The Most Important Thing in Brand Building: Choose the Right KPI

At Chubbies we went “viral” many times.

In fact in one year, Chubbies was one of the top 10 most-watched brands on the Internet.

We identified a recipe for maximizing our view count from a content perspective, and we pursued that relentlessly and single-mindedly. And by hacking in that direction (and failing quite a bit, I might add) we started to see a higher and higher hit rate of “viral” content.

You’ll notice, though, that’s not what Chubbies is doing today.

We aren’t pursuing “virality”. We are no longer aggressively maximizing our views for the sake of maximizing views.

Because what we learned as we went down that path, and as we got more and more specific about how we measured the impact of our content and our marketing, was that we actually wanted to do something quite different.

We didn’t want a fleeting interaction with a piece of content that could’ve come from anywhere.

We wanted our viewers, and our potential customers to really understand who Chubbies is, what we care about, and to leave with an emotional connection to our brand.

And in the content world, often times even mentioning that you are, in fact, a brand is enough to fully stop virality in its tracks.

“Advertising“ - and customers are extremely intelligent about smoking out advertising masquerading as content - is simply extremely difficult to get to any sort of virality. And the reality is that Branded content - where you must leave the customer with a deep emotional connection to your brand - looks like, walks like, and talks like advertising much more than it does social, or meme-y content.

And that’s OK.

What we realized Chubbies was that it wasn’t virality that grew our brand. It was something else.

We formulated different KPI‘s for our content performance, and, as we architected our content and our marketing towards those KPI‘s our virality actually went down.

And while our ability to create content that would organically shoot up to millions of views declined, our ability to build Brand in a monetizable way went up.

So for any brand builders out there working to build an emotional connection with an audience, no matter the size, don’t get distracted by the shiny KPIs other folks are using or that the social platforms are endorsing.

Instead, keep a fully open mind and an analytical framework to find out what it takes to truly grow your Brand with a capital B. What you find might surprise you.
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