This week, we're covering the principles that the best marketers keep coming back to, no matter how much the industry changes. Some you've heard before. The challenge, as always, is actually applying them.
—Elena
Emotionally driven campaigns are nearly 2x as likely to generate profit gains.
That's compared to rational campaigns, according to the IPA. Creativity is one of the most meaningful performance levers a brand has.
The effectiveness principles marketers keep getting wrong.
Are your distinctive assets actually distinctive?
Colors, logos, sounds, and characters help consumers recognize your brand faster and build memory structures that pay off at the point of purchase. The key is picking a few (a color, an audio cue, a character), making them neurologically diverse, then testing how famous and unique they are compared to competitors.
Are you investing in the people who buy least from you?
Most brand growth comes from light buyers, not loyal customers. Heavy buyers are a small slice of your audience. Light buyers represent the biggest opportunity for incremental growth, but they're not following your social channels or signing up for loyalty programs. You have to reach them first, and mass channels like TV are built to do just that.
Is your budget balanced for the long and the short?
Binet and Field's 60-40 rule suggests putting roughly 60% of your marketing budget toward long-term brand building and 40% toward short-term activation. Over-indexing on activation is easy to justify with data, but it weakens your brand over time and traps you in a discount cycle.
Are your ads making people feel something?
Emotional, creative campaigns have the ability to build brand affinity and improve media efficiency at the same time. The more memorable the ad, the less media spend you need to drive results. Adrenaline is the adhesive of memory.
Are you easy to find and easy to remember?
Mental availability, or being top of mind at the moment of purchase, only works if you pair it with physical availability. Great awareness means nothing if you're out of stock or hard to buy. First in mind and easy to buy. That's the goal.
“How an Ex-P&G U.S. Marketer Ditched Cohorts, Personas and Restrictive Segmentation”
Piedmont Healthcare CMO Joe Berg applied the same effectiveness principles discussed in this episode to a $7 billion healthcare company and landed the biggest marketing budget in the brand's history.
Why great strategy isn't enough.
“The central problem of brand-building is getting a complex organization to execute a simple idea.”
— Marty Neumeier
This newsletter comes from the hosts of The Marketing Architects, a research-first show answering your biggest marketing questions. Find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
