Most consumer brand founders think about PR in terms of product coverage. Get on the Today Show. Land a placement in a gift guide. Build some buzz before a retail launch. And honestly, that’s not wrong. Consumer PR absolutely does those things.
But if your ambition is a funding round, a PE acquisition, or an IPO, consumer PR is only half the job. The brands that successfully attract venture capital and private equity understand something most don’t: investor PR and consumer PR live under the same brand, but they are fundamentally different campaigns. Conflating them is one of the most expensive mistakes a growth-stage founder can make.
Start With the Valuation Gap, Not the Media Plan
When a founder comes to me saying they’re raising their Series B, the first questions I ask have nothing to do with media. What’s your target valuation? What’s your current valuation? Where’s the gap?
That gap is what PR has to close. Everything else, the strategy, the storylines, the target outlets, flows from that number. From there, we do a thorough marketplace, competitive, and media assessment to find where the white space is. And I’ll tell you: in my years of doing this, I’ve almost never worked with a brand that has truly exhausted its brand potential. Even in crowded categories, there is always space to create a category, redefine one, or claim leadership within one. The real work is identifying the white space that’s authentic to the brand and consistent with its audiences.
Two Audiences. Two Campaigns. One Brand.
Here’s what founders get wrong most often. They assume strong consumer coverage will attract investors. It can, but it’s not a strategy. It’s luck.
Consumers and investors want fundamentally different things from your brand story.
A consumer wants to understand the product, how it compares to alternatives, and whether the brand’s values align with their own. Their decision is emotional. They want to know how the product makes them feel. An investor takes a completely different perspective. They’re not moved by how a product makes consumers feel. They’re moved by evidence that consumers feel something. They want to understand the product’s positioning for growth, the value proposition that extends beyond revenue, and whether the brand has the authority and market presence to sustain that growth under scrutiny.
The consumer campaign builds desire. The investor campaign builds confidence. Both have to run at the same time.
That’s a completely different story, told in a completely different voice, to a completely different media landscape. Most consumer brands I talk to are running one campaign and hoping it does both jobs. It won’t.
The Authority Gap Is What Kills Funding Timelines
I see it constantly. A founder is 12 months out from a raise and they start thinking about PR. But what they’re really asking for is to close an authority gap that should have been built over years.
No brand becomes a category leader overnight. The ones that look like overnight successes? They took their reputation seriously from the beginning. They understood that authority mattered as much, if not more, than social media likes. They built the narrative before they needed it.
Some brands are happy to get on the shelf, and that’s a real achievement worth celebrating. But if the ambition is to sell, raise capital, or IPO, the path is longer and the authority required is deeper. The timeline follows accordingly.
We worked with a global wellness CPG brand in the hemp space that understood this from the start. Over 3 years, we built the kind of category authority that normalized their products with mainstream consumers while establishing the brand as an international CPG leader. The result was a 300% increase in stock price on an oversubscribed IPO. That didn’t happen because they got a few good placements. It happened because they invested in building the narrative years before they needed to cash it in.
What to Do If You’re 18 Months From a Raise
If you’re reading this and thinking you’re 18 months out from a funding round, here’s what I’d tell you to do first: get a candid, data-driven assessment of where you actually stand in the market. Not where you think you stand. Where you’re actually perceived, by consumers and by the investor community.
Start with your net promoter score. Then look at your share of voice. SOV is a leading indicator, and it’s a powerful piece of data during investor pitching because it shows both your current position and the opportunity you haven’t captured yet. What’s your baseline? Who owns the conversation in your category? Where are the gaps you can realistically close?
Then go back to the valuation question. What’s the target, and how far are you from it? At Avaans, we built a Brand Valuation Calculator specifically for this conversation. It maps your brand’s value across five methods, from royalty relief and price premium to share of voice versus market share and CAC efficiency, so your PR strategy is built against real numbers, not general ambitions.
The brands that win funding rounds don’t get there by accident. They get there because someone made a strategic decision, well in advance, to build authority in the right places with the right audiences for the right reasons.
Consumer PR builds desire. Investor PR builds confidence. The companies that understand they need both, and start building early, are the ones investors want to fund.
If you’re a consumer brand with venture ambitions, the time to start is before you need it. Schedule an assessment to find out where you stand.
The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →
