Why Brand Strategy Still Matters (Probably More than Ever)

Tension has always existed between brand building and tactical marketing investment, and that tension has only increased with performance marketing taking on a dominant share of marketing spending, not to mention the lion’s share of organizational time and attention.

How can vague promises of “investing in brand equity” compete with the hard metrics around click-throughs and conversions?

Brand building is still a black box for far too many executives in the C-suite. With COOs and CFOs having to sign off on brand budgets, and with limited metrics around ROI, it is understandable why there is hesitation when investing in brand building. Additionally, CMOs take on professional risk when embarking on brand building initiatives.

My former P&G colleague, Jim Stengel, and his co-authors Cait Lamberton and Ken Favaro articulate this challenge well, in “How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together.”

I could not agree more with the core thesis:

Pitting brand building and performance marketing against each other in a competition for budget unnecessarily damages the effectiveness of both.

At Predictive Branding, we consistently hear similar concerns from marketing leaders:

• “While our performance marketing may be working short-term, our brand no longer stands for anything.”

• “We’ve forgotten how to do brand storytelling.”

• “Our performance marketing isn’t delivering anymore because our underlying brand has lost its horsepower.”

And, while we agree with the article’s core premise that marketers need a new set of metrics connecting brand equity and activation, we also recommend going a step further.

Brand building is losing out as a direct result of HOW the strategy was initially developed.

Business-driving brand strategies are among the most important, highest ROI decisions a company can make. Yet, in our experience, far too many organizations base these critical marketing decisions on a faulty process and an ineffective use of qualitative and quantitative research.

As a result, CMOs often lack confidence that their existing brand positioning is sufficiently differentiating or consumer-motivating, which in turn leads to under-investment.

Until this brand strategy “crisis of confidence” is properly diagnosed and addressed, brand building efforts will continue to lag behind performance marketing.

On this fundamental understanding, Predictive Branding™ was born.

Predictive Branding is a marketing strategy practice that uses predictive analytics to identify, isolate and amplify a brand’s growth drivers, creating a direct connection between brand strategy and customer purchase. Our process is able to tease out the brand benefits that really matter, yielding strategies that are 85%+ predictive of purchase.

When brand strategies are predictive, teams can proactively anticipate, adapt and act with confidence. Alignment increases because stakeholders “buy in” and want to activate the strategy, rather than “doing their own thing.” Brand positioning directly links performance marketing to senior general management who are more likely to see “brand building” as synonymous with business-building.

With the right strategy in place, brand positioning is the foundational driver for effective performance marketing. The two can’t fully optimize without one another.

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