Latest Asos Figures - Brand vs Performance Marketing

Nestled in this interesting Marketing Week piece by Charlotte Rogers on the latest figures from Asos is a telling stat from CEO Antonio Ramos Calamonte that is reflected across many branches of eCommerce.

In October Calamonte confirmed that 80% of Asos marketing spend was on performance channels and while this latest article reveals his plan to focus more on building brand equity, it feels like this is a move other retailers - big and small - have been slow to take.

The draw of paid media to drive sales is natural - but it's telling how the degradation of brand can remove consideration and desirability almost completely.

In the case of Asos, the combination of a reliance on paid media with a voucher and discount-based approach to enticing shoppers has seemingly led to a ceiling in growth in some markets.

The concept of brand identity is an odd one - it's not just "what you do" or the features of your product, but neither can a robust brand be created simply by association or repetition.

There's a element of faith with branding - which of course makes it a hard sell when the allure of paid media in all its forms is on the table.

At ICS we're (of course) highly enthusiastic about helping brands to get more from their paid media spend but the amorphous power of brand can be part of the answer - rather than a competing line item.

One of the challenges in creating (or recovering) a brand is that marketing strategists will often tell themselves things that don't reflect their own behaviours or views.

One of these principles is to be 'authentic' - but authenticity is for individuals, not companies. Even on an individual level it's probably the appearance of authenticity rather than authenticity itself which matters most.

Stripping out a lot of the over-optimistic advice around brand building as key - "Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room" may work for Jeff Bezos - but you're probably not Jeff Bezos, and your company probably doesn't shape the way entire societies imagine retail.

Certainly building a brand relates to customer experience - what are the promises that you fulfil? How do you make people feel? - and this can be embodied in multiple ways.

From OOH advertising, influencer relations, creative digital PR campaigns and a robust approach to customer experience and aftersales, there's plenty of avenues. The common thread that can prevail across all of these channels is the brand promise - the confident expectation you can build, and the feelings you want to foster in your target audiences.

Fast fashion giants like Asos aren't immune from these principles - there's any number of themes that they can tie into from the feelings associated with a fantastic night out, a date night or casual sport - but it's the tangential connections that will (initially) drive affinity.