Brand Drives Demand: Management & measurement best practices from leading CMOs

Brand investments are about more than just what you spend. And brand vs demand is the wrong way to think about it - brand drives demand, and can accelerate its volume and velocity.

Broad-ranging discussion on brand management and measurement at CMO Coffee Talk last week. Below are chat highlights from both sessions

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of ~1,300 of your peers, let me know!

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Scaling revenue wins quarters, a strong brand wins categories.

How are we defining brand investment?

How do you measure Brand ROI?

It's very odd when someone believes you can generate demand without a known and credible brand.

It’s starts with goals - every CMOs of $10M company has a revenue/pipeline goal, how many have brand goals?

Brand has died at the altar of demand gen.

The catch-22 is that you need to generate predictable pipe in order to invest in brand but you can't generate predictable pipe w/o investing in brand.

Just went through a year of spending ~40% of programs budget on brand/reputation and can share results. Would absolutely recommend.

Best way to measure brand impact is via pricing and your ability to charge premium vs the market due to your reputation.

When your market already trusts you, they give you some grace to mess up (to a point).?This is a HUGE benefit we don't always recognize.

Premium brands are more than just awareness - usually requires both a premium product and a premium customer experience. That’s when you can capture a higher price.

For those of us who have strong brands, how do we make sure the org doesn't take it for granted and potentially damage the brand by not valuing the immense power of brand?

I think part of your brand is making sure it's not seen as some passive "thing" that Marketing does. If you lead branding you need to help get every customer-facing corner of the company understand and articulate how and where they affect the brand and what they should be doing more/less/differently.

When thinking about brand - I always feel it’s important to think and invest a lot about the experience and not just the awareness. I’d rather have 10,000 people exposed to my ads and but have a GREAT experience engaging with our brand than 100,000 people exposed to our ad but have a meh experience.

Power of Voice and/or Share of Voice is tricky - it is one measure of awareness but really a quantity metric that you can’t control. If you are comparing to your competitors, you have no control over their share of voice (funding, acquisition, etc). And, not all SOV increases are good - you could see a competitive spike because of a major CEO flub.

I think it’s important to measure the authentic power of voice vs the synthetic power of voice.

There are different ways to measure brand reputation. A similar way splits Awareness ( with Reach and share of voice) + Perception (Sentiment and Association) + Preference (Engagement + Loyalty + Advocacy) with metrics underneath each of those 7 areas across Awareness Perception and Preference ; Can also do this by segment…

Having your CEO and leadership team 100% aligned is critical.?Brand investments aren’t always directly relatable to Demand Gen and you can end up with a GREAT Brand Campaign and then the “where are the Leads” questions.

89% of CXOs say their perception of a vendors brand moderately or significantly influences their short-list creation.

Thankful for a CEO partner that values BRAND and a board that supports that.

I think that’s right along with getting really uncomfortable with things hard to measure quantitatively when we got used to having detailed data from DG activities.

Brand is a must for successful ABX— we present brand resourcing as part of our pipeline path.

100% Investment in brand = doors open and deal conversations go faster.

Sounds weird, but we couldn't get traction using the term brand, but rather investing in awareness through top-of-funnel activities. It gradually broadened the all in on demand gen funding and loosening of measurement.

Sounds like we are saying brand investments are for awareness, but I’ve always considered brand as something that overlays every thing we do externally, and most importantly what customers think (or don’t think) of us.

How can you do marketing without knowing who you are and what you stand for???

From day 1 ($5 mil in rev) when we needed to be all about pipeline & leads, I always said “every demand touch is a brand touch.” So get the brand right and in place and make sure everything adheres to it and in fact subordinates to it.

The brand’s narrative must be as front of mind for employees internally as core values. Every function must be able to sing their part in harmony.

Best indication if your message is resonating is when your customers repeat it back you can track via gong, your competitors start using your terms, and google recognizes you as the authority for the key terms.

When promoting brand you need to promote the problem and category then the brand if you want to be come the category queen.

We have the metric “get X% of the accounts that inbound, we are aware of”. Now, we want to get this. “X% of the accounts we outbound to are aware of us”.

We should have a whole session on how to convince founders to give up their brand babies.

I went from B2C to B2B and we’ve scaled revenue by 10x with ABM + Brand under one role in 1 year - I have one role under me that splits time between marketing/sales ops. VERY small company with a negligible budget. B2C folks deserve some consideration in small B2B companies, I think.

This is an excellent session and so timely for building 2022 plans and benchmarks!

Thanks friends! Happy Thanksgiving!