Growth’s Secret Sauce

I remember an instance years back - a performance specialist who, from our beautifully designed campaign, wanted just the logo and the headline to instrument a Google display campaign. That would suffice to deliver the targeted KPIs. I argued then that this approach makes brand strategy and brand campaigns irrelevant but I didn’t have the data to back this up.

Now we have enough research to see into the biases and caveats of performance data and to see how it performs (sic!) vs. brand-building communication.

Research shows:

Performance delivers short-term growth.

Brand building delivers long-term growth.

Performance captures demand, but doesn't create it.

Brand building creates demand and captures it too.

For performance to work, your audience has to be in the market, considering your category.

In most B2B categories, 95% of the audience is out of market, and 5% are in (The B2B Institute). Performance talks to those 5%. 

For the 95% out to get in, we need brand-building communication.

The secret sauce is mixing performance and brand-building; campaigns which combined the two objectives delivered better results than performance-only campaigns or brand-only campaigns.

Use Brand building to create demand. Use Performance to seize it.

Let’s be more refined cooks!

by Mirela Angelescu