Outcome only marketing is a dead end street

The background of outcomes and performance

A few years ago there was a schism forming within large and medium scale agencies between Direct Response teams and Branding teams. This in my opinion was driven by three things; the need for a specialist skill set, the opportunity to charge more for this type of service, and the pubescent phase of attribution. Raw and unintelligible, last touch attribution became the standard misleading beast it is today but that story is for another day.

This ability to measure from impression to sale gave agencies an opportunity to develop a specialist business unit called the performance department. A department that focuses all their skills towards the attainment of directly measurable outcomes: be they leads, sales, revenue, acquisitions, etc. From a day to day trading perspective keeping these two departments separate makes sound sense, with non-performance generally requiring more negotiation and relationship skills and performance requiring more real time optimisation and technical aptitudes.

For a few years, this dichotomy of teams became the standard for many agencies - and still is for many more.

The logic of focusing on outcomes

Fast forward to a time of change, where a newly promoted client side marketing leader who inherited an impossibly hard to reach target, shifting the focus towards investing in performance media in favour of brand - at least within the digital sphere. This can make sense from the outset if we were to imagine the thought process - "I have a marketing budget and these targets to hit. If I put them in this channel, then that can tell me how many leads I can get, which I can measure immediately, why take a risk on something I can't measure?"

This then leads one to the inevitable "Why invest in something that isn't delivering results?"

Which then leads to "Why invest in something that doesn't have an outcome".

And that logic makes sense, except that the primary flaw within this is that you're limited by what you can measure, from end to end. We're closer but we're still nowhere near, even with Google's new in-store conversion attribution with [buzzword alert] "Machine Learning". 

When you peel back a layer, you notice that the real answer is simple; That you don't know the results of certain activity because it doesn't have an immediate outcome. Like an outdoor billboard. Super effective at what it needs to do, but the immediate outcomes you can measure from it are limited.

The fruit tree

I'm a big fan of creating analogies, metaphors, anecdotes, and thinking outside of the box to explain things. The fruit tree analogy is how I like to explain the value of brand activity.

Imagine you have a fruit tree someone gave you and it is currently healthy and fruiting. You pick all the fruit and have to make a decision. Do you spend some money to water the tree, without seeing the immediate outcome of the water, or do you focus on what gives you outcomes - picking more fruit or finding fruit on the ground or on another tree? 

It seems like common sense reading this that you need to water the tree to get more fruit and the long term results and impact of watering the tree are clear. For some reason though, supporting brand activity is sometimes not as clear and by eliminating this portion of the strategy and focusing entirely on performance, you risk having no fruit in the mid to long term.

Don't forget that what you inherit has a different past to the future you're trying to set. That is, there would have been brand activity in the past for you to have inherited the tree as healthy as it was; don't get caught in the trap like this genius did when he compared Trump's Q1 to Obama's.

Let me connect the dots if you're missing this one, it's an indication of what the new party inherited vs. what they've achieved in their first quarter. If your predecessor was running brand activity, they've given you a healthy fruit tree with plenty of ripe fruit to get you going through the season. Would you like to see it fruit the same way - if not better next season?

Performance needs brand

Put simply, without brand activity performance channels have less warm leads to convert. Focusing entirely on the outcome, limits you to thinking everything has an immediate and measurable outcome. 

What would your immediate outcome be from having advertised on TV? Tell me the measurable outcome you can have that doesn't have any component associated with digital - with the exception of getting special phone numbers or coupon codes generated. The reality is, only digital is natively capable of being measured against an outcome.

Performance and brand have more of a symbiotic relationship than is visible from the surface.

Examples where outcome only marketing would let you down

Reviews: You wouldn't give two craps about reviews, good or bad. You know, because people don't do research on things, they just go straight to buy. If you can measure the reviews, it makes sense to put it in the outcome bucket because you know, they matter?

Offline: Why do any offline media? Aside from reaching most of the country and your audience safely, there's no immediate outcome. Except that long term sales results of TV advertising being roughly double those of the immediate short term results.

Banners: If you're not getting conversions from a banner, why run it? How about because 80% of it's value isn't necessarily the outcome you're measuring.

Native: What outcome would having an advertorial professionally written for you? People read it, they consider it a valuable review, and then when they go in store or go do a search and see your product again the value carries through to conversion. After all, it's not like unmeasurable formats play a role in the research phase.

This list can keep going but I think you get the point.

In summary

If there is no directly measurable outcome, discounting the value of the channel, format, strategy, or role it plays in the conversion decision has bigger implications than those immediately visible.

Focusing on only the measurable outcome gives you a two dimensional approach and one that is oversimplified for quick results, biased towards digital channels and even further biased towards a channel that fits your attribution model. If you're running Google Analytics it is probably last click, not even last touch. Focusing entirely on outcomes gets you moving towards a place your brand may never be able to recover from.

Just remember if you want your tree to keep fruiting, don't stop watering it because of the price of water.