Where Have All The Brand Marketers Gone?

Many business leaders view performance marketing as a “silver bullet”. Performance marketing is all the rage and seems like the cure-all for business problems. It’s super sexy and it’s not a secret why.

Performance marketing is satisfying and it feels safe(r). You spend money to run some type of ad and then you open up a beautiful platform and see exactly what happened. You can see if someone clicked, what they clicked, where they went next, if they purchased, where they are located geographically, and a lot about who they are. This allows people who are more self-described “numbers people” to play a hugely important role on the more historically creative marketing team. It’s incredibly valuable. But note that I said “a place on the marketing team.”

The problem lies when that “place on the marketing team” starts to look more like the entire team.

Why do we still need brand marketers?

We cannot forget that marketing at its core is about the emotional connection that the brand makes with its intended audience. The marketing team should always be led by the customer and the brand as the hub and then everything else is a spoke off of that hub. If you lose sight of that emotional connection you are trying to make with your customer - the reason you exist in their lives - your business is doomed long term.

If you want to nerd out with me, Marketing Week published an incredible article overviewing the results of a 10-year study conducted by Field and Binet. In the study, they quantitatively show the negative impacts that short-term metrics are having on the long-term brand. In essence, the 12-month or shorter horizon and ROI approach “ultimately destroyed much of the profit potential...” Conversely, “not only is it possible for long-term brand building ads to also deliver short-term sales activation, we can conclude that the better an ad is at brand building, the more likely it becomes that it will also deliver on short-term sales…” Read the entire Marketing Week article by Mark Ritson here.

It’s easy to get caught up in the sexy spreadsheet and the lower funnel, short-term results of performance marketing.

Just don’t forget that real people with real emotions buy what you sell. Without the customer and that reason at the center of all that you do, your brand eventually becomes meaningless and shallow. And then customers don't know why they should trust you or buy what your business sells.

P.S. Need a creative brief to get you started with a project? Check out this great, free marketing brief template!