Brand vs performance, what side of the fence do you sit on?
B2B Excellence is a weekly newsletter that curates the best B2B marketing content from the brightest minds in our industry.? I like to share provocative, intelligent, and original POVs that challenge conventional wisdom and create a conversation.
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Brand vs performance, what side of the fence do you sit on?
Most marketing answers usually start with “It depends”.
This is usually down to the critical context of the stage of the company, budget, objectives and category.?
So, any wide swooping statement will always have a hand-raiser with an annoyingly contrarian perspective.
This is fine, it’s difficult to provide a POV and then quantify it on every occasion, but it helps provide a healthy debate.
However, this well-articulated post from Liam Moroney outlines, in my view, the reality of long-term brand building vs short-term focused marketing.
As with any healthy debate, it attracted multiple polarising perspectives.
Brand vs performance.
What’s the value of demand gen.
Efficiency vs effectiveness.
Check out the full post and comments , it’s an ongoing debate, but one that continues to help formulate my perspective.
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Founder @ DERU Digital | B2B Paid Media Agency
1 个月Me
Head of Brand at Aldermore
1 个月It's proven that the best activation combined with targeted compelling performance delivery drives the strongest and most sustainable outcomes. There are too many short termists that think sales campaigns deliver everything (and god forbid use impressions as a measure of brand awareness). The question isn't brand or performance, the question needs to be why wouldn't you combine both to drive the most efficient and effective growth engine for your business. The short term accounting cycles that practically every business succumbs to is the challenge to building brand saliency. Customers don't think in financial years, yet many businesses seem to think they do, so day 1 of the next financial year we reset and start again (utter nonsense as we all know).
Senior Brand Manager | Marketing & Brand Strategy | Brand Management | Event Management | Strategic Innovation
1 个月These two positions are not in a metaphorical tug of war imho. They are complimentary… go back to Binnet and Field, The Long and the Short. Brand enables performance. Simple really. However, getting leadership to invest in brand when the needs of short term revenue and profit are in front of them is tricky. Measuring brand effectiveness is not done by how many leads you get and takes years to show in terms of revenue. So what we really need is broad education around brand being the strategic part of your sales growth that makes doing business easier and ultimately drives profit. I’ll get off my soap box now!
Strategy Director at WJ Agency
1 个月Brand AND performance. Broad reach AND targeting. Emotive appeal AND rational persuasion. The crux is in how you lay out your strategy to determine how much to invest into each. Good rule of thumb is 60% brand, 40% performance (as per Les Binet’s and Peter Field’s research).
CEO & Co-Founder @N.Rich??| Upmarket GTM ??? | High-ACV ABM/ABX ??| Reduce GTM Waste ??
1 个月How about; branding IS performance? At least in upmarket GTM it's rare for companies to have the luxury of being able to generate quality pipeline solely with performance marketing. From this perspective, in ICP-focused GTM branding is the driver of performance. Just posted about this btw. Branding means warming up the ICP accounts and warmed up accounts should convert at a higher rate: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/mstahlberg_marketers-struggling-to-align-with-sales-activity-7242854942951038976-csZU