"Brand Building" sounds great in theory, but WHAT stuff should we do to actually build brand?

(Post Cyber Monday 1:1 betw CEO and VP Growth)

CEO: I feel like we're on a hamster wheel with performance marketing and efficiency that we need to get off of.

VP of Growth: but we just hit our highest ROAS (return on ad spend) on record!

CEO: But have you looked at our sources of new customer revenue in google analytics? Last year, 60% was from owned and organic, 40% from paid. This year, it's the opposite

VP Growth: What can we do about it? We need to be able to measure and justify the ROI of every dollar spent. At least that’s what you, the CFO and our board have been telling me

CEO: If that way of operating was correct, our organic new customer acquisition and our contribution (aka variable profit) dollars would be growing, but both of those metrics are down. We haven’t been building our brand.

VP Growth: What does that even mean?

CEO: the goal isn’t to get good at getting people to click on our ads. The goal is to get people to purchase from us without having to click on an ad in the first place

VP Growth: two months ago, we allocated budget to the brand campaign, but at the end, you told me that because the brand spend didn’t drive short term revenue as reported in meta, there was no way we could know whether or not we were ‘building brand’ or lighting money on fire

CEO: you’re right, this is a new way of operating where everyone is going to have to adapt

VP Growth: So are we just giving up on measuring our success? If we're doing to do less performance marketing, WHAT specifically will we allocate our budgets to?

CEO: ummmm

*end mtg*

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Here's how we approached figuring out WHAT to do:

The WHAT will be informed by the non revenue metric you choose to drive. The metric you choose will be driven by a calculation of which ones have the highest dollar value

An example: at Chubbies, we thought the metric that represented “strengthening our brand“ was video views

That became our metric

We got really good at going viral. however, we learned we chose the wrong metric. video views did not drive business

We then did an analysis of the dollar value of a bunch of metrics

Once we found the metric/s with the highest values (let's just say it's an insta follower) we could then prioritize and focus our resources on the specific metrics we wanted to increase.

from that, the WHAT was clear

You could also imagine the WHAT would be very different if the metric you were trying to increase was, for instance, video views, total media reach, or engaged sessions from branded search.

hope this helps.

thoughts?
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