Can marketing actually save brands that are failing?” Why is having a “core belief” critical in brand building? Get the answers to these questions and more as our CEO Carolyn Walker grabs a chair with Jane Singer on her A Seat at the Table Podcast.
Here’s a link to the episode, “How to Build a Brand that Consumers Can Relate To” and the full transcript is below.
Jane Singer:
Everyone talks about brands these days, building brands, brand identity, brand mission, but few people actually know how to successfully build a brand, any brand. The value of establishing a strong brand is indisputable. Even in tough times, companies with power brands or even just strong brand recognition within one sector outperform the market. Apple, LVMH, Google, Tesla, Alibaba, Amazon and other mega brands are proof of concept. Established brands are better positioned to ride the economic peaks and troughs that often crush near competitors. While understanding why we need to invest in brand building is easy, figuring out how to do it is a bit more complicated.
Meet Carolyn Walker, CEO and managing partner of response, an award-winning independent marketing agency that has helped market leaders such as Logitech, McAffee, office Depot, and Tylenol, build revenues and maximize market competitiveness. I’m Jane Singer and welcome back to A Seat at The Table where we expand our vision of the opportunities and possibilities in today’s fast moving global business world by speaking with the people who are making things happen. Today, Carolyn will be sharing her expertise on why brands need both brand building and performance marketing to ensure their survival, the critical role of core belief in brand building and whether marketing can actually save brands that are failing.
The strongest brands typically have strong leadership managing teams and guiding the company through the ongoing highs and lows that every business faces. Recruiting those leaders is a lot easier said than done. Finding the best talent is the skill that takes years to hone. So most companies work with an executive search firm like Asianet Consultants to help identify the best candidates. It’s really amazing at how game changing, having decades of experience and a massive network of professional candidates can be when you’re trying to find people with highly specialized skills or precise experience.
I’ve seen Asia.net fill search assignments that I figured would be impossible to fill, but I guess that’s the benefit of having a top-notch team that’s truly connected to the market. They know a lot of the non-obvious candidates, those hidden gems that most other companies overlook. You can learn more about Asianet Consultants at their website, asianetconsultants.com. I’ll drop a link in the show notes for this episode. Meanwhile, let’s talk with Carolyn about what we can do to build stronger brands.
Carolyn, I am so happy to have you here on A Seat at The Table. I think it’s really interesting what you’re talking about with regard to branding because I think there’s a lot of confusion around that. Of course, you have big corporates, they understand branding and marketing, but you have a lot of smaller companies, whether they be SMEs or entrepreneurial operations, even solopreneurs who absolutely don’t understand how marketing works and how branding works. They think it’s a logo and a name, and they really go deep on getting that logo colors and they think, okay, well that’s my brand. So I think that what you’re talking about, it is important insights to bring to listeners of this podcast.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. Well, I’m glad you bring the topic up because I’m super passionate about it and I couldn’t agree with you more. I think people maybe undervalue a brand because they don’t totally understand it, and like you said, I think a lot of smaller companies, SMBs are or look at brand as how they’re manifesting themselves in their logo, their tagline, maybe their website, things like that. But in fact, it is so much more than that.
Brand is about and reflected in every single interaction that you have with a customer.
It’s every single touchpoint, and it’s way more than just your logo and your tagline and your site. It really is about your purpose and not just your purpose, but how is my purpose and our values and our mission and vision reflected in how we’re communicating to our audience?
And ultimately, it’s not what we think it is. You as the owner or the marketer, it’s not what we think it is. Ultimately, it is what your customers think that it is. And that perception of your brand is based on their experiences with the brand. So what can we do as brand people, marketers, owners to influence that perception of the brand? And it is all of those things. I mean, certainly logo and colors and all that have something to do with it, but like I said, it really is about every single interaction, every touch point. What are we saying? What are we communicating to our audience and what experience are we giving them? So it is really much, much more than just a logo.
Jane Singer:
Yeah, absolutely. And that can be very, very difficult, particularly for companies that are smaller and don’t have dedicated people in a hierarchy of teams and departments to execute on all of that. So I think that if we looked at what you talk about here, and you mentioned the importance of core belief in brand building, can you explain a little bit about what you mean by that?
Carolyn Walker:
Sure. And I’d be happy to also recommend to anyone to listen to Simon Sinek’s TED talk about this very topic, and he’s got the Golden Circle topic that he talks about and basically your core belief. And by the way, it’s not just Simon Sinek that talks about it. A lot of people talk about it in different ways. One of the best brand strategists I think on the planet is David Aaker, and he wrote a book called Building Strong Brands. He wrote many books, but one of them is Building Strong Brands. And in that book he talks about what’s the core of the brand, and that’s exactly what Simon Sinek is talking about too, which is as a company, as an inventor of something, as an entrepreneur, whatever, you can very easily talk about what you do. That’s on the outside of the circle, what you do.
The inner part of the circle, the next inner part of the circle is how you do it, what are your processes in place, how do you deliver, what are the channels you go to the market, how you do it, and then at the very center is why you do it. And most businesses, I would say, have a difficult time answering that question. Really, why are you motivated to have this product in the market? And it’s not just the financial side. I mean, a lot of people will just say that, “Well, I’m here to make a profit, I’m here to hit a sales goal,” something like that. But that really isn’t The why is that core belief, and I can give you some examples because it’ll probably help people understand it.
For Nike, for example, Nike’s core belief is that they believe in honoring great athletes and great athletics. And what I say about that core belief is could they make a subpar shoe or athletic wear with that core belief? No, I don’t think so. Airbnb’s core belief is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, and so could they match up hosts and travelers without that core belief? I would argue no. So the belief really is that guiding light, that direction that gives purpose to you and your brand.
And what Simon Sinek says, which I really do believe, is that people don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. They want to be connected to your brands in an emotional way. And that core purpose, that core belief allows you to do that.
Jane Singer:
I think that’s really interesting. And you’re right, it’s an interesting way to frame it to first put your mission first. And I particularly like what Nike’s done. Of course, Nike’s a massive company and they can afford the best of the best working on it. But I suppose that even smaller companies, if you make an effort and continually over time try to refine, it could get to something that is almost as on point as Nike. And it’s something that’s simple to understand. You say they honor great athletes, so it’s one sentence and it’s easy to understand. I think oftentimes what I see with companies is they have a mission statement or a purpose, whatever you want to call it, and it is just so massive and so vague. How do you see that?
Carolyn Walker:
I agree with you, and I think that there is the tendency to conflate mission, vision, values, and purpose. They are very different things. And we believe that the best mission, vision, values, purpose or core belief statements that are out there are very simple. There’s a great line. And I think maybe Steve Jobs said it, I think it said something like, “Complexity is impressive, simplicity is genius.” And I think that applies to writing those lines. The more simplistic, I think the more powerful it is, the more easy it is to understand and the more that everyone can adopt it, especially within the organization as well, you want everyone to live that.
Jane Singer:
Yeah. I think that’s absolutely true, and I like that quote that you’ve attributed to Steve Jobs because so often people get caught up in trying to make things overly complicated, too fancy, and yeah, it’s actually less actionable and it’s less easy for people to understand. And yet as you’re pointing out, it’s very difficult to make something simple.
Carolyn Walker:
Most definitely. I think it’s harder to make things simple than it’s to make them complex. It’s easy to add words and add complexity of the things. You really have to peel back the onion, I believe, when you’re thinking about your brand and get to those few words that really describe it very well in terms of those things, mission, vision, values and purpose or core belief. Yeah. And like I said, I think the shorter, the simpler, the easier to understand, the more widely adopted it is, the easier it is to execute on, by the way too.
The other thing I’d mentioned too, we had talked about Nike, and they do have a great team and a big team, and they’re a huge company and brand, but I think the learning from what they’ve done so successfully on the brand side is they’ve really invested in brand way more than performance marketing. And what I mean by that is when you look at Nike’s advertising, they’re not talking about the features of the shoe. These have air soles and Reeboks don’t have air soles, or they’re not talking about those things. It’s not about the engineering of the shoe and the mechanics of the shoe. And it’s not that. Even the look of the shoe, what they advertise is the feeling that you get when you have Nike’s. And it really does honor athletes. And by the way, their definition of athlete is anyone who’s breathing, they think everyone’s an athlete, and of course you are. If you get up and you walk, it’s like they really want to inspire every person on the planet to bring out their inner athlete.
So it’s a very powerful thing, and I think so many brands and companies get pulled down the path of what’s the feature that’s going to get my customer to buy my product over another? What’s the offer in terms of price that I need to be at in order to get them to buy? And in reality is yes, that stuff works. And certainly in the age of digital where we have tracking and measurement that goes all the way through, it’s very easy to say, “I’m going to take my whole budget and put it into digital because we can track these things and we know that we invest this much and we get this many sales.”
But many, many companies, and it’s a big, big topic right now have done that.
And what’s happened over time as the long-term starts to come into effect, you’ve taken your eye off of branding and building brand and just putting it on performance and the brand actually over time the base brand is declining because you’re really just targeting people who are in market for your product or service today and not worried about the people who are out of market who maybe know nothing about your brand.
But again, I just feel like Nike’s a really good example of looking at that and how to do brand marketing really well.
Jane Singer:
Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right, and their performance over a very long period of time in a very competitive market has proven that. I like the fact that you bring up the fact that more and more people are turning to digital marketing because you have that visibility. And in a sense, you could say it’s a false sense of visibility because people, in my opinion, mistake views and likes with actual engagement or even caring about the product because I don’t know, mean me too. I randomly scroll through stuff and we’ll give this a like, or if it’s someone I know or something like that, even if it’s not really related to what I do, it’s like okay, well, give it a like. It doesn’t really give you a clear indication of how someone is actually responding to your product.
And yet one of the biggest frustrations that marketers have with traditional marketing is you can’t really see what’s happening. It’s a leap of faith. You’re basically a farmer. You have to plant those seeds, you have to weed the garden, you have to fertilize the garden, you have to water the garden in the hopes that months later and sometimes with marketing years later, you’ll actually start to bear fruit. I mean, how do you help clients cross that mental bridge, so to speak?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. So we’re big believers of this whole topic and that there is a balance between brand marketing and performance marketing. And the best thing that we can do and we do with our clients is share with them the knowledge that we have in the research that is out there. I mean, there’s quite a bit of research out there. If you’ve seen anything by Les Binet and Peter Field, they’re considered the fathers of advertising effectiveness and they have researched this stuff. And it’s proven because you’re right, Jane, as a marketer or brand marketer, it is something that takes time. It’s not as immediate as having a digital ad out there with some offer that you’re getting people to click on and buy from. It is a much more long-term thing. But the studies have shown that when you commit to brand and you invest in brand, there is this additive effect.
So you’re building brand and your sales are going up because you’ve got brand, but then your performance marketing actually performs better because you’ve got brand marketing out there. It really is about the long-term and making sure that your brand endures for the long-term so that you’re in the consideration set. That your audience has awareness of you and maybe more than that brand salience with you as they’re out of market, so that when they’re in market, they opt to choose you because they know you and they know your reputation.
And I would say with brand marketing, it really is about building positive equity within the brand building, brand love, building brand salience and affinity. It really can affect current sales as well. So you may reach people because on the brand side, you’re trying to target as many people as you can. You want to be very broad. So you are going to get some people who are in market and see your brand communications and decide to buy as a result of brand, especially really good brand advertising. It really primes for future sales. Again, you’re reaching those people who are out of market and think about that. How many people really are in market for your product or service at any given time? From the research that I’ve seen, it’s pretty low. And there’s this new rule out, there’s the 95/5 rule that says maybe up to 95% of your audience is out of market at any given time. That means only 5% are in market. So you have to make sure you’re pushing on both pedals.
Brand advertising tends to be more emotional messaging, like we’re talking about the Nike example, it tends to use video more because it’s emotional. You can engage people more in video advertising. It’s super effective in terms of building such brand love and trust and affinity that you have less reliance on price. You don’t have to discount as much. If people love your brand, then you don’t have to say, okay, it’s now $2 off. I’m willing to pay in fact, for that brand. And in fact, when you have situations which many businesses are in now with supply chain challenges and prices going up on raw materials and things like that, customers who love you are going to say, “Okay. I understand that this is costing another 50 cents, and I don’t mind paying that because I want your brand. I love your brand.”
It also really makes your brand… It fortifies it versus your competitors because now you’re creating this really emotional attachment with your customer more than just a functional relationship. And your competitors may not have that. So now you’re keeping competitors at bay by having this brand marketing out there that’s building trust and love. And then the other thing I’d say about the power of brand marketing is that it starts to allow for category optionality, meaning that as the world change, which it does. Microsoft used to be all on floppy disks and now it’s all downloads, that kind of stuff I’m talking about. Microsoft’s brand was so strong that it meant software and whether that software was delivered on a floppy disc or in a digital download, it extends, it goes to a new category.
So it really in the longterm is the way to build equity and power and sales for your organization. And I think the challenge with that, as you had started to say Jane, is that it’s much, much more difficult to prove. So one of the things that lots of brand marketers out there are talking about now is the research, and the data is proving that it works. So you have to get people to take the leap with you, but also that brand ultimately should be or is one of the most valuable intangible assets on your balance sheet. So if you invest in brand, then that number should go up, and CFOs tend to listen to that when you thread the needle and say you’re investing in brand, sales will go up, the value of the business will go up because the brand is worth more. That’s the conversations you have to have and start have them thinking about and really getting them to think that it’s not an expense. Marketing and branding is not as an expense. It’s an investment that’s going to pay off at some point.
Jane Singer:
Yeah. I think that’s very true, and we can certainly see that major brands have massive value. It’s a little bit harder for companies that are not a Nike, an Apple, an Amazon, a Google, a Microsoft, Tesla, anything that’s so big that it’s very easy to quantify the value. So therefore a lot of people are not really sure what they’re getting. They can’t really see results. The results, as we all know, even if you have the best person on marketing, you have the top of the line, there’s a timeline for this to happen. It is not going to happen overnight. And that timeline without being able to see tangible results is too long for most people to hang in there for. Do you know what I’m saying?
I realize you have to be mentally very tough to be able to have the faith to keep doing what you’re doing, whether it be putting in a certain amount of work or putting in a certain amount of money without seeing results, but with the belief that down the road you will see something. I mean, how do you take people through that? What are some of the benchmarks they can see, or is it just you have to hang in there for… It takes more than a year to build a brand, so you have to be able to keep investing money and keep doing the work for let’s say probably a year to three years at least to be able to start to really gain some traction. How do you keep on track? I mean, especially when people are needing nowadays, as you pointed out.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. I don’t disagree with that, Jane. And here’s what I would say to that is first of all, I’m not saying that it’s one or the other.
It’s not just do brand marketing, just do performance marketing and nor am I saying that there’s no interaction between the two. Really, really good brand marketing has incredible impact on performance. Can be incredibly effective at building sales.
So while the KPIs are a little different for brand, the things you’re looking at are things like brand awareness and brand love and salience and all those things, are the attributes coming through, all of that. And by the way, we’ve done this work with some really small regional clients, one of which is Sikorsky Credit Union, and we went out there at the beginning and did a base level of research to find out what consumers thought about the brand and how strong the awareness was of the brand and things like that.
And then we put a brand campaign in the market, not just brand again, but you do that plus some performance marketing where you’re talking about in the case of the Credit Union, the rates on auto loans and the rates on mortgages and things like that. And all of that worked together. And then we went out a year later and did another brand study and guess what happened? All the brand metrics, it went up, awareness went up, brand love went up, all of this went up. So you do have to slug it out a little bit.
But again, we did some really strong brand advertising that people really gravitated to and started to really understand the brand and why choosing Sikorsky over maybe a traditional bank would be good for them. So it worked, the combination of having really strong, highly effective brand messaging out there with performance messaging works. So that’s what you really have to do. It’s not one or the other. It’s both. And committing to both at some levels and those levels might have to dial up and dial down based on the business.
Jane Singer:
Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right, and I’m glad you’ve explained that because for people who don’t come from marketing, it is really difficult. People start companies or they’re working with small companies where they’ve never really bothered with marketing or dare I say, advertising which people have now come to think is a waste of money. I don’t know why, but everything is turned to, well, you just need to post on social media and then seeing how much reaction you get there, which as we discussed earlier, is a bit random. And it’s difficult because people don’t know how to measure and they want to know if, and that makes sense because used to having KPIs in business to measure effectiveness and to know if we’re on track. So marketing, I mean advertising has always been somewhat of a leap of faith, but we can see that the best companies out there do marketing and advertising, and we haven’t seen anyone become massively successful without that.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. I mean, I’ll give you the case of Airbnb. I don’t know if you saw earlier this year in February, they announced that they had their strongest, most profitable quarter ever, the prior quarter. And what they did, the pandemic hit and it hit Airbnb just as hard as it hit everybody else. Of course everyone stopped traveling. So they said, “Okay. We got to rejigger our marketing and our advertising.” They slashed their budgets, their entire marketing budgets, they slashed the budgets, they took a huge portion out of performance, and I’m talking about SEM and social and things like that.
So the little budget they had, they primarily put it in brand building and what they consider brand building is PR, which I agree with. And they did a bunch of more… What am I trying to say? Broad advertising with broad reach vehicles like TV, and you probably saw some of their ads. And their ads are, they’re basically an emotional journey that shows these incredible places where people are staying. So it’s honoring the hosts because it’s their places that they’re giving and renting to these travelers for these amazing experiences, and it draws you in emotionally. So that’s a great example of they were so invested in performance and so into the digital world and last click attribution and how many people are coming to our site, they reduced their budget, they invested in brand, they’re getting more clicks to their site, and they had the most profitable quarter they ever had. So it’s an incredible testament to the power of doing it and having that right mix and balance.
Jane Singer:
Yes. I think that’s a really interesting case study because very few companies would’ve had the guts really to do that. Most people just go in for whatever they think is going to get them immediate clicks, which is basically marking down your price.
Carolyn Walker:
Exactly. And that’s a really dangerous thing to do, by the way. It’s a great way to go out of business by keeping reducing your price. So it’s a dangerous place to be. And I think anyone who is considering investing more in performance marketing has got to think about what those offers are. I would argue that in a case, like say… Actually Chipotle does it really well too. It’s not plate at a price. It’s not the 4.99 burrito. It is what’s the new thing for this season?
That’s the thing that’s going to get that frequency and that performance and people coming back to Chipotle, and they by the way, do a great job on the brand side too. Building affinity for their brand that they believe that food can change the world. Food is so powerful, can change the world, and they invest in the farmers and farm to table and all of that stuff and only have 52 ingredients that you can actually pronounce and all those things that they do really well on the brand side. And then they’re not saying they’re $4.99 chicken el pastor, they’re saying, “We have a new product that we make from the farmers bring to you,” and that’s the way they do it. So you have to be careful because performance marketing does have an impact on brand.
Jane Singer:
Absolutely. Now, just one last thing, and you talk about can marketing save brands that are failing. And too often people come to the marketing advertising table when they’re in dire straits. I mean, they should be doing it from the get-go and growing that as they grow other parts of their business. But as we all know, people tend to be in a hole and now they’re looking for a rescue and they think, “Well, maybe we will do some advertising or marketing”. How does that play out from your experience?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. Well listen, my quote is marketing is the amplifier not the savior. So there is something massively wrong with your business if it’s in that dire straits situation. And what I say about marketing is you have to have a great product or service. You better have the best of the best product or service that you’re working on. You need to have great operations or execution to execute on that great product or service. And then you layer on great marketing, and that’s when the home runs are made that the real true magic happens is when you have those two things.
So I would say, you can’t as an organization or a company or brand come to marketing and say, “Wave me if you haven’t looked at the internal like what’s the strategy? What’s the product? How are we executing on it first,” because it’s not going to save you. We’ve done it. You have great marketing, you bring people in, like say it’s a restaurant, you bring people into the restaurant and the experience is terrible. You can’t get them back. You did it all for nothing. You brought them in to have this terrible experience and you’re never going to get them again. So you have to have the basics right before you layer on marketing, and then you can amplify the effect of that great product, service and execution.
Jane Singer:
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it’s important for anyone who’s listening to this podcast and certainly anybody in industry at all to be thinking about marketing as a foundational part of their business. Marketing and advertising is something that must be part of your business, and at certain times, maybe to a greater percent of your budget or a lesser percent of your budget, but it’s not the thing that you add on when you have a little extra cash on hand. It has to be foundational, especially nowadays, it’s so competitive that if you’re not doing anything proactive. If you’re just posting stuff on social media and hoping that’s not going to get you very far from what I’m hearing you’re saying.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, absolutely. And listen, I talked a lot about advertising today, and it isn’t just advertising. I don’t want people to get the wrong impression. It’s not just advertising. You have to look at, like I said, every touchpoint that you have and what experience are you giving to your customer or your guest if you’re a retail organization or a restaurant. So there’s opportunity internally, so through the people that you hire and who are representing your brand, whether they’re customer service or they’re a server in a restaurant or a sous-chef in a restaurant, they need to understand your brand and be advocates and stewards of your brand. They have friends and they have family, and no guests. So they need to understand, and especially that why part of your brand, why do we exist, why? And they can then be empowered to make decisions about how to make that guest experience even better for you.
So there’s an internal piece. There’s paid advertising, social media, all that stuff. There’s earned in terms of public relations and getting things to go viral and things like that. So there’s multiple elements of the whole brand and marketing experience. And then of course, lastly, there’s the owned side. What does your website look like? What experience do you have? What does your retail location look like? What’s that experience like? And not to forget even the little things. In a restaurant, is your brand properly reflected in the restroom even? What’s that like? Or in a retail location where it’s clothing, what are your changing rooms look like? What’s that experience like? You have to look at every single touch point and every little detail. It’s important that it’s all reflected through because like I said at the very beginning, your brand is your customer’s experience. That’s their perception of you. So you can’t overlook anything. It’s every single piece.
Jane Singer:
Carolyn, thanks so much for joining us here on A Seat at The Table and for sharing so many great insights. I’m going to include your contact details in the show notes. I know so many people listening to this podcast are going to want to reach out to you with their own questions. So thanks again for joining us.
Carolyn Walker:
Okay. Well, thanks so much, Jane. This was fun.
Jane Singer:
Yeah. And thanks a lot for sharing.
