The Critical Role of Branding: How to Build – and Kill – a Brand

Branding is much more than a logo, colour palette, or catchy tagline. For entrepreneurs with successful businesses, with the current focus and potential reliance on performance marketing, it is easy to overlook the long-term value of branding.

Yet, branding is the emotional anchor that turns customers into loyalists, influences purchasing decisions, and builds resilience in the face of market fluctuations. A strong brand is a competitive moat—performance marketing can fuel rapid growth, but it is branding that sustains and scales businesses beyond transactional relationships.

Why Branding is Crucial for Sustained Success

1. Longevity and Trust: Branding is a long-term investment that builds equity over time. It is not just about immediate conversions; it is about creating lasting trust. Coca-Cola, for instance, could stop all marketing tomorrow, and people would still reach for it, thanks to the brand’s ingrained place in global culture over a long, long time.
2. Differentiation: In competitive markets, product features or prices may converge. A strong brand stands out, creating emotional connections that transcend product parity. Apple, for example, doesn't just sell tech—its brand represents innovation, simplicity, and a lifestyle, commanding loyalty and premium pricing.
3. Resilience Against Competition: Performance marketing can generate leads or sales but often lacks the emotional tether to retain customers in the long run. If a competitor outbids you in ads or offers better discounts, your customers may jump ship. A brand, however, creates stickiness—think of Nike’s ability to maintain its premium positioning even in the face of less expensive alternatives.
4. Premium Pricing: A strong brand allows businesses to command higher prices. Customers pay for the promise of value that transcends the functional attributes of the product. For instance, Louis Vuitton charges thousands for a bag, while the cost of raw materials and production may be significantly lower—it's the brand’s prestige that justifies the markup.

Sure-Fire Ways to Build a Brand

1. Consistency in Messaging: One of the golden rules of branding is consistency. Your messaging, tone of voice, and visual identity should be uniform across all platforms, from your website to customer service. This doesn’t mean being repetitive; it means reinforcing core values. For example, Airbnb consistently communicates its ethos of belonging, making it a trusted name in travel.
2. Know Your Audience and Craft a Story: Your brand should resonate with your target audience. Patagonia has mastered this, with a brand built around sustainability and environmental activism, a perfect alignment with its outdoorsy, eco-conscious customers. The story you tell must mirror your audience’s values and aspirations.
3. Emotional Connection: Brands that succeed go beyond functional benefits to tap into emotions. Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign moved the brand from soap to self-esteem, creating deeper emotional engagement with its customers. The key is understanding the emotions your brand elicits and nurturing them.
4. Authenticity and Transparency: In today’s marketplace, authenticity is non-negotiable. Brands that are open about their values, processes, and even missteps often foster stronger connections. Ben & Jerry's, for example, has never shied away from taking strong social and political stances, and this authenticity has endeared it to a loyal customer base.
5. Brand Experience and Customer Service: A brand isn’t just built through ads—it’s shaped by every interaction a customer has with your company. Creating seamless, positive experiences in customer service, packaging, and even post-purchase engagement reinforces the brand in the consumer’s mind. Zappos, known for its exceptional customer service, has built a brand that thrives on word-of-mouth recommendations.

Sure-Fire Ways to Kill a Brand

1. Over-reliance on Performance Marketing: Businesses that prioritise short-term wins through performance marketing often neglect brand building. While performance marketing drives immediate conversions, it can commoditise your product. Over time, without a brand story, customer loyalty dwindles. An over-reliance on sales promotions, for example, has seen many high street retailers slide into irrelevance, unable to create lasting brand equity.
2. Inconsistency in Brand Promise: If what you promise doesn’t align with the customer experience, it can quickly erode trust. Take Pepsi’s infamous Kendall Jenner ad—an attempt to associate the brand with social justice movements backfired spectacularly. Customers saw it as tone-deaf and inauthentic, and the brand suffered significant backlash.
3. Ignoring Evolving Consumer Values: Brands that fail to evolve with changing consumer expectations risk becoming irrelevant. Blockbuster, once a household name, failed to adapt to the digital streaming revolution and was overtaken by Netflix, which capitalised on the evolving media consumption landscape.
4. Poor Crisis Management: Brands face crises from time to time, but mishandling them can be catastrophic. Uber's multiple controversies around its workplace culture and CEO scandals alienated customers and led to significant brand damage. A lack of accountability, transparency, or swift action in such situations can permanently stain a brand.
5. Commoditisation of the Brand: Offering constant discounts or promotions can kill brand value by making it seem cheap or desperate. For example, GAP’s reliance on discounts diluted its brand, once synonymous with casual chic, into one associated with bargain bins. Brands should be careful not to undervalue themselves, or they may struggle to return to a premium positioning.

Balancing Performance Marketing with Brand Building

For entrepreneurs who have built their businesses through performance marketing, this might seem like a shift. But in truth, branding and performance marketing should work in tandem. While performance marketing brings in quick wins, branding builds equity that ensures longevity.

Airbnb is a great example of a brand that successfully balances performance marketing with brand building. They use brand storytelling to position itself as more than just a platform for accommodation—it's about "belonging anywhere." Their brand-building campaigns focus on human connection, experiences, and global community, showcased through content-rich campaigns and user-generated stories of hosts and travellers. At the same time, their performance marketing targets specific audiences with deals, search ads, and retargeting campaigns focused on bookings for particular destinations or types of stays. This balance between short-term performance goals and long-term brand vision has been crucial to their growth.

So what can we learn from them?

1. Use performance marketing to highlight your brand’s values, not just push promotions. Invest in telling your brand’s story across your ad spend - see below for more on this. Consider using remarketing not just for upsells, but to reinforce brand identity through storytelling ads or customer testimonials.
2. Track brand health metrics alongside performance KPIs. Measuring brand awareness, customer sentiment, and loyalty will help you assess whether your efforts are building a sustainable brand or simply driving one-off sales. Tools like YouGov BrandIndex can help you monitor these brand health indicators in parallel with conversion-focused metrics.
3. Develop a brand strategy that complements your sales funnel. As customers move from awareness to consideration to decision, brand affinity plays a crucial role in conversion and retention. Ensure your content builds on brand values at each stage of the journey, not just at the top of the funnel. For example, content that shares behind-the-scenes looks at your processes or celebrates your customer community can solidify trust in the consideration phase.
4. Invest in long-term content creation. While performance marketing can feel like a sprint, branding is a marathon. Develop evergreen content—blog posts, videos, or case studies—that convey your values and benefits over time. This content will continue to work for you, helping reinforce the brand’s position in customers' minds long after the initial ad spend dries up.
5. Diversify your channels. Relying too heavily on one channel (such as paid search) can make you vulnerable. Brand building happens across multiple touchpoints, from social media and influencer marketing to PR and partnerships. Each of these channels should carry your brand’s message, tone, and promise consistently.

Amplifying a Brand’s Story

Founder-led and heritage brands in particular carry with them an invaluable asset: their unique history and origins. For entrepreneurs managing established brands or aspiring to create lasting legacies, leveraging the founding story can be a powerful way to build a brand with deep emotional resonance.

1. Rooting in Tradition: Brands with a long history can use their origins to connect with customers who value craftsmanship, authenticity, and timeless quality. Burberry, founded in 1856, has embraced its British heritage, using its past to lend credibility to its reinvention as a modern luxury brand.
2. Communicating Legacy with Modern Relevance: It is vital that heritage brands maintain relevance while showcasing their roots. The key is to celebrate the past without becoming stale. Jack Daniel’s, for instance, consistently reinforces its 150-year-old whiskey-making tradition, but with modern campaigns that speak to a new generation of drinkers.
3. Founders' Stories: People love stories of humble beginnings. Whether it’s Chanel’s origin as a small hat maker or Dyson’s decades-long journey of product failures, these narratives humanise the brand and create empathy. Founders' stories are often a reminder of the brand’s purpose and reinforce why it exists in the first place.
4. Limited Editions and Retro Products: A nod to the founder's unique perspectives through limited editions or history through product reissues can re-engage loyal customers and attract new audiences. For instance, Adidas' re-releases of classic trainers appeal to both nostalgia and modern-day streetwear culture. This kind of heritage play blends past and present, building on the original brand story while attracting contemporary consumers.

There are some key ways to amplify a brand’s story effectively, you need to tell it across the right platforms, in the right way, and to the right audience. Start by weaving your brand’s story into every customer touchpoint, from packaging and in-store experiences to social media and email campaigns. Use content marketing to share your origin story—blog posts, videos, and podcasts are powerful mediums for storytelling, especially when they include behind-the-scenes insights or interviews with founders or long-standing employees.

PR and collaborations with influencers who align with your brand values can also amplify your message to a wider audience. Don’t forget to bring your story to life offline through experiential marketing—heritage events, limited-time pop-up shops, or even brand museums can offer immersive ways for customers to engage with your brand’s history.

Lastly, consider using heritage milestones like anniversaries to celebrate your legacy and connect with customers on an emotional level.

Conclusion

A well-crafted brand doesn’t just sell a product; it sells a promise, an emotion, and a story. For entrepreneurs looking to transition from performance-heavy strategies to sustainable, long-term growth, investing in brand-building is essential. Remember, branding isn't just about aesthetics or a memorable tagline; it's about creating an enduring connection with your customers. And while performance marketing can fuel the engine, it’s branding that steers the ship in the long haul.

A brand is built through authenticity, consistency, and emotional resonance—or destroyed by complacency, inconsistency, and short-termism. Whether you’re building or rebuilding, remember this: brand equity is your most valuable asset.