Duarte Garrido, Fractional CMO and VP of Marketing at Connectd offers his thoughts on how to drive more sales with strong brands – perhaps familiarity is the key?
According to Deloitte, 81% of executives now believe that investing in Brand is essential for long-term growth. If we follow the teachings of Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk, we as marketers understand how vital it is to build Mental Availability - and the role a strong brand can play on the way there.
A strong brand can reduce price sensitivity, drive lower acquisition costs, and expand the available market you’re trying to capture. Even though hundreds of millions of new brands enter the market each year, the charts are constantly topped by the usual suspects.
Big brand success
Why? Why do big brands keep consistently getting bigger, while challenger brands are left in the dust - in the contrail?
Building a Brand is hard, and costly. Hard because it involves manual surveys and focus groups, agency retainers, and big content teams. Costly because, well, that. If you're a founder wanting to build your brand today, it involves deep research into your market, your competitors, your consumers, and yourself.
Having the data is only the start. Then you need to make sense of it, turn it into actionable insights, and ensure those insights are then reflected on your strategy. Then there’s execution. Copywriters, designers, video editors, social media managers, community managers - and constant test and learn. Endless iteration.
Lacking internal resources
With most brands lacking internal resources to do this, the keys to the kingdom are held by a network of consultancies and agencies. A big brand has at least 10 of them in retainer at any given time. Millions of dollars per year spent on brand building.
But the world is changing. No longer are brands built on mass advertising. Consumers don’t want generic advertising. They don’t want advertising at all. They want content, and experiences. And they want them personalized, meaningful, and always-on.
Brands spending months working with a consultant to define guidelines, another one to run focus groups and surveys, and another to turn it into an actionable plan will see that strategy outdated as soon as it hits the Power Point.
This process is slow, expensive, ineffective, and built for those developing TV commercials in the pre-social media era. What if, instead of pouring months and millions into a TV commercial based on the insights of a ten-people focus group, brands could know everything they needed about their brand, their customers, their category, and their competitors - and see how that changes Every. Single. Day. Wouldn’t that be something?
What if they could turn all that data into actionable insights, those insights into strategy, and that strategy into always-on marketing content that they could test on their audience organically every day?
AI potential
AI has the potential to disrupt every job function. It can speed up processes, fight inefficiencies, boost effectiveness, and create value.
We're already witnessing it happening with HR, Product, and Software Development. Why not Brand? For the past 10 years, marketers have relied too heavily on the quick fix of Performance Marketing, ignoring Brand at their peril. That, in its turn, has pushed MarTech to respond only to the former. I say no more. We're entering a new age of Brand. AI is bound to lead the way.
By Duarte Garrido, Fractional CMO and VP of Marketing at Connectd