The Four Phases of Brand Building We All Go Through

On the road to the IPO, Chubbies went through 4 phases of figuring out how the heck to build our brand in a way that measurably tied to financial results, enabling us to confidently invest meaningful portions of our marketing budgets toward it. Here are the phases, and how you can jump straight to phase 4.


>> Phase 1: "We don't need to do brand building because we're performance marketing extraordinaires!" <<

> How we operated: 95% of our budgets were allocated to direct response. 5% to 'brand'. Brand budget first thing to get cut. It was a nice to have.

> When it became painfully obvious this was not working: Customer acquisition costs kept rising. Owned and organic new customer revenue was going down AND becoming a smaller and smaller portion of total new customer revenue.


>> Phase 2: "We gotta try this brand building stuff, so we'll just wing it" <<

> How we operated: Make more content that isn't evaluated by how it drives purchases in a 7 day last click attribution window. No aligned upon objective measure of success.

> When it became painfully obvious this was not working: One person would say a piece of content was the best ever, and another person on the team would say that same piece of content was horrible. Not having a metric made it impossible to quantify financial impact. Result: complete inability to justify any investment in brand building. Stuck at 5%.


>> Phase 3: "Well THAT didn't work. We have to choose a metric as an aligned-upon measure of success or failure" <<

> How we operated: We were not trained marketers, so we didn't know much about this brand stuff. We'd heard of 'brand awareness' as a measure of strengthening brand. We thought the way to grow awareness was to get lots of video views. So that's what we did. We also heard we had to commit to it for a long time. So we did. For a year, we focused on getting views. We were one of the worlds top 10 most viewed brands.

> When it became painfully obvious this was not working: When we did the retro on the financial impact, we realized there was none. We were...bummed. Paid channels were still comprising the vast majority of new customer revenue.

We didn't have a choice so we had to keep trying


>> Phase 4: "Well shoot, THAT didn't work either. We have to choose the right metric that measurably tied to financial results, enabling us to confidently invest meaningful portions of our marketing budgets toward it." <<

> How we operated: We realized much more thought, and most importantly, data science needed to be applied before we selected the metric. We needed historical validation that moving a particular metric quantifiably drove incremental owned and organic revenue. That's the manifestation of a strengthening brand

...


To jump straight to phase 4, align the team, investors, etc on how you're going to approach brand building.

Simply put, owned and organic new customer acquisition growth will be the output.

Focus the org on that and you'll be golden.
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