Brand Strategy in a Product Marketing World
The battle between long term and short term marketing
by mike geraci
Spend enough time with a brand strategist and you’ll eventually be presented with Binet and Fields’ Long and Short of It playbook. Binet & Fields are the one name-needed Simon & Garfunkel, Batman & Robin, Ren & Stimpy, Bert & Ernie...of marketing research. Their Long and Short of It presentation is an “evidence-based” treatise on the necessity of investing both in long term and short term marketing programs. Long term to build the brand among a relatively large pool of passive prospects and short term to active in-market prospects. The basic idea is that each investment has a distinct and complementary role in a sales and profitability, and one without the other is akin to
You’ll be presented with some version of this graph based on their research:
Long-term strategy and tactics drive growth and profit, short-term strategy and tactics drive efficiency and sales.
Today, brand strategy in a product marketing world makes CFOs and VP of Sales nervous. It’s a long-term play in a short-term culture, where next quarter’s numbers are prioritized over next year’s. Only certain leadership teams and investors understand that sales activation doesn’t create demand; it just helps businesses capture the demand that already exists. Brand building is what actually generates demand, in both the long term and the short term.
Compounding the problem is in how the role of CMO/VP of Marketing has evolved to include greater ownership in the sales number. Which might explain why the average tenure of a CMO is now less than 24 months. It’s easier to get budget for short-term product marketing initiatives as the nature of the tactics provides more data that can be directly attributed to the investment, especially compared to long-term brand building.
In their end-of-the-year trend report, 2030 B2B Trends - Contrarian Ideas for the Next Decade, LinkedIn’s B2B Institute surveyed more than 4,000 B2B marketers and found, “...only 4% measure the impact of their campaigns beyond six months—even though Binet and Field show brand effects take at least six months to kick in.” (See, Binet and Field…)
That’s six months to kick in if you commit. What does commitment to brand strategy in product marketing world look like?
A clear point of view on the market - Understand and promote the change in the world and how you solve it, particularly from your prospect’s perspective.
Education - It’s hard to sell a solution when there is no awareness in the market about what the problem is and how you solve it. Longer-term brand-level campaigns should provide that awareness.
Advocacy - If/when you embrace brand level strategy, you transition from a challenger brand to a category leader. That means less follower-like behavior that pays attention to what everyone else is doing and more leadership responsibilities. You are now the champion for the entire category.
Creativity - Professional, brand level art directors and copywriters are a unique breed. They don’t work at your company, I guarantee. Bureaucracy and process hurts them, physically and emotionally. They are hard-wired and well-trained to take your strategy and words and turn them into unique, interesting ways to tell and sell your story. They cost money but like everything else in long-term, brand-level marketing, they are worth the investment.
Broad-Market Campaigns - Part of Education and Advocacy is to expand beyond hyper-targeting of active prospects. You want to impact people when they aren’t actively shopping for your solution, so that when they are in-market your brand awareness makes you differentiated and instantly part of the consideration set.
Related, “Distinctiveness” - When asked about the secrets of his success in disrupting the travel industry trade media, Skift founder Rafat Ali’s advice to other start-ups was “over-index on design.” His point was that the merchandising of the IP was as important as the IP itself. His investment in design gave the business and the brand the attention and respect it deserved.
Confidence and a Long-Term Commitment - As Web Smith notes, “One of the most difficult things to create in the ‘age of distraction’ is consistency.” Drift founder David Cancel has said that he didn’t believe in their ‘conversation marketing’ category strategy for the first year, but he trusted the process and committed to the strategy. Drift’s conversation marketing platform is now valued at $360 million.
Binet and Fields’ research advocates a 60/40 split in Long Term/Short Term marketing budgets for B2C brands, and a 50/50 split for B2B. Most new product-based companies split more along the 10/90 side (if you consider trade shows and sponsorships as long term) and work their way towards 60/40 as they mature and diversify their product offerings. But getting that additional long-term budget can be a painful process.
Part of the appeal to strategists of Binet and Field’s work is that it provides quantitative “evidence-based” support for the larger, relatively nebulous investments that longer-term brand strategy requires.
As B2C brands invest more in direct, short-term B2B approaches, and B2B is looking more to longer-term B2C-style approaches in marketing, it is important to remember that brand building delivers long term growth and some short-term lifts, but the true value of brand building is how it compounds over time and influences future sales from future buyers.
MG