Brand and demand marketing—5 ways to align your strategy

Most companies are having the wrong conversation about high-performance marketing. They think balancing brand and demand is about budgeting when it’s about organizing and mobilizing internally. Market leaders don’t outpace competitors because they have a better advertising mix—all companies average one-third each for brand, demand and integrated budgets—they win because they have deeper integration. Senior-level marketers in North America are three times more likely to think about marketing’s immediate and sustained impact as one continuum. They align their organizations so all the efforts that support marketing build momentum with new customers, support the long arc of the brand, facilitate premium pricing and accelerate conversion at the same time. And they’re adapting talent and culture to get better at it all the time. NextGen Marketing Summit Join us for a crash course on Gen Z, DTC marketing and the creator economy Register today Here’s what you can learn from them: Promote systemic thinking The traditional impulse to assign resources to specific activities yields the silos everyone decries yet perpetuates. It’s like a team where each player focuses on their near-term component results. Leaders see marketing systemically. They build teams in balance so that insights, creativity, commercial, digital, brand and measurement own their skills but embrace the full marketing continuum. What’s more, their teams build coalitions across the organization with other pillars such as product, distribution, service and finance. Set one goal It sounds obvious, yet many companies don’t translate their financial goals into specific roles for corporate, brand and digital teams. Leaders now follow one compass to where the company needs to be in the market. So, they set business KPIs with a clear view of immediate and sustained business outcomes and how individual activities connect to them. The contribution of marketing, brand and digital teams is human-centered. They focus on breaking or reinforcing a habit or perception to change the behavior of human beings so they can deliver new customers while keeping and getting more value from current ones. This customer-centered mindset is the foundation for setting up powerful measurement systems of leading and lagging metrics. Leaders look at the scale of change needed and how activities deliver that incremental growth over the course of a year, not just within a month. That allows scenario planning and agility when things change (everyone is grounded in the whole). It clarifies the impact of overall marketing investment, which creates the basis for stronger CMO-CFO relationships (another advantage within market leaders). And it prevents the company from having to break stride and reset every six to 12 months as competitors do. Focus on symphony Marketing leaders act like conductors, with the whole organization as their orchestra. They set a shared vision of customers and their needs and clear expectations on what it means to deliver. So, essentially, everyone is playing from the same sheet music. Then they make a ritual of integrated planning with annual visions and quarterly check-ins focused on emerging needs, opportunities, and solutions (where we’re going, not where we’ve been). And they bring the teams together for everyday and special projects—work as rehearsal—with an emphasis on in-person collaboration. The result is an always-on mentality and provable impact across the company. Love the hard things The most successful marketers know change will be hard, and they love the pace, challenge and unpredictability of it. So, they don’t just experiment; they create a culture of experimentation. It works because there’s a “no fear” attitude toward technology and transformation; you won’t be demoted or fired if your experiment fails. As a result, they attract CMOs who have autonomy and summon patience—honoring that growth is neither magical nor overnight. Gen Z Career Forum Get practical advice on launching your career and excelling in the industry Register today Disband cultural hierarchy You can’t operate systemically without putting people on an equal footing. There should never be a moment where it's cooler to be a creative person or a data person than a logistics or finance person. Logic, data, ideas and creative magic all go toward sustained impact. You need that interdependence within the organization and outside in connections with partners and suppliers. One way to promote this is to establish pods and squads. Pods are small teams focused on a customer segment or brand, while squads hone specialty skills. Bring them together to collaborate regularly, and you’ll develop T-shaped talent—people equally facile with their skill areas and the intersecting components of business value. Leaders appreciate that the business is the brand, and the brand is the business. Moreover, they operate this way. To them brand and demand aren’t pieces to be polished and then glued together; they’re strands to be woven into one whole cloth. Read Ad Age’s Best of 2024 stories here

Brand and demand marketing—5 ways to align your strategy

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