Is There Such a Thing as Brand Response Marketing?

Whatever happened to brand response marketing? Or the idea that brand marketing actually does drive down funnel productivity, cost efficiencies and conversions? How about the taboo idea that performance marketing can actually create aided recall and awareness? The digitization of all things means nowadays, everything is a brand experience, and everything is about performance.

The reality is the funnel hasn’t really changed. At the very top, you’ve got the consumers that are “out of market” — they just don’t know they need you yet for various reasons. This is where 95% of your TAM resides and where brand marketing focuses on.

What about the folks who are ready to buy? Here performance marketing is the active tactic. It’s easy to measure, aligned with sales goals and key business metrics.

Then you have your customers, the fickle to the loyal. These are the folks who are nurtured, hopefully appreciated and intertwined with our product development efforts.

Most of the time, these three tactics are not integrated, mostly siloed or operating somewhat independently.

So What is Brand Performance Marketing?

Simply, it’s the idea of integrating brand marketing with performance marketing. I see it as a holistic method to move consumer segments from being “out of market” to being “in market” and finally bonding with the brand as existing customers.

All three segments care about these four things:

1. Price – Level setting on price is so crucial. It’s the hardest thing to figure out. A pricing strategy should be a consumer first process.
2. Value – Does your product deliver the benefits and reasons to dole out the cost to buy your product?
3. Trust – Are you a legitimate brand and is the product reliable to the degree that this person is willing to take a leap? This is so crucial; legitimacy is not going to come from your business, we have to earn this through surprise and delighting prospects and happy customers.
4. Superiority – Are the features and functionality of the product above the rest?

Brand performance marketing can bring the three segments together. Philosophically, there should be no distinction between how each segment views a brand, interacts with the funnel designed to convert them, and actively uses the product.