Brand building takes time. That is precisely why it shouldn’t be put to one side until you have time. Good brand building creates familiarity, memories and an emotional feeling that can make future choice, and future sales, easier.
You’ve been asked to put together a marketing strategy for growth.
The board will understandably want to know what you are doing this quarter. Where will the sales come from? Which products are being supported? What return can the business expect?
These are perfectly reasonable questions. A credible marketing plan has to deal with the commercial needs of the business today. But it also has to answer a harder question:
What are we doing now that will make growth easier in three, five or ten years?
Saving for a pension offers a useful comparison. The best time to start was in your early twenties. The next best time is today. Strategic brand building works in much the same way. The longer you postpone it, the longer you delay the point at which familiarity, memories and favourable feelings can begin accumulating.
Brand building is not something to consider once all the immediate marketing work has been completed. That moment may never arrive. It is an investment in creating an environment that can support and encourage more sales in the future.
Growth has more than one timeframe
The ultimate purpose of product marketing is to help a business sell more.
The important distinction is when the activity is expected to work, and what remains after it has finished.
A tactical campaign is designed to generate an immediate response. There is an offer, a promotion, a product launch or another reason to act now. It may work brilliantly. Sales rise, the campaign finishes and, before you know it, the effect begins to recede.
The business then needs another activation to generate the next response.
Strategic brand building works in a different way. Its role is to create and reinforce the memories, associations and feelings that people carry with them after the advertising has ended. It tends to take longer to influence sales, but future activity then has more to work with.
Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank has done much to establish the difference between short-term sales activation and longer-term brand building. Their work warns against allowing short-term targets and measurements to dominate marketing investment at the expense of sustained business results.
A strong marketing plan needs to account for both timeframes. That doesn’t necessarily mean trying to make every campaign do both jobs.
In my experience, attempts to create a hybrid campaign can end up weakening each side. The offer interrupts the emotional story, while the longer brand message distracts from the clear and immediate action the tactical campaign needs to produce.
There will be a time to sell, and there will be a time to create the conditions in which future selling becomes easier. Both deserve proper attention.
Staying in first gear
It’s true, a business can grow without investing sufficiently in its brand. It can improve distribution, launch products, negotiate stronger retailer support, buy more visibility and run attractive offers.
But it is a little like trying to drive everywhere in first gear.
You will move. You may even reach your destination. But the engine has to work much harder, and you are unlikely to get there as quickly as you had hoped.
Without sustained brand building, the business becomes more dependent on the strength of its offer and the amount of visibility it can afford. Each tactical campaign carries most of the responsibility for creating a sale. When one finishes, another has to follow.
This can become an expensive cycle. Keep buying attention. Keep finding a new offer. Keep giving shoppers another immediate reason to act.
Brand building cannot remove the need for offers, visibility or good sales activity. It creates something additional that can work in your favour before those things arrive: an existing impression of the brand, a gut-feeling.
Instead of every message meeting the customer from a standing start, it is received alongside everything they already know, remember and feel.
Being remembered is not enough
Repeated visibility has value. Seeing the same brand on the shelf, in advertising and through retailer activity helps it lodge in the mind.
Byron Sharp describes mental availability as the likelihood that a buyer will notice, recognise or think of a brand in a buying situation. It depends on the number and quality of memory structures connected with that brand. He also makes an important distinction: mental availability is not the same as attitude or liking.
That distinction gets to the heart of our argument.
Visibility helps a brand lodge in the mind. Emotional brand building helps determine what that memory feels like.
People may recognise your name without having a particularly meaningful impression of you. Any emotion connected with that recognition may be weak, generic or left largely to chance.
Emotional brand building tries to give the memory a direction. Depending on the brand, that feeling might be trust, confidence, desire, reassurance, belonging or pleasure. It does not always need to be a deep affection for the company. It needs to create a favourable inclination that can help when a choice is eventually made.
Like a scent in a room
An emotional impression is a little like a scent in a room.
You may not notice it consciously, but it changes how the whole place feels. It is present when someone sees the product, notices an advert, researches the range, reads a review or compares the brand with an alternative.
Every new thought about the brand enters a room where that scent is already present.
When the new information agrees with the existing impression, it can strengthen it. A positive product experience reinforces the belief that the brand is trustworthy. A thoughtful piece of communication confirms that it understands people like you. A new product feels credible because it fits what you already believe about the company.
The opposite is also true. Contradictory experiences can weaken the impression. A strong brand may be forgiven for a small mistake, but brand building does not grant immunity from serious product failures, poor behaviour or broken promises.
The emotional feeling and the rational evidence need to support one another.
We explored this relationship in more detail in How people choose: emotion, reason and the power of creative marketing. People often feel emotionally before they justify rationally. The product features, price, proof and practical reasons still matter, but they are not necessarily being assessed from a neutral starting point.
Home advantage at the moment of choice
A favourable impression gives the brand something like home advantage.
It does not guarantee victory. The product still needs to be relevant, available and good enough. Price matters. Packaging matters. Competitors matter. The shopper may have a specific need that another brand meets more convincingly.
But one option already feels familiar, trusted, desirable or right for them.
This is especially relevant to home and garden brands because these categories often reach beyond simple function. People are making choices about the spaces in which they live, the gardens they care for and how they want those places to feel.
They may want a tool that works, but they can also feel satisfaction from owning something well made. They may need plant food, but their choice can connect with a desire to garden more responsibly. They may need a chair, a candle or a storage product, but they are also creating a home that expresses something about them.
Even highly practical purchases carry emotion. The desired feeling might be confidence that the product will work, reassurance that the choice is responsible or pride in the finished result.
Good brand building identifies that emotional territory and returns to it consistently, so the brand gradually becomes associated with more than a list of functions.
Giving Viridian an organic heart
Our work with Viridian Nutrition is a good example.
Viridian already had a strong ethical position. The company sold vitamins and supplements, but simply listing its principles or explaining its formulations would not necessarily create an emotional pull.
We created the line:
Ethical vitamins with an organic heart.
The first half gave people useful information. It told them what the company offered and established its ethical stance. “With an organic heart” added warmth, character and humanity.
The accompanying brand film did not lead with ingredients, dosage or technical product claims. It created an emotional world of countryside, nature, wellbeing, energy and wholeness. It gave people a feeling to connect with the facts.
More than a decade later, Viridian continues to use “Ethical vitamins with an organic heart” in its company communications. Its durability has been proven.
It was not a disposable line created for one season. It gave the business a meaningful idea that could remain relevant while new products, campaigns and communications added further layers to it.
That is what strategic brand building should aim to create. Not endless repetition for its own sake, but a central idea with enough truth, emotional meaning and flexibility to become more valuable over time.
The accumulation only begins once you start
Not every business can afford a large advertising campaign. Smaller brands face difficult decisions about distribution, cash flow, retailer requirements and immediate sales.
But the amount a business can invest is different from whether it should begin.
For a smaller brand, strategic brand building might start with a clear story, a distinctive identity and one emotionally meaningful idea applied consistently through packaging, presentations, content and campaigns. A larger business may be able to invest in sustained advertising and much greater reach.
The scale will differ. The principle doesn’t.
Putting it off is not a neutral decision. Every year spent relying entirely on offers and tactical visibility is another year in which the brand has not been accumulating the memories and feelings that could help future sales.
Brand building takes time to work. That is not an argument against it. It is the strongest reason to begin sooner.
This is also where legacy starts. If you want the brand to remain relevant and commercially successful years from now, some of today’s marketing investment has to be made on behalf of the business it wants to become.
What are you investing in for tomorrow?
The board is right to ask how marketing will support sales this quarter.
A credible growth strategy should have an answer. But it should also explain what the business is doing today that will make people more likely to notice, trust and choose the brand tomorrow.
Tactical marketing can create sales now. Good brand building creates an accumulating advantage that can make future choice, and future sales, easier.
The best time to start investing in your brand was years ago.
The next best time is today.