“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room” is a much-cited marketing quote from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. In other words, he says that brand is reputation – that is, whether people know you and what they think of you. In a series of articles over the next few weeks, we will focus on a discipline called brand building, first in general, then in relation to the online environment and RTB on Seznam.
Without a good name, you have no power in the marketplace. You’re essentially an anonymous vendor, with only a handful of people stopping by to whom you can offer yourself directly. If you want to change this and elevate your business to something that people specifically seek out and like to come back for, you need to systematically engage in brand building.
Brand building is the process of building a brand. It is a set of activities that you use to create, expand, and deepen brand awareness – awareness of you, your products, your services. It is also a process of creating the (visual and overall) identity of the company, its products and services, making them memorable and distinguishable. There is another term for how distinguishable your brand is: brand distinctiveness. If you have ambitions for your business to expand, both brand awareness and brand distinctiveness need to be pursued and nurtured over the long term.
Brand building and performance marketing
The metaphor of a fruit tree is often used to illustrate the relationship between brand building and performance marketing and the importance of both:
Imagine – with a certain degree of exaggeration – an apple tree in an environment without significant external influences, i.e. in an environment where it depends primarily on your care. This apple tree represents your brand. The better you look after it, the more it grows and thrives. It’s probably obvious that brand building, in this parable, means precisely the care we take of it – how and how often we nurture it, and the sum of all the other actions we take for its long-term benefit.
The more this apple tree thrives and grows, the more apples it produces and the better quality those apples are. The apples represent our potential customers. To get the most out of the crop, we need to harvest properly and efficiently – to activate our potential customers, to motivate them to buy. This is the role of performance marketing.
If we forget to honestly attend to one or the other component, brand building or performance marketing (sales activation), our business languishes and remains below its potential.
Five key points for brand building
To make your brand-building activities meaningful and successful, you have to respect a few basic keys. These can be summarized in five points:
Long-term communication and continuity
Sufficient investment
Broad reach
Originality, emotional tonality, memorability
Accurate measurement
These five points will be covered in more detail in the next article in our series. So don’t forget to follow our blog.
Brand campaigns are undoubtedly a vital part of marketing, especially in a highly competitive environment, so we should never forget the importance of building brand awareness. But can a bumper, i.e., an unskippable 6-second video ad, be a suitable means to extend the reach of a TV campaign? And does it make sense to use this format as a tool to build awareness of a new product? Have a look at how our client Jan Becher managed to use a bumper to support a TV campaign and achieve outstanding results.
In the previous article we listed the five key points for brand building, which are: 1. long-term communication and continuity, 2. sufficient investment, 3. broad reach, 4. originality, emotional tonality, and memorability, and 5. accurate measurement. Let’s discuss all of these in more detail. 1. Long-term communication and continuity You can see two curves in the …
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