06/06
The Power of Cohesion: How Brand and Product Marketing Should Work Together
No matter what sized company I’ve worked at, multinational to DTC startup.
No matter where, global or regional.
And no matter what industry, financial, automotive, CPG, tech, telecomm …
The debate I’ve witnessed in the C-Suite has always been the same:
Brand building vs product marketing? Brand building vs demand generation?
Which one is more important?
And when budgets are tight, which one to support?
As if it were a Sophie’s Choice to determine which kid to give up.
It’s not really so much even the debate as to “should we do brand?” Everyone understands, however vaguely, the importance of that.
No, what’s interesting is that what undermines the case for brand marketing today at the C-Suite level is how badly and carelessly it is often done by marketers themselves.
Too often it can come across as superfluous to the business or even worse, possibly be seen as just a play for a Cannes Award and fame-whoring. So that, in the face of a budget cut, it’s relatively easy for the CEO/CFO to make the decision to just support product marketing because the ROI is more obvious and immediate.
The Most Common Mistakes
Some common errors are shared by all in the C-Suite: starting with the dangerously false separation of brand as selling the intangibles of emotion and “love” and product marketing doing the heavy “rational” lift that will deliver on the bottom line. If that were ever once true, I’d argue that it certainly isn't today.
Marketers often aggravate this binary choice perception by showing brand and product as planned in a silo-ed sequence.
- First create brand love and loyalty (often with work that doesn’t even feature the product.)
- Then follow up with the product sell (egregiously all specs, demos and promotions and Millward-Brown’ed to death – guaranteeing no sane consumer will ever pay attention.)
A sequencing that assumes in a huge way that consumers will somehow combine 1 and 2 above together mentally to get the full story. (Good luck in today’s world of media fragmentation and ad blocks.)
Media plans aggravate this by often literally designating the brand as a separate budget line item—halo-ing the product marketing media spend that sits under it—and ironically, by doing that immediately flagging it to the CEO/CFO as the sacrificial lamb when sales are down.
The Solution
But when done right, it’s not a binary approach.
Each actually does the heavy lifting for the other: product marketing can build sales and brand equity and brand marketing can help provide the right context and competitive edge for higher profit margins.
Simon Sinek has talked about this as the “why” that explains the “what” a company does because,
"People don't buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it."
C-Suite and sales especially prefer the rational approach that appeals to the neocortex portion of our brain (the what you do, features, specs, etc.) but consumers make decisions based on their limbic brain (the why and the how).
Ok. So far, so expected. Every marketer has most likely seen the great YouTube video with Sinek.
The trick lies in how you action this.
The Simple Approach
We call it Vertical Brand Building at The Actionists. It’s when your brand and product marketing are tightly aligned through all your marketing channels at the extrinsic and intrinsic levels (See Apple Chart below.) This is different from Horizontal Branding where the brand cuts across the entire company, not just marketing.
Vertical Branding encompasses two essential steps:
- Brand marketing needs to do much heavier lifting than just creating emotion. A company needs to explain why it’s creating/selling the product. This is not meant to be Purpose-driven marketing (although, of course, it can encompass that.) It can simply be the gap in the market, the category or the unmet consumer need that the company is now fulfilling. It sets up why the product exists. And for Gen Z and millennial consumers this is critical.
- The product marketing in turn needs to go beyond features and specs and promotions (no one is interested in that, let alone remembers them.) But if the features are a reflection of the brand philosophy and couched within that context you can strike gold. Sinek puts it as “What you do (product) serves as the proof of what you believe (brand.)” Every product marketing component should cumulatively add back up to the brand proposition so that over time product marketing alone can build the brand (assuming the brand philosophy has been understood.)
Let me explain via a couple of fun examples via some Traditional, New World and Cultural Juggernaut brands.
Traditional Brand Approach
Apple
Apple’s famous brand revitalization in 1997 started with the seminal “Think Different” (TD) campaign. It is a near perfect textbook example of the above steps 1-2.
The “Why”: A company that thinks differently to the category in everything they do and created for people who think differently. The gorgeous anthem spot and print campaign are justifiably famous and were really meant squarely to keep the Apple loyalist base from leaving the brand whilst Steve Jobs got the product line in order.
What most people forget is the real brand work happened at the PR and Keynote Event levels where Jobs expounded on how the iMac/iPod/iPad/iPhone were the living proof of thinking differently within their respective categories.
The “How”: The equally famous product marketing that followed that talked about great design, simplicity, and yes features, but each spot and campaign added up to “TD” and each successive product launch that followed cumulatively deposited into Apple’s brand equity bank account.
New World Brand Approach
Glossier
Glossier began as a cult cosmetic brand that then rapidly became a mainstream beauty fav. They followed the 1-2 step approach above but with a very interesting and new media-relevant approach vs Apple: they built their brand without any Paid media–especially no TV. It is a great template to learn from.
The “Why”: Glossier’s whole brand “Why” is built around its founding purpose of the democratization of beauty. They believed that, unlike all the big cosmetic companies, beauty should not be dictated by the boardroom but by what the consumers wanted for themselves. Accordingly, most product ideas and solutions are sourced directly from the consumers and fans.
The “How”: This brand philosophy was articulated in PR, their blogs (Into Glossier), and especially social and dot.com where they would literally brief the consumers to help them formulate products that would solve real world women's needs. Their sales ambassadors (influencers) would come back to HQ armed with feedback to the R&D team and the product would be launched with much fanfare on their social, retail and dot.com channels. The ongoing two way dialogue especially garnered a fiercely loyal fan base.
Their products, literally created by its users, are the living embodiment of the brand philosophy and a huge reason for the company’s success and fandom.
Cultural Juggernaut Brand Approach
Taylor Swift
On a completely different level and looking at 2023’s cultural juggernaut, Taylor Swift commands such a fanatic fandom because all her products (music, concerts, movie) reflect her brand.
Her music runs the entire musical gamut from Bland to Boring for me but there’s no denying her impact as a brand. And she is a mega-brand.
Her “Why?”: The Everywoman. The NY Times Daily noted that in an era where the playbook for a music supernova is to write in broad generalities to gain even broader global appeal, she writes in specificities and about everything that happens to her. From teen rejection to a celebrated then reviled celebrity – with a few tasty catfights thrown in for good measure (Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian) – to a grown woman facing personal relationship ups and downs to her business and musician colleague betrayals; all codified into her music output.
The “How”: Women relate so passionately to her because her brand is about relatability writing about their own personal and professional experiences. Her “product”— good, bad, bland; PR – induced or not—sells precisely because of that life experience. Her product is her brand and vice versa.
And like the Glossier playbook her brand has been built via relentless PR (I know nothing about American football but even I somehow knew about her showmance with an athlete who seems to have never encountered a shaving razor), a social media strategy that goes beyond postings and responding to fans to actually inviting them for music parties to her house, donating to fans who need help to sending the superfans special gifts, etc. She’s done that for over 20 years (another lesson for brand building: it doesn't happen overnight.)
Last Thoughts
In essence, successful brand building and product marketing are not separate entities but rather two sides of the same coin, working in tandem to create a cohesive and impactful brand story. By aligning the "why" of the brand with the "what" of the product, companies can strike a balance between emotional resonance and practical functionality, fostering loyalty and driving sales.
It is the most impactful and efficient way to build a brand and sell products.
It’s that easy. And honestly, that hard.
