The question is, is the main part of your marketing budget being wasted if you fail to build a strong, differentiated and mission-driven brand?

Written by Henrik Hyldgaard

Too many companies fail to get the most out of their marketing budget. There is too little respect for and focus on what is needed for marketing to have a business impact, both among marketing managers and the executive team.

In the short term, marketing can be executed with the purpose of activating a sale. This type of marketing presents a new or existing product – usually also at a decent price – with the primary goal of generating more sales here and now. But what happens when most purchasing decisions, both in the B2B and B2C markets, depend on a brand’s uniqueness, responsibility, recognition, symbolism and the associated emotional and self-expressive benefits? If a company does not have a particularly attractive brand, it will naturally achieve less effect from its sales-activating marketing.

In the long term, marketing can play a crucial role in accelerating a company’s business growth. Weak growth in sales, stagnation, or decline is rarely due to poor efforts from the company’s employees. Inefficiency in production or a lack of hunger among salespeople can only move the needle a few percentages points. Instead, the company’s foundation for accelerating growth is lacking. The company’s business platform and brand must be able to break through to new customers, new geographical markets, new product areas and eventually even entirely new product categories.

If your company’s business model and leadership culture are not both visionary, dynamic, and innovative, you will struggle to attract the best employees and develop tomorrow’s ‘must-have’ products. If the company’s products are not packed with customer benefits, they are difficult to market, sell and get others to recommend. If your brand is not unique and attractive, it will be more than ordinarily difficult to conquer new customers, markets and product categories. After all, no one is queuing up to introduce or buy something unknown, uncertain and like everything else.

We humans tend to fall more in love with the gain than the demanding effort required to achieve it. Therefore, business leaders often underestimate the foundation that needs to be built to ensure a company’s business breakthrough.

It is the extraordinary company platform and the strong brand that are crucial for whether a company can accelerate its growth and expand its activities and thereby future-proof the company in terms of new business models – besides succeeding in having a significant positive impact on society. A weak brand cannot attract customers across borders, and an ordinary company platform can neither create innovation that conquers new markets nor find the surplus to make a significant difference in our fragile world.

 

Flock mentality in the executive hallways
The greatest business impact that can be achieved through marketing consists of building a unique and attractive brand. When you manage to move the brand’s role, relevance, recognition and awareness in the market, you improve the opportunity to significantly increase the company’s sales.

Offensive brand development also reduces the risk of ‘suddenly’ being left with a brand that has lost its spark, appeal, and competitiveness. Technology, society, and competitors are certainly not standing still. The relevant, integrating, and engaging differentiation is the absolute pivot in building the strong brand. It is impossible to break through to a significantly higher awareness, new attractive perceptions and extraordinary good customer relations if you follow in the footsteps of other brands.

If your brand looks, acts, and communicates like other brands, then it cannot come to represent any particularly interesting story or create any particularly added value, either functionally, emotionally or self-expressively. Yet, it is rare for business leaders to feel comfortable standing out from the crowd. They can easily refer to the most unique brands in the world in their briefs and admire the most creative, courageous and attention-grabbing marketing. But when it comes to the creative work, courage often fails, and they seek into the middle of the flock.

The well-known flock mentality of sheep, where a sheep instinctively feels safer in the middle of the flock rather than on the edge, where it is more exposed to attack, is also thriving in the executive hallways. Many business leaders end up pushing the creative brand and marketing work towards copying the most competent competitors. Added with an insignificant twist. We are all looking for the answer sheet that can minimize the risk of failure, being misunderstood or ridiculed. But it does not exist. It is both natural and very understandable when you as a business leader seek away from the unknown and uncertain. It is a noticeably big responsibility that one has towards shareholders and employees.

A burden and responsibility that can be difficult to understand if you have not experienced it yourself. Unfortunately, it becomes like leaning back in the ski boot when the slope gets too steep. You do it instinctively to slow down. But the sure consequence is a fall. In the same way, the consequence of caution in the brand and marketing work is the lack of differentiation of the company’s brand and a weaker foundation for creating business growth.

 

 

Cautious can’t create effective marketing
You need to flee the flock if you are to secure the breakthrough to the unique and strong brand that can make a big business difference. Customers do not have a chance to discover, remember, become a fan, follow, like, buy and recommend your brand to other potential customers if your brand is like all the other ordinary brands or is a poor, dependent and untrustworthy copy of the best brands. If your brand tiptoes around in the middle of the flock – as most brands do – then your marketing is certainly just as fear-driven and ordinary as the brand is uniform.

  • Cautious cannot create marketing that builds a unique and strong brand.
  • Cautious goes with the marketing that is safe, neat, clean, and proper.
  • Cautious creates product-focused – and slightly self-satisfied – marketing without any extraordinary message.
  • Cautious primarily orients itself towards strategies, ideas, and concepts that are easy to explain and understand without too much abstraction. But also, without too much potential.
  • Cautious only initiates marketing that is financially manageable within the far too limited budget.
  • Cautious creates marketing plans where the marketing is easy to develop and produce on a tight schedule, for the most important thing is to be able to tick off what has been agreed upon.
  • Cautious executes marketing that has a high quality on the visual surface but is impotent.

Therefore, a completely different marketing brief is needed if you are to get a return on your marketing budget:

  • What is the ‘purpose’, clear distinction, and strong ‘truth proposition’ that you build your marketing around?
  • What are you fighting for, and what ‘war’ are you waging against? Naturally for the benefit of customers, employees, and society.
  • If you want fans, you must also accept that you can get some significant opponents.
  • How do you challenge market conventions and cultural norms in your marketing to establish a relevant debate?
  • What are you trying to do that has not been seen before?

The new. The entertaining. The provocative. The inspiring. The slightly eye-scratching. The stop effect is the obvious logical first necessary step to creating marketing that customers, employees and the outside world relate to.

  • Are you brave, or are you scared?
  • Do you first think of capturing attention, or do you primarily think of avoiding problems and opposition?
  • Does the marketing create value beyond communicating your messages?
  • Is it a campaign or a platform that customers can engage in and mirror themselves in?

It is the prerequisite for creating the ‘community’ that all companies dream of establishing. The ‘safe’ is simply the most insecure and ineffective approach one can take to marketing if one wants to build a unique and attractive brand.