Aqumena Review

Performance marketing is attractive because outputs are immediate. Brand-building investments are harder to put in a dashboard. HBR describes this well: short-term performance activity can crowd out investments intended to change perceptions of the brand. (Harvard Business Review)

Three insights from leading professors capture the contrast particularly well:

1. @Nirmalya Kumar, Lee Kong Chian Professor of Marketing at Singapore Management University: “To focus on short term positive financial impact is detrimental to building the brand for posterity.” Not that marketing should evade accountability, but insisting every brand investment demonstrate immediate financial return misunderstands how brand equity accumulates. (Nirmalya Kumar)
2. @Anand Narasimha, Professor of Marketing at JAGSoM in Bengaluru and Dean of its Specialist Brand School: “If you don’t do brand building your performance marketing ROI goes down.” Brand building creates awareness, emotion and connection that make lower-funnel conversion more productive. (The Vision Board)
3. @Jagdish Sheth, Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School: “The goal should be to win the customer’s ‘share of heart’, not share of wallet.” Larger opportunities emerge when marketers stop looking only at the transaction and investigate what consumers are actually trying to achieve. (Customer First Thinking)

Four examples of looking beyond the immediate sale

Cadbury Dairy Milk — from selling chocolate to owning “meetha”. Research uncovered a large behavioural barrier: traditional meetha was collective and embedded in Indian celebrations, whereas chocolate was regarded more as an individual indulgence. “Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye” repositioned Dairy Milk against the much larger universe of Indian sweets. Consumption occasions multiplied. Reports indicated increased revenues and profits have grown consistently ever since.

Surf Excel — from fighting stains to enabling childhood.How far will whiter clothes, better stain removal, lower price take you? Research with Indian parents revealed something deep — they valued children learning life skills and values through experience. “Daag Achhe Hain” therefore made dirt evidence of children doing worthwhile things. Surf Excel became the enabler that made parents comfortable with it. The platform widened Surf's lead over its nearest competitor in sales and share and increased brand equity.

Pampers — from a dry diaper to helping babies develop. Optimising communication around leakage and dryness was the obvious route. Instead, P&G investigated how babies' physical requirements and mothers' aspirations change as children develop. That led to stage-specific Swaddlers and Cruisers propositions: softness and protection for newborns, flexibility for babies beginning to move. Consumer response added several percentage points of dollar share in the first year and began a decade-long climb.

Dove — from selling beauty products to challenging the definition of beauty. Research exposed the gap between idealised beauty imagery and how women actually felt about themselves. Dove moved from communicating product benefits towards addressing confidence and unrealistic beauty norms. Dove sales have reportedly risen significantly over the next decade. (INSEAD Knowledge)

The lesson is not “brand building good, performance marketing bad.” They should reinforce one another. Performance marketing is exceptionally good at harvesting demand that exists now. Deep consumer understanding and brand building can create future demand, redefine what business the brand is in, and uncover growth pools that today's conversion funnel cannot see.

Performance marketing asks, “How do I convert this consumer?” Brand strategy asks, “What larger consumer problem can we solve?”

#BrandBuilding #PerformanceMarketing #BrandStrategy #MarketingEffectiveness #ConsumerInsight #LongTermGrowth #BrandEquity #DemandGeneration