Synergizing Brand Building and Performance Marketing: The Ultimate Formula for Success

Key Takeaways (6 min. read) :

• Marketing Evolution: Transition from traditional to performance-based marketingand focus
• Balancing Creativity and Strategy: Importance of harmonizing brand building and performance marketing
• Measuring Brand Equity: Using tools like Brand Health Monitor (BHM) to quantify brand strength and performance

In 2007, IBM published an article on why performance-based metrics for tracking, targeting, and optimizing media mix would be the “end of Advertising as we know it” (Source). It was a time before Connected TV, before Streaming Services, before Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok. The first-generation iPhone had just launched, with smartphones accounting for a mere 6% of the entire US mobile market (Source). It was still possible for one to “walk away” from the internet. But we knew even then the power of the web as the new frontier when it came to advertising to consumers, as it already lassoed our attention away from television. 

The ever-encroaching technology that birthed the web also made it possible to track, target, and refine how many people were seeing—and interacting with—specific ads in specific formats, on specific platforms, at specific times, so those that performed best would increase spend and share of budget, and those that performed worst would have their budgets rerouted. 

But what does constant refinement bring but the doldrums of monotony? 

Over the holidays, my partner and I went to our favorite winter market on the hunt for unique presents to give friends and family. After about an hour, I mentioned that the selection seemed less impressive this year. Most vendors fell into one of four categories: pre-mixed cocktails, delicate jewelry, apothecary-like candles and skin oils, and rustic pottery. He wasn’t surprised, reasoning that the showrunners probably looked at which vendors do the best each year and asked them to return, along with look-alikes. That might seem wise in theory, but in practice, it ends up destroying the unique and inventive qualities the market originally captured, their secret sauce, their magic powder. 

This slow but steady move to monotony is precisely what happened with performance marketing in the 2010s. An entire business model was created around marketing analytics, CPC, CPLPV, eCPM, i.e., COST. Brand building, creativity, and personality took a backseat, and it showed. 

Then, in 2020, something happened: quarantine. Not only could people not leave their homes, but their entire lives were disrupted in every way. They canceled subscriptions and took up new hobbies. Trends inundated the whole world and then died away over the course of a week (remember Tiger King??). Consumer habits changed so much that the relied-upon models no longer worked. Forecasting increased but with close to zero percent accuracy. This meant (drumroll, please) marketing teams were allowed to take chances again! Fun and attention-grabbing campaigns and stunts started popping up. Consumers’ responses showed they wanted to hear what a brand felt and esteemed. And the pendulum swung back to focus on building a robust and exceptional brand, a complex, fully-developed character full of nuance and personality.

As a branding agency, one would think Antonio & Paris would be elated. But we understand the power of engaging and effective marketing comes from creating a finely-tuned balance of creativity and strategy. And you need both to deliver on our promise to increase shareholder wealth. That ultimate payoff demands that performance marketing and brand strategy understand and support one another wholeheartedly.  

Give your performance marketing team the best chance possible by providing inspired creative built to actively engage with audiences. Set up your new branding efforts for success by equipping them with smart, adaptable, and diverse media mix modeling that reaches your targets at multiple touchpoints and stages in their journey. Educate your creatives on the benefits of performance-based marketing, what that team does, and how it means more and better-matched audiences engaging with their work, and show off the creative team’s imaginative work to the media buying team, along with expounding on the notion that eye-catching, entertaining, and engaging content makes their lives easier, leading to more clicks and shares. 

Now that each team appreciates the other, it’s time to get them to synergize. 

Performance-based marketing is, of course, driven and guided by results, but can you quantify the strength and performance of your brand strategy? The answer is yes. At Antonio & Paris, we have developed a Brand Health Monitor (BHM) that quickly and accurately measures brand equity, demonstrating the positive impacts of investing in brand strength. Our BHM goes above and beyond a simple Net Promoter Score, which only provides a snapshot of the customer journey. We survey appropriate demographics and markets of your brand for aided and unaided awareness, as well as additional attributes such as uniqueness and likability. Understanding consumers’ sentiments towards your brand is just as critical as their awareness. If they dislike your brand or see no difference between you and the other option on the shelf, they will not buy what you are selling. And oversaturating the market is not the way to convince them otherwise. We also test attributes explicitly tailored to your brand and measured against appropriate competitors to provide recommended paths forward. After all, “the key to successful brand building is a clear and specific promise to the customer that can be demonstrably fulfilled” (HBR, Source). Running your brand through BHM will show how strongly consumers feel your brand executes its promise and which areas need improvement.

By looking outside of just brand awareness, you can better understand where help is needed. Possible topics to test include: customer service, willingness to recommend, and message clarity, all of which are essential to developing and increasing loyalty and retaining lifelong customers. Is there a disconnect in your message clarity? Are there gaps in coverage leading to a disappointing customer service experience? These regularly administered surveys help to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of consumer relationships with your brand. They can also recognize potential problems within the organization before they snowball, or recognize an increasing threat outside the company(competitor or otherwise). By staying informed and actively sharpening brand and business strategies, you ensure company growth and avoid corporate missteps or misinformation. 

The final benefit of measuring brand equity is justifying a positive return on investing in brand strategy to leadership and shareholders. Whileyour marketing and advertising team may not need convincing of the importance of enhancing brand experiences, your C-Suite will want to see hard numbers on why they should spend a larger portion of the budget this quarter on a necessary rebrand instead of expanding the company footprint. “55% of leaders feel marketing has an inflated view of its importance.” (Source) Not only are they questioning the importance of their marketing department, but many are restructuring, doing away with CMOs, and placing marketing responsibilities under the management of their IT department. By tracking your progress and proving brand strength’s influence on revenue through loyalty, retention, and recommendations, you can continue to steer your own ship.

As is always the way in life, finding a balance between two seemingly opposite philosophies is the key to becoming a superstar brand. Using the power of both brand building and performance marketing can elevate a brand head and shoulders above its competition. You have to make swift, smart choices through performance marketing to show growth and positive impact in the short term, and you must invest in building a robust, engaging, intuitive brand to create consistent, fortuitous growth in the long term. Both are needed for success.

About A&P

A&P, a brand agency, excels in finding innovative ways for clients to provide exceptional experiences to their customers. Their work includes consumer insight, brand innovation, creative development, mobile and technology solutions for global brands such as AT&T, Mini USA, DIRECTV, Newell Rubbermaid, Tenet Healthcare, and Barco Escape. For more information about A&P, visit them on Facebook, Twitter or antonioandparis.com.