How to create magic by blending Growth and Brand Marketing. The art and science of 1+ 1 > 2
How to find synergies between Growth and Brand Marketing (And why it's important)
Important disclaimer: The opinions mentioned here might not reflect the dynamic of your organization, or even resonate with your experience. I totally respect that. This article reflects my personal experiences, and conversations with business leaders over the last 15 years. I believe that blending growth and brand Marketing is one of the most complex, and critical alignment opportunity in any modern Marketing organization
In working with several diverse organizations across multiple industries, leaders are still trying to harness the mix of brand marketing and performance marketing, but the “how to” are not always very clear. I see quite a few newly minted brands that are forming based on performance marketing tactics. Even with highest level of sophistication, it will be rare for a company to differentiate on performance marketing only.
Remember what Eric Schmidt said a while ago
The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives. Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. "Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."
Before we get further, lets get on the same page with parlance. Here is how I define Brand and Growth Marketing
Definition:
Performance marketing is the art and science of acquiring users all the way to retaining those users and turning them into advocates. In other words, Growth Marketing is linked to an entire funnel. In some of the advanced organizations, Growth marketers are comprehensively involved in product development/enhancements as well. KPIs include conversion rates, cost of acquiring customer, and related micro outcomes/metrics
Many new brands have had fairly straightforward paths to growth, putting most of their marketing budgets toward new customer acquisitions through digital touchpoints like paid search , social, paid programmatic platforms etc. That type of direct response approach has typically been folded under the performance marketing umbrella.
Brand Marketing is the art and science of shaping company’s reputation by enhancing its credibility, trust and creating a mind map to evoke a positive response. Brand marketing is less about pushing a specific product or promotion and more about telling your story in a way that resonates. Some of the KPIs here fall in some of the categories such as - Awareness, Consideration, Recall, Favorability, and Brand Lift
The below visual tries to explain the continuum
Why does blending Brand and Growth proves challenging
Reliance on simpler attribution tools instead of the more expensive holistic approach
Most traditional attribution models are simpler, and only measure a portion of the digital media mix that is often closely aligned with the last-click of a consumer (or some version of that). These approaches often do not include brand building activities or external factors (e.g. seasonality, macro economic variables, competition, operational constraints). As a result, the credit is over-allocated to the purchase centric lower funnel channels. Unfortunately, companies are using these lopsided attributions to shift a significant portion of their budget toward performance channels at the expense of core-brand building initiatives, and overspending past the saturation point on performance media.
Don’t get me wrong - A few organizations do take the harder route and have a more accurate attribution approach that utilizes a combination of tools (Google Analytics, Media Mix Modeling etc.) and structured analytics, however, given the effort involved, those organizations are the exception to the norm
Missing alignment on the larger goal, and no incentive to change behavior
Have the overall goals of Marketing organization cascaded to how the individual teams define success ? Is there a consistent monitoring, reporting and accountability on the KPIs that matter. Is there a cross functional incentives for growth Marketers to help influence the brand KPIs or vice versa?
The most common answer for the above questions is a no. Incentives change behavior, and co-owning the outcomes is a strong motivator for different groups to play nice with each other
Leadership bias toward short-term impact
Marketing budget is allocated based on business impact. Principles of targeted performance marketing such as personalized messages, experimentation, and measurement at the level of individual users combined with near-time optimization makes it easy and quick to demonstrate impact. This is especially true for digital marketing activities that drive conversion and purchase.
On the other hand, Brand Marketing is operating on a different aspect of user journey. The cost/benefit analysis of awareness and consideration takes relatively longer time to prove, and the near-time optimization is hard to achieve.
In the current times, Marketing leaders are partners in revenue growth beyond just brand building, and marketing communication. There are several forces at play that makes it difficult to make bets that will take a while to measure, and even longer to iterate upon
How to approach
Take the tougher path - Drive holistic measurement approach, and shared understanding
Data and technology can help clarify customer behavior at the earliest stages of the decision journey. Develop a lightweight technology solution that gathers internal, external signals to have a more holistic measurement model in place. Some of this can be accomplished using existing tools (MTA, MMM etc.) as well as some inhouse work.
Embrace creative solutions to brand measurement - There have been meaningful advances on brand measurement. Google has introduced Brand Lift free tool to measure the ads' impact on the perception of brand. With metrics such as ad recall, brand awareness, and consideration (rather than traditional metrics such as clicks, impressions, or views), one can understand the impact much faster (4-6 weeks). I have see this used effectively in both ecommerce, and financial services.
Some of the more successful marketers use advanced analytics to build business cases with metrics that reflect meaningful financial value (ROI, customer lifetime value, revenue run rate) and spend a lot of energy in promoting a shared understanding of the “why” behind their decisions. The “why” is about as important as “what” in this case
Co-ownership of Creatives/Content
The synergies between performance and brand aspects are compelling- effective leaders know this and use the creative production as the forcing function for all teams to collaborate. Performance marketing team needs to work with the brand team to define assets that will be needed for all forms of marketing — the website, advertising, social and more. This approach ensures brand consistency, and performance.
Additionally , this is even more true for paid social content that is critical for performance marketers as a mid funnel tactic. Success in paid social requires engagement and interaction with the brand. Social content that fails to align with the customer’s perception of the brand doesn’t perform well
Drive partnership, and alignment on common scorecard
Clearly state macro marketing goals while delegating the process of micro KPI creation to brand and performance teams, keeping in mind that their KPIs need to ladder up to the larger goal. This creates early partnering on strategic planning and budgeting, aligning on roles and responsibilities, executing plans together, and reporting on results as a unified team
Leadership Beliefs/ Conviction
Create Equity: Operate from a place of Equity. Anytime where growth metrics are highlighted, make every effort to showcase how brand is building the foundation. Share the credit appropriately between both sides
Educate and articulate: Foster a deeper understanding in the organization regarding the continuum of user journey and how it is really “AND” and not “VERSUS”. Pedantic repetition of the purchase journey and how one function feeds the other is the key to shared understanding of the big picture
Balance long term with short term : The goal is to combine the worlds of brand marketing and performance marketing and use that amalgamation to deliver a higher return on investment. There will be some short term hits but as as long as short term tradeoffs are in the service of log term goals, it will lead to the optimal outcomes
Hope the above perspective helps augment some of your own experiences. I would love any comments you might have.
Thanks for taking the time.
Best,
Yogesh