Imagine you're an apple farmer
Marketing is like an orchard. Focusing your marketing budget on performance and direct sales activity is like picking all the ripe apples in the orchard. You're reaching people that are in buying mode when they see your ad.
Brand building, or investing in your brand, is like planting more apple trees. You're creating future demand to harvest for years to come. You're using your brand to reach new people while building familiarity and encouraging repeat business among existing customers.
Great brand marketing, the stand-out, creative, hearts-and-minds winning stuff, sets you apart from your competitors.
It's planting trees that only you can harvest.
In your customers' minds, you're the brand that occupies mental space. That familiarity and emotional connection can make them less inclined to consider competitors. Switching allegiances requires effort and sometimes risk, giving established and trusted brands an advantage.
It's not an either/or scenario
So, the analogy shows that you need to both plant and tend the trees, while also picking the fruit within reach.
In their 2013 publication The Long and the Short of It, Les Binet and Peter Field proposed that around 60% of the communications budget should be devoted to brand building and 40% to sales activation. A subsequent IPA study found that this ratio was still associated with the strongest campaigns, although the optimum balance may vary by category and market.
A recent Havas Market report builds on this idea, arguing that brands need an approach that allows upper-funnel storytelling to feed lower-funnel efficiency. In other words, brand building and sales activation should work together as part of the same overall strategy. However, that doesn't mean assets should try to do both jobs.
As a recent Mark Ritson column for Marketing Week highlights, trying to combine brand building and sales activation within the same asset doesn't necessarily drive twice the result. He shares the case of New Zealand bank ANZ, which incorporated more sales messaging into a previously successful brand campaign and found that the resulting assets did neither job particularly well.
Of course, we know that there is often a need for short-term sales. But only picking apples can get expensive quickly. As highlighted at the start of the article, the average CPC on Google Ads has risen over the past decade.
Planting your own trees can help keep these costs down. Greater brand recognition can make people more likely to click on your advertising, while increased awareness can also generate more direct and repeat sales.
Making the case for brand marketing
For marketers, the value of brand-building may already be clear. The greater challenge is often convincing business owners, boards and finance teams to invest in activity that can take longer to deliver and is more difficult to measure.
This doesn't mean committing a large budget from the outset. You could start with a small budget, experiment to see what works and monitor its impact over time. Look at whether brand-building is improving performance across your marketing, including conversion rates, direct traffic, referrals and customer acquisition costs.
You could also take the fluid approach recommended by Havas. In practice, this might mean shifting more of the budget towards performance marketing during important sales periods, such as Christmas or a product launch, while continuing to nurture the brand to support future demand.
