B2B Growth Social Media and Updates

Effective Brand Marketing Is Product‑centric, Not Just Quirky Campaigns

There's a very big difference between trying to get someone to start thinking of you and preventing them from forgetting you - and a lot of the brand marketing we talk about is the latter. Big brand campaigns, the ones that win awards and make waves in the marketing community, usually come from established brands who are trying to create new relevance through playful messaging and exploration of the brand assets. It's fun to see and discuss, and plenty hard to do well, but it's also the outlier example of what brand marketing usually is. It has also skewed a lot of how companies think about brand marketing, with it being often thought of as the fun, quirky, and expensive campaigns that rarely if ever talk about the product. It's no surprise that brand gets neglected in budget talks in favor of more performance marketing when seen only like this. The truth is that most effective brand marketing is delivering very product-centric messaging, and so it can be easily confused for performance kind - and made ineffective by being pushed to act more like it in the CTA and measurement. Brand marketing isn't all about trying to make people feel things about you, while performance is about getting them to take action and buy you. That's a false choice where one will obviously win out over the other. Rather, good marketing promotion is about trying to get as many people to know who you are, what you do, and when to think of you, and then performance is all about making sure you don't miss the opportunities that come along as people are ready to act. That's brand and demand as a cohesive promotional team, working as a combo that is bigger than the sum of its parts. As opposed to a false set of options you need to choose from, where one is fuzzy and wasteful and the other delivers results efficiently. No such reality exists that leads to being a big brand.