How Long it Takes to See the Business Impact of Brand Building

6 months is all it takes.

If I knew the most important transition in the life of Chubbies would only take 6 months, we would not have waited the better part of a decade to do it. Needless to say, the road to a 9 figure exit would have been infinitely less painful.


** First, a tale of two me’s… **


1. (before) Sad and confused me:

“I can’t invest in brand building because it takes too long to pay off”


2. (after) Slightly more enlightened me:

“Holy sh*t, 6 months is all it took to see how the resilient baseline of revenue driven by brand building can surpass the short term temporary revenue peak driven by 100% focus on conversion-driving direct-response marketing. Why the hell did we wait so long to get off the direct response crack pipe!?!”

…

While the image is simply an illustration to demonstrate an idea, it provides a visual for ideas I had been unable to clearly articulate for a long time.

Without further ado, here's:

1) Three things I learned about the transition
2) Three questions you can ask yourself and your exec team as you consider what’s right for your company
3) Three things you can do about this right now.


let's do it.


** Three things I learned about the transition

1. 6 months is not long at all. May 14, 2023 was 6 months ago. That was basically yesterday in the life of a consumer brand.

2. It’s not about a 100% shift out of direct response conversion investments into strictly brand investments. It is an evolution - an evolution you can more confidently begin now that you know how long it takes.

3. Les Binet and Peter Field (the GOATs in this area) advocate a 60/40 split in favor of brand building as the optimal marketing investment mix (we were 95/5 in favor of sales conversion for an embarrassingly long time)


Three questions you can ask yourself and your exec team as you consider what’s right for your company

1. If you could start seeing elevated resilient baselines of revenue by May 2024, would that change your perspective around starting to more confidently invest in brand building?

2. Would you prefer a short term temporary pop in revenue if you knew you were getting no increase in baseline revenue?

3. What percentage of your new customer revenue came from unpaid traffic sources (how the results of brand building will show up in google analytics) the last 30 days? How does it compare to 1 and 2 years ago? Are we happy with that answer?


Three things you can do about it right now **

1. Send the image on this post to your team. Get their thoughts. Let’s say, for a moment, this illustration was true. Decide what you’d do differently with this info (if anything)

2. Read the blog post I link to in the comments. It has 13 of the most useful diagrams / visuals that will not only help you think through how to balance conversion efforts with brand building, but a path for how to think about measuring it

3. I only have two things

enjoy
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Thanks for reading. If this post was helpful, here are 4 things you can do right now to 

• Get more strategic + tactical nuggets on brand building, 

• Tactics on connecting brand building to financial impact, 

• And specific things you can do to build strong emotional connections with your audience: 

1) Subscribe to the Brand Builders podcast on YouTube or Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 
2) Apply to join our brand builders slack community (suuuuper small group exclusively for brand founders and operators), 
3) Follow Tom and Preston on Linkedin for regular posts on this stuff
4) And heck, share this with someone