Performance Branding
Over the last 2 years, we've been lucky to work with a variety of brands, large and small. Companies that had just started (eg. JUDY, Barcode, Snif, Caraway), companies that were disrupting their categories (eg. Juneshine, Cuyana, DUDE Wipes), and companies that were American household brand names (eg. Orgain, Poo~Pourri, Pill Club). Now, we're in talks with some of the largest companies in the world — multi-billion dollar brands. In every conversation there are two questions that are constantly pulling at each other:
1. "What is this going to DO for us?" (performance)
2. "How is our brand being PERCEIVED?" (brand)
When I was at Hint Water, one of the ways we scaled the business so quickly was by constantly building brand at every touchpoint of the consumer journey. In every video creative, every sponsored article, every whitelisted-influencer video, and every box insert, we had 3 objectives:
- Let the customer know WHO we are (even if they already know).
- Let the customer know WHY we exist (not just what they're buying).
- Let the customer know HOW important the product can be for them in their life.
The end result for us was not just a fast-growing business, but also people coming in from the street to say "Hey, I just learned about this brand from Facebook and love the whole story! Can I buy a bottle?" It was almost as if we tricked customers into a hyper-optimized performance marketing funnel they weren't even aware of, because we layered the brand story on top, so well.
Scott Swanson, who was my co-pilot at Hint, and I decided to call this concept: Performance Branding — synchronously building brand equity on the back of your working performance media dollars.
Some of our content was so good, it had a 13% click-through rate, and got our account shut down for falsely tripping the system from being too high!
The unlock with Performance Branding is you can use the insights from performance marketing to elevate the brand marketing. Your ads can be more "invisible" as ads, because your content is so relevant that someone wouldn't view it as a digital billboard in the feed — it's just really f*cking good content.
When speaking to these large corporations, they all want to know what is that magic solution that is going to help a $15B holding company leverage their advantages (capital, resources, supply chain, distribution) in a DTC world, where they don't fall behind among smarter entrepreneurs. The answer is: Performance Branding.
You could argue that once a brand is "well known" it's good to go, right? But then it wouldn't make sense how companies like Haus end up being a focal point for some of the largest alcohol companies, or how Hint ends up on the watchlist for Coke and Pepsi. Even the best brands cannot JUST live on their own, today. They need strategic and tactical marketing execution to keep growing and retain their market share.
Brand compounds over time and allows your performance/DR efforts to work HARDER for you, but you need to still add that layer of direct-response on top, for the full cycle to work.
We spoke with a company last week that ran a global TV campaign. The creative was great for TV, but their next step was to blast that across paid social for more reach and awareness. The brand here — incredible. The performance side (with the goal of awareness) — not so great.
If the video wasn't properly optimized for sound off, it won't work. If the video didn't have overlays to hit the punchlines — it won't work. If the video wasn't formatted for your iPhone screen — it won't work. It's not JUST about brand OR performance, the combination of both allow you to be contextually native in the platform you're distributing in. It's the same reason you would never put a TikTok on a billboard, or use a Snapchat which got lots of replies as your TV campaign.
An example that worked well with new brand: Having a web page that highlights your founder (brand) but also offers his/her/their favorite SKUs sold on the site near the bottom (performance).
One of the reasons Performance Branding is such a great concept for digitally-native brands, or brands that launch digital first, and then go into retail, is it allows you to not just silo your marketing budget to one side of the table. You're not JUST focused on beautiful campaigns and you're not JUST focused on running ads to a landing page. The prospective customer gets a proper introduction to the brand while being on the most optimized conversion funnel — which also likely will answer their questions, give them the confidence they're making a good decision with the purchase, and if it's a consumable, they might be reminded at the right time to reorder.
Another great example of a company that did this well is Native Deodorant. Moiz has gone on record many times saying he built that business with Facebook ads, and Facebook ads only. Some might interpret that as JUST performance, direct-response, scummy, offer-focused marketing, but it was the opposite. Instead, every customer understood WHY they were buying from Native, AND they knew what was inside the product, they knew what made the product superior.
Until brands recognize and implement the concept of "Performance Branding", their brand marketing will be all about science & art, while the performance team sits on the data. The right move, for most, is to combine science, art, and data. If you're running a billboard campaign in LA, be smarter about your message when you follow up digitally to someone who viewed the billboard. If you're running an offer on your site, be intentional with incorporating the story like it's done here. You still get 20% off, but you get to know the brand.
