Is brand marketing becoming the forgotten hero? Many direct-to-consumer brands today have begun to develop an obsession with performance marketing while placing branding in the proverbial back burner. However, prioritizing one strategy over the other can result in significant ramifications.
Brand marketing was the foundation of my career. Identifying authentic consumer insights and using that as a basis to develop inspiring creative briefs and ultimately communicate with consumers for major brands was my specialty. The opportunity to harness both brand and performance marketing became evident to me when social media went mainstream. And after my partnership with MSN to launch the first-ever branded online game, I became hooked on how exciting it was to be able to measure engagement. I went on to found a marketing technology company that used a company's first-party data to apply customer intelligence to marketing across performance-marketing channels in real-time.
My experience made clear to me that finding a balance between brand marketing and performance marketing is essential for organizational growth and long-term success.
Brand marketing defines a company's reputation, its values, the quality of its offerings, its trustworthiness, and more. It seeks to enhance credibility, prompt an emotional response from the consumer, increase customer loyalty, and motivate buyers. Performance marketing, on the other hand, deals with the realm of concrete data, such as lead generation and conversions (e.g., email sign-ups and number of purchases).
Many marketers are masters of either brand or performance marketing, but very few excel at both simultaneously. It is challenging to go deep into both.
However, the best marketers must and do understand both the art and science of marketing and are able to bring forward foundational brand elements into communication with the consumer across every channel.
The Inadequacies of a Skewed Focus
Brand marketing and performance marketing are becoming increasingly interdependent in a world where personalization and building relationships with your consumers are of paramount importance.
We've all seen what happens when the focus is too brand-heavy. Some luxury retailers, for example, maintain a strong focus on aesthetics and art, and fail to give the same attention to measurable growth-marketing strategies and tactics. We've seen the gorgeous websites with beautiful editorial-style pictures, long page-load speeds, a lack of content that fosters organic traffic, and impossible-to-navigate webpages.
The idea is that by wowing the consumer with aesthetic and creative approaches, one can stand out from the crowd and make an impact.
However, that alone is not a recipe for success in a modern age where reach is largely determined by ad spend and organic traffic searches. Without strong SEO, user experience, or PPC strategies, those gorgeous campaigns end up like the Prada store in Marfa, Texas—a beautiful piece of art that draws attraction here and there but is largely confined to a desolate landscape.
We've also seen what happens when marketers go too far on the other side of the spectrum. Content is heavily optimized with a strong focus on performance and little regard for branding or image. It is dry, robotic, or too salesy—more like the byproduct of a content farm than a brand looking to make a strong and lasting impression on its audience.
