Brand v/s Performance - Foes For Ever?

Have you ever noticed how we praise marketing as this big, unified team during those all-hands meetings? Yeah, we do a grand job painting that picture for the interns, telling tales of seamless collaboration, all aimed at one thing: Growth!

But Is That Really Happening?

Let’s be real for a moment. When was the last time you saw the Paid, Brand, Product and Organic teams actually sitting down together, not just sharing the same air but genuinely discussing their wins, losses, and how they could join forces to boost growth?

The Reality Check

Forget supporting each other; we look down upon our allies.

Oh, the Brand team? They just love setting money on fire with those fancy ads with little accountability.”

“The SEO folks? Always waiting on tech or telling us to ‘be patient’ for a year.”

“Product team? Champions at launching features they love, but do our users feel the same?”

“Data team? Masters of the 50 MB Excel dump, hoarding data like it’s going out of style.”

“And the Performance team, what’s so hard about driving sales with a constant 50% off?”

The above fight between the teams is not exaggerated. I have been part of these conversations both on the client and the agency side.

Take a pause and think about it.?

How are performance, organic, product, and brand teams cooperating in your company??

It’s hard to survive for a company doing just performance or brand marketing.

Performance marketing may help you initially get a certain slice of your pie.

But you need a solid product to retain that slice of the pie.

And to grow your pie, you have to have a strong brand.

Can you think of a brand that has survived for 50 years on the back of just the brand or the performance?

If the brand is not collaborating with performance and the product, you may not be able to target and convert those potential buyers into your customers when they are looking for a problem you can solve.

The primary blocker has always been product, performance and brand working in silos.

Separate teams, different KPIs, and sadly, no one likes each other.

There is a Solution

We may have a solution that may not completely solve this problem, but it can help us make slow and steady progress towards better collaboration.?

We all have witnessed the importance of creatives in performance campaigns.?

Be it Google Performance Max, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, display, or video ads.

The performance team need help with the creative strategies.

They are good with numbers, have solid analytical skills and are great at driving returns.

In the same way, the brand team needs help from the performance team in aligning their KPIs with growth on all channels.

The brand team is essential for their creative input and attention-capturing strategies.

The product and data team is essential in ensuring we capture the right metrics and the correct data, Followed by launching the features that customers love—running CRO experiments and A/B tests to find the winners and build momentum.

You can only improve what you measure; sadly, we are unsure if we are measuring the right metric.

We are already sitting on tons of data.?

We don’t need more data. What we need is to make sense of what we already have. And it can only happen if we all communicate with each other.?

I have seen instances where the data team would send an update to CXO suggesting that additional spending of 2X last quarter didn’t result in any meaningful revenue impact. Hence, we should not spend more on the marketing channel this quarter. We should go back to X or cut it down even further!

The marketing team suggests that they haven’t changed any targeting, the exact keywords, the same audience, or higher bids.?

But the data/product team should have highlighted that page load time went up by 4 seconds, causing a higher bounce rate, poor experience and hence poor conversion rates.

According to Amazon, a 100ms increase in load time led to a 1% decrease in their revenue, equating to a $1.6 billion loss in sales each year. And this was back in 2006.?

Just imagine what would happen in today’s 5G world.

A drop in conversion rate, a spike in page load time, or a high bounce rate cannot be the responsibility of a brand or the performance team.?

Closing thoughts

So even if brand and performance work together (which I have rarely seen), it’s not enough. All three/four teams need to work together.

One must zoom out a bit to see the bigger picture, and by more significant, I don’t mean looking at the macroeconomic factors that are not in our control. But by focusing on what we can control, focusing on where we can cooperate better to drive better and stronger results.

It’s not just beneficial; it’s essential for an effective growth strategy.

If your brand, product, data and performance teams are stuck in silos, the best they can aim for is local maxima.?

Forget even having a shot at the global maxima.?

So, What Do You Think?

Got a story where breaking down these silos led to a win? Or still, fighting the good fight? This isn't just about doing better; it's about growing together.