavioral data points to help drive our future marketing decisions. Here are six key things we learned along the way: