Les Binet, brand building super powers, and font fashion statements

Brand building: how to raise price and sales at the same time?

With inflation and interest rates on the rise, brands are under more pressure to deliver profits. Which means sooner or later they have to hike prices, and naturally there’s a concern it’s going to impact sales.

But according to Les Binet, group head of effectiveness at Adam&eveDDB, the brands that invest in brand building needn’t worry.

Binet was speaking at Kantar’s Ignite 2023 event, making a case for the link between brand building and a company’s ability to raise its prices. The avid brand builders have better ‘price elasticity’ – meaning the demand for their product is less impacted by firmer pricing.

Binet went on to say: “the really big increases in profit come from brands that manage to increase both price and volume at the same time”.

And it comes down to investing in the right marketing mix, balancing long-term brand building activity with short-term sales activations: 60:40 in favour of brand building. But in the current economic climate, he says that split might even be closer to 70:30.

Binet was talking to the B2C split, but the B2B metrics are very similar. His advice comes from years of research studying brand building and crunching the numbers with Peter Field. The research they published in The Long and Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies is well worth a read if you haven’t got to it already.

Reach further. Cut deeper. Get famous-er

As well as getting the budget split right, Binet mentions sprinkling in three other key ingredients too. The first being reach. You can’t just strengthen pricing power through existing customers – your brand has to reach wider audiences.

The second is emotion – being rational won’t work to convince customers to pay more for your products and services, especially with sectors like insurance, where any difference in product is either small or non-existent. Think Apple. The reason people pay more for their products is because they’ve spent years building those positive emotional connections in people’s brains.

And the third is fame. “Campaigns that consciously aim to make the brand and its marketing famous are much, much better at reducing price sensitivity.” he said.

Which is why it’s essential to make your advertising highly creative – because that’s the stuff that’s much more effective at touching the emotions and making your brand famous.

(Clearly, in commercial insurance, hard and soft market cycles will determine whether rates rise and fall across the industry. But the principal remains – the more famous brands can charge more for the same thing.)

Burberry: the latest type trendsetter

Burberry rebranded back in Feb and it sent a jolt through the design world. It was the first of the big global fashion brands to drop its sans serif wordmark. New Chief Creative Officer Daniel Lee went back to Burberry’s English heritage, and brought in a serif type instead. Does this mark the end of another typographical trend cycle?

Sans serifs have ruled the roost for the last five to ten years. And it’s mainly because of the digital revolution.

Brands needed to work on digital screens and formats of all shapes and sizes, so they had to be flexible. Scaling down a complex serif-y logo on to a mobile phone screen just didn’t look good. So brands trimmed all the unnecessary fat, leaving things very minimalistic in style.

Wordmarks have more space to work it

But the Burberry rebrand might suggest that change is afoot. And we think this is because the brand experience on smaller screens has evolved.

We’ve gone from looking at static Instagram profiles with tiny logos, for example, to dynamic content on the likes of TikTok and Snapchat, where brands can bleed their campaigns right across the screen. Screen resolutions have increased too, so the finer details in a wordmark are coming up nice and clear.

And brands like Burberry are craving distinctiveness. With everyone following sans-serif suit for the past decade, every word mark started looking the same. Certainly, in the fashion branding world it was hard to argue otherwise…

Burberry needed to rekindle and refresh those distinctive features that helped them stand out from the competition.

Brands go through these trend cycles all the time – stripping back the detail for a period until everyone does the same, then looping back around to bring distinctive elements back in again. And so on and so forth. (We talk more about logos and their trend cycles over on the blog.)

This looks like the start of another cycle. It just needed a brand as big as Burberry to make the first move. Think of them as the first wildebeest stepping out into croc-infested waters. Once other brands see it’s safe to do the same, it won’t be long before they follow.

Let’s talk

Want to talk more about getting that ideal marketing split? Or need that creative advertising campaign to put your brand on the map? We can help. Email the Free team at?[email protected]?