The Deridut Brand Building Strategy: Creating Market Awareness Before Market Readiness

When your product solves a problem that most companies don’t yet realize they have, traditional marketing playbooks fall short. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Javier Marti shared how Deridut approaches brand building in the emerging water risk market, offering valuable insights for founders facing similar challenges.

The Awareness-First Approach

For Deridut, brand building starts with a fundamental understanding: “a company like ours is all about awareness. We need to make sure that everybody understands that when you’re tackling a global problem with a global reach, you need to be known by a lot of people.”

This philosophy shapes their entire marketing approach. As Javier explains, “The more you get to be known by the audience, no matter if they’re buyers or not, the better.” This might seem counterintuitive for a B2B company, but it’s crucial when you’re creating a new market category.

Leveraging Partnerships for Credibility

A key element of Deridut’s brand building strategy is strategic partnerships. “We have put a lot of effort in creating partnerships of a certain size,” Javier notes, explaining that this serves two purposes: “one hand, you need to be together with industry leaders to build something as complex as what we have built. And secondly, they also have an exposure that naturally is going to give you a side exposure that takes you forward.”

This approach has helped them secure partnerships with “Dosha Telecom, which is the number nine brand in the world at the moment, according to Forbes, and other partnerships with very well known, respected companies such as Databricks, SRE and Thales, SAS and others.”

Building Market Understanding

Rather than pushing immediate sales, Deridut focuses on building understanding of the underlying problem. Javier notes that their story is “quite compelling” due to climate change, which has led to “many invited talks and to many podcasts and points where we can actually present ourselves and describe to the world what we’re doing.”

This platform allows them to introduce concepts like “water data scarcity,” which Javier coined at COP28, helping frame the market need for their solution.

Managing Growth Expectations

A crucial aspect of their brand building strategy is managing expectations around market development. As Javier candidly admits, “The traction is sort of slow… when you look at traction in a field which is extremely destructive, where market is still like, yes, we know that there is climate change that is risk associated to the water. We don’t know how to tackle that at large.”

This transparency about market timing helps build credibility with both investors and potential customers, while setting realistic expectations for growth.

Creating Accessible Entry Points

To make their complex technology more approachable, Deridut uses relatable analogies. When asked what they do, Javier responds simply: “I’m building the Google Maps of water.” This creates an instant connection because “everybody understand what the Google Maps is, and we all understand how traffic is affecting our ability to go from a to b.”

The Long-Term Vision

Their brand building strategy is anchored in a clear long-term vision. Javier envisions a future where they can “democratize that data in a way that every level can actually live better by the water and still enjoy in the water, which is very enjoyable.”

For founders building in emerging markets, Deridut’s approach offers valuable lessons. Instead of focusing solely on immediate sales, invest in broad market education and awareness. Use strategic partnerships to build credibility and extend reach. Most importantly, recognize that sometimes the most effective brand building strategy isn’t about driving immediate adoption, but about helping create the conditions necessary for market acceptance.

The key is maintaining a balance between current market realities and future vision. As Javier puts it, “The future is there, that exists. The reality today is that we are still working towards that future.”