Brand vs. Demand Marketing
Brand marketing focuses on creating engaging, value-driven content that builds long-term brand awareness, while demand generation marketing directly drives sales. Successful brands, like WeTransfer and KitchenAid, use storytelling to connect with audiences, making them more likely to choose their products when the time comes. In an increasingly noisy digital landscape, balancing both marketing strategies is essential for sustained success, even during economic downturns.
Transcript
What do whales have in common with transferring files? Or gender biases in the restaurant industry have to do with a mixer? Or skateboarders with a website? It's all part of the idea of brand marketing. The general thought is that you might see a piece of content produced by a brand that is just interesting. It adds value to your life, it educates you, it entertains you, or it's just cool and grabs your attention. But the subtlety there is that it's produced by a brand that wants you to buy its product, but they're not saying that up front.
First, let's get some definitions straight. Demand or retail marketing has an immediate short term purchase focus. You're trying to identify your prospects, create demand, and convert that interest into a sale. But building a brand is a long term strategy. You're trying to boost awareness and ultimately try to change your customer's behavior. So I might go to wetransfer. com to send a file. But I'm also given this introduction to WeTransfer Presents, and I might actually click through and see what that's all about while I wait for my file to transfer.
This is really interesting because WeTransfer have clearly identified that the majority of their users are creatives. So what better way to cater to your audience of creatives than highlighting work by other creatives? There is an entire section on this beautiful photography of humpback whales that you can scroll through.
And these creative showcases are what's highlighted while you transfer your file. Which makes it more likely for you to click in and get pulled into the entire array of films and artwork and photography that they have on their home page And it makes you think a little bit more highly of we transfer you can see that on their company page they are a company that lives by their values and is a certified b corporation and if you want to transfer a file, and you don't pay for WeTransfer, maybe this makes you a little bit more likely to consider becoming a paying user.
There's so many examples of brands that have done this. KitchenAid partnered up with Vox Creative to create a documentary called A Woman's Place, which premiered on Hulu. And it's all about gender inequality in the culinary industry. So this is something that you might come across and watch, and then just find it interesting.
And then the next time that you're in the market for a mixer, you might actually go for a KitchenAid. Or maybe you're really into Skateboarding and follow Tony Hawk, and then you might see him pop up in this GoDaddy documentary series, which highlights Tony Hawk following different action sports entrepreneurs.
And that's something interesting that might pull you in and make you think of GoDaddy next time you wanna build your website. And the way that they've actually structured their content is really interesting. They have piles of content that's all geared towards entrepreneurs, from mini documentary series to useful how to's. Their YouTube channel is just a plethora of resources for helping the small business owner. So again, if you're a small business owner and you're getting all this helpful content from this brand, as opposed to a competitor, maybe think a little bit more highly of GoDaddy and go build your website with their tools.
Since YouTube came online, the democratization of content has exploded, but it also means that the world is a more noisy place. There's content creators, advertisers, brands. So many people are vying for your attention all of the time, but the hardest part for marketers to justify to their stakeholders today is, does it actually drive results?
When interest rates rise or there's economic headwinds, the first thing to go is marketing budgets. People batten down the hatches and really focus on their product or service, hoping to sell more of it. But these are not taps that you can quickly turn on and off. This report from work collected data on just that.
They asked the question, What happens if I cut my budget in a recession versus keeping advertising during a recession? And they found that cutting ad spend carries the risk of damaging a brand's market share. This effect was compounded for smaller brands. On average brand sales declined immediately in the first year and in every subsequent year of the advertising succession.
So it's a really interesting idea to keep reinvesting in marketing even when times that are tough and even when budgets are tight. So how do you actually draw the line of connection between some really cool tangential piece of content that might come from a brand? To justifying to your boss that this is actually something that's going to drive a sale.
That end of the spectrum, demand gen marketing, is all the type of advertising that we're used to seeing. Explaining how a product works, explaining why you should buy this product, explaining why it's better than all of the other products out there on the market. We know how that looks and feels. So let's say I'm scrolling on Instagram and I'm served this ad for Rothy's. It's partially because Instagram knows that I like shoes, especially sustainable shoes. But it's also giving me this 25 percent off coupon code to encourage me to buy something right now while the code is live. And we might be open to consuming it if we're in the market for that kind of a product. But if we're not, the brand marketing game is a long game.
You might be seeing content about whales or skateboarders or gender biases in the restaurant industry, even when you're not in the market for those products. But it makes you think a little bit more highly of that brand. So when you are actually in the market. for that product, you might think of that brand first.
It's interesting to trace this back to where this all came from. Where does advertising even start? You might think it started a lot later than it actually did. The very first advertisements were way back in the 1700s in newspapers. In the 1800s, you started to see billboards pop up. In the mid 1800s is actually the inception of advertising agencies. As you get into the 1900s, you now start to see all of these amazing vintage brands, like Coca Cola, Ford, Kodak, start to advertise themselves with all kinds of marketing collateral. This is probably the advertisement that you think of when you think of vintage advertising. Kodak was actually one of the first brands in the 1900s to start marketing itself as a brand, rather than just promoting its product.
Once you get to the 1950s and 60s, this is where advertising really became a science. People started pulling focus groups and really digging into what their audiences wanted to see. And the rest is kind of history. And one of the most recent revolutions in advertising is the age of the internet, which we are more than two decades into.
And that brings us to today. We are at a crossroads again, where marketers and brand leaders are feeling pressure. Pressure to put their dollars towards something that will drive sales. And usually the reflex is to invest your dollars into demand gen marketing, something that just explains your product or service, and hope that people will buy it after watching it.
As always, reality lies somewhere in the middle. The truth is, is that demand driven marketing and brand marketing are two levers that you can strategically pull to drive results regardless of the economic context. This report from Nielsen actually found that brands that market during a recession can actually end up saving money because we all know that when economies contract, Costs go down and your dollar is going to stretch a lot further.
Every brand needs a good mix of demand gen marketing and brand marketing to really have communications that sit at every stage of the funnel. We've come a really long way since the first newspaper ad, but as time has gone on, marketing and advertising has only gotten more complex and more noisy as more players enter the space.
And it can be really overwhelming as a marketer to navigate this, but it all boils down to a few simple questions. Who are you as a brand? Why do you exist? Are you making content that aligns with your core purpose? And is your audience enjoying and engaging with the content that you put out?
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