#YouAsked: What about Brand investment?

#YouAsked has a new record: we've received 89 questions since Thanksgiving about how to demonstrate the impact of Brand on business performance.?A CMO in San Francisco, essentially standing in for everyone else's questions, wrote: “Mark, how should I think about Brand investment in light of everything else in GTM? ?What have the analytics taught you over the years about this?”

Great question, Barry! ?The key is right thinking and right execution, informed and validated by a robust feedback loop (causal analytics).?

First, we need some definitions, rules, and parameters for this conversation:

1. Brand is investments that communicate what your company is all about. This is most commonly seen through an Awareness lens, but it also should help build Confidence and Trust in your audience. Brand is communicated through all channels all the time, regardless of your intentions, because it’s what your company is.?Brand and Reputation are all about customer comfort -- how much do they exhale when they sit down with you?

2. Brand Reputation, or just Reputation, is what marketers are really talking about when they say that "you don’t own your brand, your audience does."

Awareness is the necessary gate here, but Reputation is mostly about Confidence and Trust in your customers, partners, and team members. This is about what people decide about who your company really is after factoring everything in or out. Think of Reputation as a kissing cousin to #CX.?

3. Brand and Reputation are the most time lagged investments that exist in B2B GTM, particularly when you’re beginning from a cold start. Building reputation is a Day 1 activity for startups for the same reason that you should start saving and investing long before most people do. It takes time to build a Brand and Reputation piggybank. Average time to impact is about 14-22 months. Yeah, you read that right. But when it begins to cut for you, nothing is more powerful than brand and reputation.

The time lag issue re Brand is the whole reason why most B2B companies tossed it over the rail in the 2000s for DG. C-suites couldn’t see the business impact because it was time lagged, and they didn’t realize the math was available to answer the question.

Instead, they tried to recreate GTM as a deterministic DG machine. It was a fantasy funded by easy money. ~92% of B2B SaaS started after 2008 have died in the past 17 years. This is one big reason why.?

This point is critical. Brand is on the upswing, but nothing will kill it faster than being unable to show how it drives business outcomes. If your team, agency or PR firm doesn’t have a solid, approved, scalable analytics package to support their plans and frameworks, force the issue. Ideally, an analytics program should belong to the brand, not the agency. It is there to de-risk the proposals and ideas that your team comes up with.

By the way, if your brand team isn’t linked at the hip with a great PR firm to handle the Reputation work, they don’t get brand. They just get brand awareness. If this is your situation, know that you need more sophisticated minds running this for you. Doing brand campaigns without great minds backed by GTM causal analytics is a CMO kamikaze mission in 2025.

It will get you fired.

If you have the analytics, it’s completely different. You’re golden.?

My recommendation is that you insist on causal analytics with all of GTM, but particularly with Brand and other long time-lag investments.?You need to make these happen, but if you do it without analytics, you are a target.

“What if” counterfactual planning models that show how brand power begins and then how it uniquely drives the business. You want to see multiplier effects, time lag readouts, and adstock calculations, etc. Make Causal Analytics a non-negotiable part of the program.?

Then you’ll want to replace the synthetic data in the what-if models with natural data.

Then you’re off to the races.?

If you'd like to chat about this, please feel free to use the Calendly link at the top of my profile here. We at ProofAnalytics.ai enjoy these conversations a lot. Sometimes they turn into business, sometimes they don't. And that's ok. So come ready to talk, peer to peer, about the issues on your mind. It's about you, not us.