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This edition of TMAI Premium is free for Standard Edition subscribers.
Over the last few weeks, TMAI Premium editions have tackled complex challenges: Why you should NEVER give data for free, a set of two newsletters focused on John Snow's data visualization mindset and five glorious data visualizations that tell impactful stories, how to do exceptional branding (like Harry's!) and apply it to yourself and your team. You can upgrade to TMAI Premium here - all revenue is donated to charity. | | TMAI #322: Brilliant Brand Measurement | Prologue.
| Say, you walk into a retail store. Maybe you buy something, maybe you bounce, maybe you use the free Wi-Fi inside the Best Buy to place an order on Amazon for that TV you like and get it 30% off. Everything above is clean, trackable, and measurable. Sure, there’s the silliness of attribution to contend with, and the awesomeness of incrementality to aim for. Fundamentally, all clean, trackable, and measurable. You run countless brand marketing ads and suddenly things are not so clean, trackable, and measurable. Or. Are they? Well… It’s complicated. In the last Premium edition, we dived into the core essence of brand marketing. I LOVE brand marketing (though most of my career, I drove massive trucks filled with high ROI money back to my clients via exceptional performance marketing campaigns!). This newsletter is Part 1 of a series, in which I will dive deep into brilliant brand marketing measurement. I’ve learned so much by experimenting and learning from my peers and industry friends. I want to package it all up into something cogent and helpful so that you can use it to foundationally change the trajectory of your brand measurement initiatives. The problem with brand marketing measurement is brand marketing. Without doing exceptional brand marketing, the best brand measurement will tell you that you suck. You won’t listen to it, you stay the course, it keeps telling you suck, you still suck, and now you suck some more. It can be tiring to keep saying the campaign is not working, and it is not fun to hear that either. If you are an agency, these chickens can come home to roost with dramatic impact.So today… A lesson on brand marketing, what it is and what it takes to do exceptional brand marketing.Specifically, Section One is introductory, and answers the questions what is brand marketing, and why do we need it; it also lists some of the typical reasons why brand marketing fails. Section Two covers the four brand marketing problems to target, defines and relates the importance of the impact horizon and, last, a checklist of four requirements for upfront clarity from the decision-makers upstream – essential for measurement success!Ready? | What is brand marketing? This definition resonates deeply with me: Brand marketing is the creation of a simple mental profile of the brand that facilitates the consumer thinking: “For this purpose, this is my best choice.”
Brand marketing’s optimal execution is via a long-term, consistent, strategic plan. | Why brand marketing?
Today a group of people know your brand. You want a lot more people to know your brand.
Today you are able to charge $89 for your product. You would like to charge $129.
Today your retention rate is 16%. You would like for it to be 62%.
Today you are yet another seller of plungers. You want to stand apart in the sea of sameness.
Today you sell products with the cheapest materials. You would like to use top of the line materials, ethically sourced and be seen as problem solvers and not just cheapo exploiters.
All of the above seem irresistible, right?
Each is a concern that brand marketing can contribute to solving.
Non-negotiable: It is important to offer a functional product or service, it helps if you have customer service that does not operate under a reduce costs at all costs mindset, and it is really helpful if, as a company, you have a kind of humanity to it.
If those three pre-conditions exist, effectively executed brand marketing can be key to delivering the benefits outlined in each scenario above.
Make no mistake, it is hard (which is why for every one success, there are 68 failed companies). But solving hard problems delivers outsized outcomes AND deliriously happy employees. | Why does brand marketing fail? For a deeper set of reflections, and a case study, see TMAI Premium #321: Brand, Branding, Brand Marketing. When brand marketing initiatives fail, among all the causal factors, three stand out above all others… 1. As a brand, you genuinely have nothing to offer in terms of humanity. Joy. Integrity. Purpose. Customer-centricity. You have a decent enough product, but the holistic experience of your brand experience reflects the results of your company silos, bureaucracy, and politics. Failure is the result.
2. As a brand you have something to offer (or, A LOT), but your brand marketing consists of vanity creative, poor media delivery, and ungodly sums of money chasing mirages like social proof or the marketing fad of the quarter. Failure is the result.
3. As a brand you have something to offer, your brand marketing is unselfish, sincere, and meaningful, but you don’t know how to measure if it is working. Failure is the result. TMAI Premium #321 was a 4,000 word down payment on major factor #1. (People write entire books on factor #1, and I promise to continue to cover the many delicious facets of the topic.) Multiple facets of major factor #2 make frequent appearances on TMAI. And, we will continue to do so in the future because the purpose and execution of brand marketing has a black hole at the center… Measurement is the last thing you should worry about. That leaves us one small problem to solve: #3, smart brand measurement. In a two part series, let’s do just that (though, again, I should probably just write a small book on the topic!). | Which Brand Marketing Problem (BMP) are we solving? The why brand marketing section above can sound grand and pompous (and perhaps it is a little). I believe every word of it. Yet almost the entirety of brand marketing can be simplified into the following four business outcomes – none of which are fix it in one quarter problems and hence outside the realm of show me the money, NOW (!) exercises of performance marketing. BMP #1. Awareness. (*Unaided* Awareness – product, feature, brand, problem being solved.)
BMP #2. Consideration. (Product, Service, Idea.)
BMP #3. Purchase Intent. (Product, Service.)
BMP #4. Image. (Corporate. Product. Employee/s. Values.) The first three are common across companies of all sizes – including my wife’s little restaurant (may it rest in peace) or my little startup Market Motive (still rocking post-acquisition) or a medium-sized manufacturer of garlic-based products in nearby Gilroy. For Facebook or De Beers or Burlington Northern Railroad, the first three are opportunities as well, but the greatest purpose their brand marketing can have is the fourth opportunity (which is a problem worth hundreds of millions of dollars if solved with non-sucky execution). [Bonus: Pet Peeve 1: I’ve come to abhor Aided Awareness as a purpose of brand marketing, and hence as a metric to measure. Three reasons: 1. You have to prompt someone to remember that they remember you. 2. It is a really easy metric to move, after all you are prompting them! 3. Any lift decays almost overnight, hence it is impossible to see a tie to business outcomes – as I’m sure, my dear, you would have already discovered if you have the misfortune of working for a company where Aided Awareness is an actual purpose of brand marketing. (Everything I just said, apply it to the metric Ad Recall!).] [Bonus: Pet Peeve 2: It is not uncommon for your Research Partners, Agencies, CxOs to poist additional purposes like “Brand Love.” Ironically, I’ve come to not love these “metrics.” First, they mean nothing. Second, they mean everything. Third, they mean anything. Fourth, they can change with the seasons. Then. What are they really? How do you solve for them? And, in the end, are you only solving for a Senior Leader’s whim or to escape accountability that comes with a standard metric? Go through this gauntlet honestly, it will reduce the likely100% chance of failure you'll encounter otherwise.] | Why worry about brand marketing’s impact horizon? Every one of the above four brand marketing problems has an impact horizon. Brand marketing that is solving for Purchase Intent can have a measurable business impact (as in Sales, Revenue, Profit) in a 180-day horizon (for products at a certain price point – low – and short sales cycles, an impact horizon as short as 90-days). Consideration’s impact horizon is 9 - 12 monthsish. There’s, of course, a distribution depending on the product and service but you get a sense for where the scale is. Unaided Awareness’ impact horizon is 15 – 24 monthsish. With humanity’s attention fragmented and narrowing to I’m likely to pay attention to you for three seconds, oh and no matter what you say I will forget you in 15 seconds to plan on saying it four times a week for the rest of my life if you want me to think of you when I actually need something, Unaided Awareness is a super hard problem to solve (though not as hard to measure if you are succeeding or failing!). Image is often so narrowly specific to a large company, it is hard to box into general ranges. As an example, an Image brand campaign is BP committing several billion to coastal citizens to recover from the oil spill (bless them), and running a multichannel campaign to share their actions. It is also Meta running VR ads to the general public – almost none of whom will buy the products being sold, but it is about communicating Meta’s new and inspiring pivot. I don’t need to tell you what Gucci or American Express spend decades communicating. Image brand campaigns are loooooong-term commitments, and, if they work, the payoff is extraordinary, over an equally loooooong-term impact horizon (from 2 to 5 years). [Bonus Reflection: Loooooong-term Image campaigns that commit to a theme/concept and payoff by building incredible resilience for the brand, and help survive competitive or economic blips. Apple is a rare example of this. They will spend three years on Privacy, five years before that on Shot on iPhone, and so on and so forth. Look at other tech companies, flitting about like bumblebees from thing to thing flushing brand marketing dollars.]The reasons to discuss impact horizon for each brand marketing purpose are simple: A. Impact horizon dictates Marketers require a remarkable level of consistency of approach (message, medium, etc.) and patience. If either one of those two is not available, the campaign will fail. Good to prompt this discussion early.
B. Impact horizon helps you understand if you are actually doing brand marketing. It is not uncommon for me to hear from Clients, CMOs, VPs: How many sales did our recent two-month brand campaign on Facebook drive? It was not really a brand marketing campaign, it was performance marketing masquerading as brand marketing (I can give you the results now: It sucked.)
C. Impact horizon complicates measurement. It becomes harder, it has to be more nuanced, you need more advanced math, you need larger samples, you need consistency, you have to... A lot. But. Any impact horizon can be measured – your Brand Marketers need to commit to consistency and patience in strategy for the entire impact horizon.
Stop reading. Pause and reflect on what I just said about impact horizon. Consider the implications on your brand marketers of what will be expected of them if you are actually doing brand marketing (long-term thinking, deeper values, real unfakeable features/things to say, so much more). Consider the (scary) implications on measurement. Now go back. Read just the above section one more time. It is massively important. | How to set brand marketing measurement up for success? Do good brand marketing. Everything else is easier. Most, but not all, of the time when the blame falls on measurement, you’ll discover with some analytical reflection that the problem lies upstream. So while this really is not the Analyst’s job, and often well above the Analyst’s pay grade, I strongly urge them to get clarity in the following four areas upfront: 1. What brand marketing problem is the campaign solving?
Specify what problem the campaign is solving: Image? Awareness? Consideration? Purchase Intent?
Since life is meant to be difficult, sadly you can only solve one problem at a time (it really is that hard). If a human says Consideration and Image, this human has never run a successful brand marketing campaign – or has never been blessed with an accurate measurement of their campaign, and hence is oblivious to the truth.
2. Is that problem worth solving?
It is not uncommon that a Senior Leader's assessment of what's a problem in the real world is different from reality.
This is where the efforts to understand baselines are a God-sent. A baseline is your current score for that metric, for your target audience. If, in your ecosystem, Consideration is 30% of the target audience, and you are at 30, or even 32% (bless you!)… Running an expansive, expensive, brand marketing campaign might still fail as there is no headroom left – translation: You are solving a problem not worth solving. Framed a different way, your CFO might not want to allocate the $70 mil in brand marketing it will take to move from 30 to 31). Bonus Assessment: Do one, or more, of your CEOs 2-year priorities touch on anything remotely close to the purpose of your brand marketing campaign? Especially BMP #1 and BMP #4. It is not all that unusual for Marketers to solve for their own version of reality/priorities. In those instances, you should not be surprised that the world’s greatest brand measurement will not identify business impact.
3. Is the advertising creative solving for the problem worth solving?
With 60%+ of the success of a campaign sourced from the quality of the creative, do I need to say more re why this is crucial? In the last decade – perhaps my personal misfortune – if the problem is worth solving via brand marketing, an Everest-high number of times death arrives with the creative. The company is running Image creative with the stated goal of changing Consideration (in 45 days no less – I weep, so, so, so much). Purchase Intent creative shows the product for 1.2 of 30 seconds. The Creative Director loves the creative as it is nuanced, layered, and laden with hidden meaning – no normal human gets any of that. Fail.
[Premium members, see TMAI #294: Why does so much advertising fail? Please email me if you can’t find it.]
4. Do you have enough media budget behind the creative?
Good creative needs sufficient media weight to wear-in, and heavy media weights to truly breakthrough.
You run an ad five times on TV; Jesus-quality creative will not deliver success. You run a campaign on Facebook for a week; keep your money ‘cos failure is guaranteed. I’ve shared the Minerva Check in the past, our strategy to ensure sufficient media weights – or no soup for you Ms./Mr. Brand Marketer! [Premium members see TMAI #224: Analytics On The Bleeding Edge.] You are right. None of the four MANDATORY REQUIREMENTS have anything to do with measurement. But, when they don't exist, the brand campaigns will fail spectacularly. When that happens, no Senior Leader will ever take a fall, a scapegoat will be needed… It will be the Analyst. During the scapegoating, two reasons will be ascribed to them: Uno. Your measurement is of poor quality. (Hidden: You are wrong.)
Dos. Your statistical significance quant measurement can’t possibly measure what’s fundamentally unmeasurable. (Hidden: You are wrong.)
Sadness washes over every pore of my body. :( The best strategy for doing smart and effective brand measurement is… To ensure your company/client’s marketing campaigns are solving a problem worth solving AND they have the three crucial ingredients required for successful campaigns. When every Analytical Guru starts brand measurement guidance with a discussion of surveys and significance and minimum detectable lifts and, if they are me, Bayesian belief networks… They are making a gigantic mistake. They are ignoring the reality that when Brand Marketers ignore the aforementioned prerequisites, they achieve consistent failure. You need success for successful measurement. Hence, before you get into a brand measurement discussion… Do everything you can to ensure you will have something worth measuring.
| Bottom line.
My 2,773 words in this newsletter explain the whys, whats, and hows of brand marketing to empower Analysts can speak intelligently to Brand Marketers (and thus becoming active partners in driving success), and to ensure Brand Marketers deliberately pick a clear purpose and solve for core marketing factors.
Together, if they ensure optimal strategy and execution... Measurement of medium and long-term success is a piece of cake.
Stay tuned for next week’s installment on this topic.
— Avinash.
PS: Bonus: I thought it might be helpful for you to have the brilliant brand marketing prerequisites laid out clearly as a waterfall… | [For optimal viewing: Right-click > Open Image in New Tab > Print!] | Committed to investing in your professional growth? Upgrade to TMAI Premium here - it is published 50x / year. | |
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