Volume 119: Brand, Living in Performance Harmony.
1. Brand, Living in Performance Harmony.
tl;dr: Following up on brand & performance marketing.
Last week, I wrote about Airbnb, performance marketing, brand marketing, and why I think we’ve arrived where we are. The good news is that there’s an increasing realization that you need both working in harmony rather than relying on performance marketing alone. Now, I know this is hardly a new thought and that the likes of Binet & Field and Ritson have talked about it for years, but sometimes it takes a long time for ideas to embed into the synapses of society. And in this case, that society comprises marketers who’ve been under tremendous pressure to focus on direct response digital, which has created an entire generation who only know how to do that.
Based on discussions I’ve seen on LinkedIn and the Chaos Factory, formerly known as Twitter, the Airbnb example resonates with a desire for change, but let’s be careful about how we think about this.
As is often the case, we must be wary of swinging the pendulum too far. The reality for most is that it’s not about shifting wholesale to brand marketing and ignoring direct response entirely; it’s about ensuring an optimum balance. (Even Airbnb admits to using performance marketing as a targeted tool where necessary) And that balance is likely to differ depending upon the category you are in, the competitive dynamics you face, the customer attention you can (or can’t) attract, how well-known your brand already is, and where you are in your overall evolution as a company.
Put simply, brand marketing is not a risk-free exercise, and it’s no catchall panacea for the slowing growth of every business. However, just because it isn’t risk-free doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it; after all, very little in business comes without risk. So, really this is about being cognizant of the risks and doing what we can to maximize our probability of success.
With that in mind, here are a few observations about how we might think about brand relative to performance marketing because, unfortunately, the talking heads who do nothing but think about this stuff all day long have made it way too complicated for most.
So, why do we need brand marketing?
Simple. Because we want people to know about us and think about us in the period before they’re actively in the market to buy in order to:
Accelerate their shift from not ready to purchase to ready
Increase the number of people who are willing to purchase from us when they are ready
Be top of mind when that happens.
And, while points 2 and 3 are the most important, doing all three is the Holy Grail.
For people who think in terms of funnels, the role of brand marketing is twofold. First, to widen the top of the funnel to increase the number of people willing to consider our brand. Second, to accelerate the flow of customers into this now wider funnel. By contrast, the role of performance marketing is to help capture more business as it moves through the funnel. As a result, if you do brand marketing well, it should increase the effectiveness of the performance marketing that follows. This is why they represent an and, rather than an or.
So, what makes for good brand marketing? OK, this is where shit gets unnecessarily complicated. Just this week, Mark Ritson went on another of his nihilistic rants that are more confusing than they are helpful on this subject, so if you’re thinking of doing some brand marketing, here are a few thoughts to help you along the way.
First, you must stand out and be uniquely recognizable as you.
For all practical purposes, distinctiveness and differentiation are the same. Yes, marketing academics are having a big ‘ole catfight over this subject right now, and no, it doesn’t matter because they’re dancing on the head of a pin. All you have to remember is the following. How do you intend to stand out from the crowd? And what will people remember you by? More specifically, make sure that irrespective of your campaign or message:
Your brand stands out uniquely from all other brands, cannot easily be mistaken for any other brand, and has things that make you unique and recognizable. For Nike, it’s the swoosh. For Adidas, three stripes. For Coke, it’s the color red allied with the white script of the logotype, a unique bottle shape, and polar bears at the holidays.
That you use your uniqueness (whatever it is) consistently over time so that people remember it and come to recognize you by it, so once you understand what makes you unique, use it, don’t ditch it arbitrarily, and make sure you don’t accidentally lose it when jumping from one campaign to another.
As an aside, take a look at your value proposition before you start down the path of brand marketing. If it’s uncompetitive or bad in any way, fix it first. Advertising of any stripe is a weak force. It can’t make up for an uncompetitive offer.
Second, yes, you must be noticed. But don’t sacrifice image to do so.
For all practical purposes, you should think of salience and image in the same breath. Yes, I know some of you are throwing your hands in the air in frustration at this statement, but think about it for a second. Salience means you get noticed, remembered, and come to mind when someone considers making a purchase. Image is what you are noticed and remembered for. They’re deeply interrelated. You can’t build an image without salience because that means nobody is noticing, but salience without a consistently attractive image is just chaos.
Think Twitter. Elon Musk has given it new salience - Daily active users have increased as his antics turned it into front-page news. But, becoming the Chaos Factory has created a terrible image with advertisers who are bailing, as are users that aren’t trolls or car-crash rubberneckers.
This is why Mark Ritson is wrong to say the Belvedere Vodka ad with Daniel Craig has salience without meaning. Yes, it’s doing a great job of being noticed because of its surprisingly silly irreverence (and thank God we finally see some ads with whimsy and silliness at the heart). This salience will make people think of Belvedere when ordering vodka, but it also carefully maintains the premium, aspirational image of the brand, even as it plays with it. In the same vein, yes, Brewdog has established much salience, but it’s also built an image as the iconoclast of the category in the process.
So, by all means, focus on salience (and I’ll reinforce why in a second) but be careful not to sacrifice image on its altar, as Elon Musk is hellbent on doing, both for himself and for Twitter.
OK. Back to salience for one last second. Why does it matter so much? Again, very simply, we want to be noticed and remembered and desired, and since consumers are bombarded with commercial messages all day long, they barely notice, let alone remember anything. So whatever we do better be something different, unexpected, creative, or whatever you want to call it to cut through.
Third, bland, boring, anything means you’ve failed.
Bland, boring brands that have nothing unique to remember them by executing bland, boring brand ads that nobody notices, let alone remembers, is an excellent way to light your money on fire. We want to be noticed, remembered, and, ideally, desired.
This is why if you’re a B2B brand, you should avoid the penchant for boring, functional, feature-driven narratives. They don’t work. As pretty much every research study finds.
It’s also why designers need to stop looking at their work through a lens of “good design” and start looking through a lens of “good branding,” where “clean, modern, and seamless” takes a huge backseat to “unique, different, and instantly recognizable.”
Fourth, understand that brand marketing and performance marketing are very different and act accordingly.
When we do performance marketing, what matters most is how well we target. Why? Because we’re trying to get in front of the tiny subset of 5-10% of people who are actively in the market to purchase at that moment so we can entice them to buy our product and not a competitors.
When we do brand marketing, what matters most is the salience of the ad/PR/experience and the image this presents. Why? Because now we’re dealing with the 90-95% of people who aren’t in the market and aren’t paying attention, and we’re competing with every other brand they see for whatever sliver of attention they’re willing to give us. It’s not our right; we must earn this attention every time, all the time, over time.
Fifth, brand and performance marketing measure very differently.
With performance marketing, we measure via dashboards in the moment and seek the reassurance of immediacy. Put simply; it’s addictive. And that isn’t an accident because tech firms have become expert at designing products for addiction. Secondarily, we have so-called “hard metrics” like ROI, ROAS, attribution, conversion rates, etc., ad-infinitum, that we rely upon to prove value to our more numerate business colleagues, mostly in finance. (Although, in tech firms, this also includes engineers who bring their own biases, see the point about B2B ads above)
With brand marketing, because the job it’s doing is different, the effects measure over longer timeframes; they’re often softer and thus harder to attribute directly and will never have addictive immediacy to give us that dopamine hit. Put simply, good measurement of brand marketing generally takes longer, costs more, and is more complicated to undertake than the measurement machines tech firms have built to support performance marketing. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. As I’ve said before, “what gets measured gets managed” isn’t true in most organizations. The truth is usually “what gets easily measured gets managed, mismanaged, and sometimes manipulated, and what’s hard to measure gets ignored.”
So, don’t ignore brand marketing just because it’s hard to measure.
Where does all this leave us?
Well, in summary, brand marketing expands our potential market, while performance marketing helps us capture more of that potential. Brand marketing gets us noticed and remembered and helps build our image before the customer is ready to buy, which makes it easier for performance marketing to capture the sale when the customer does want to buy. And brand marketing is measured across months and years, while performance marketing is measured in minutes and hours.
It’s not that one is bad, and the other is good. Don’t fall into that trap. It’s just that they have different jobs to do and are most effective when done together, in harmony.
2. The Case For The Chief Brand Officer.
tl;dr: And oldie but a goodie.
I’m conscious that with all the focus right now on brand marketing, it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that brands are defined by much more than how they communicate.
For many years, I used the example of HSBC. While it loudly communicated its status as “The World’s Local Bank,” I found it harder to open a US HSBC account after I moved to New York than I did other banks, even though I’d been a UK HSBC customer for years. In other words, no amount of comms can make up for a discordant experience.
The why is simple. Advertising is a weak force. Its power lies in the ability to nudge people to act differently than they otherwise would. For any brand, word-of-mouth is almost always a stronger force. Get these two forces working harmoniously, and the impact can be huge. Have them working in opposition, and we’re left with the old adage that “nothing kills a bad product faster than great advertising.”
With this in mind, you’ve probably seen one of the myriad of charts that are meme-ing their way across the interwebs right now that seek to compare “marketing” to “brand.” They usually look like two circles with marketing in charge of communications and brand in charge of…well, everything else.
And, while this is wrong, like all the best lies, there’s a nugget of truth at the heart that cannot be explained adequately with two circles and a few words.
This is why I recommend you read The Case For The Chief Brand Officer, which I wrote back in 2018 before Off Kilter was even a glimmer on my keyboard. I think it stands up surprisingly well. Hope you agree.
If you do or don’t, please let me know via email or the comments on the post itself.
3. If Brands Really Cared, They’d Protest Harder.
tl;dr: Hard to get excited about such a compromised World Cup.
I love football, the beautiful game, AKA soccer, to my American friends. Although, as a player, I realized at a very young age that my best position was left back…in the locker room.
I was truly abject, first playing as a defender with the sole skills of:
Clumsily and accidentally wiping out opposition players instead of playing the ball
Hoofing the ball out of play while trying to pass to a teammate
Jogging briskly for about five minutes before doubling over and wheezing for the next fifteen due to my abject lack of fitness
After realizing I was incapable of mediocrity in any outfield position, I briefly switched to goalkeeper, where I was handicapped by having no clue what the offside rule meant and not being able to afford gloves.
Before my final ever competitive game as a young teenager, I foolishly devoured a massive portion of battered sausages and ultra-greasy chips on the way to the football pitch. I spent the next 90 minutes desperately trying to hold it down while freezing my ass off in howling wind and horizontal Scottish rain, the temperature of frozen nitrogen, all while doing my best to ignore a constant stream of angry sarcasm masquerading as “coaching” from a pair of old codgers on the sidelines. Apparently, they had nothing better to do that night than stand in the freezing wind and rain, smoke cigarettes, get lashed on whisky, and verbally abuse a teenager.
Anyhoo, I shipped seven goals, was roundly and loudly blamed for the drubbing by my teammates, and never set foot on a football pitch again.
But that did nothing to stop my love of the game; if anything, it may have made me an even more rabid fan. And while my first love will always be the greatest team ever to grace the Earth; 19-time English League Champions, 8-time FA Cup champions, 9-time League Cup Champions, 6-time European Champions, and 1-time FIFA World Club Champions, Liverpool Football Club, YNWA, the World Cup has always held a special place in my heart. Until now.
(As a side note, since Scotland rarely qualifies for the tournament due to our being–to use a technical term–a bit shit, I normally adopt another country, usually Spain. This year, I haven’t bothered)
You see, I can’t bring myself to get excited for a World Cup held mid-season that’s defined more by corruption, cruelty, and death than anything resembling the love of the beautiful game.
So, with some meager satisfaction, I note a subset of national teams getting creative in their protest efforts. We have the Danes and their shirt sponsors, Hummel, blanking out the national emblem and sponsor marks on their shirts, as they don’t wish to be seen endorsing a tainted tournament. We have the US national team using a rainbow logo at their training facilities to highlight the illegality of homosexuality in Qatar, and we have varied captains of European teams who’ve pledged to wear One Love armbands for similar reasons.
Unfortunately, that’s about it, as major World Cup sponsors are all conspicuous by their silence as they prioritize access to a massive global audience ahead of any discomfort they may feel over the circumstances of the tournament.
At least my fellow Scotsman and rabid football fan, Rod Stewart, turned down a $1m+ payday to perform at the World Cup. Good for you, Rod.
The President of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, claims we should leave everything else aside for the next month and focus on football, but it’s a bit late for that. FIFA should’ve focused on football when they awarded the tournament in 2010.
I just hope my excitement ramps back up for USA ‘26.