Brand Marketing: Overhyped or Overlooked?
When building a great product, it is easy to lose sight of all things marketing. Technical founders and their teams often have laser-focus on building the best possible products - as they should. That said, at a certain point of product development and company growth, marketing becomes essential to raise awareness and scale revenues.
In bringing marketing efforts up to speed, it is essential to build strong foundations. One foundational element that is easy to overlook is branding. HubSpot defines a brand as the identity and story of a company that makes it stand out from competitors that sell similar products or services.
Branding is about more than logo graphics, fonts, colors, and slogans (although those are all important). In this blog, we’ll talk about what all a brand entails and why having a strong brand identity is important for every B2B technology vendor.
Branding is an Investment
In the race to build and iterate leading products, marketing sometimes is approached in a reactive way. Messaging, positioning, and marketing channel strategies are created on the fly with the hope that everything will fall into place. Branding sometimes becomes an afterthought, set aside as superfluous and unimpactful.
This isn’t a problem limited to smaller and more upstart companies. According to Boston Consulting Group (BCG), nearly one-quarter of companies surveyed devote less than 20% of their marketing budget to brand. Les Binet and Peter Field famously and controversially recommended that 60% of marketing spend be allocated to longer-term brand building activities versus 40% to shorter-term sales enablement. Per BCG, Only 30% devote half or more of their marketing budget to branding.
In reality, budget allocation for branding is more complicated and specific to your company and product than any broad-ranging report could portray. However, given the data, it is not unreasonable to conclude that many organizations are underinvesting in brand.
Why is branding so important?
No matter what your organization sells or who it serves, branding is a foundational element of marketing, but why?
Branding creates awareness. There are so many things competing for your target market’s attention. A good brand helps your company be sticky in the minds of customers. Think of the world’s most iconic brands. McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Google immediately come to mind for me. Whenever I see one of their respective logos, I am immediately reminded of what each brand brings to customers and society at large.
This should be the vision of any branding effort - to have your brand instantly recognized and your brand story triggered upon recognition. While you probably don’t need to aim for the level of recognition of these global behemoths, you do want to achieve a level of relative ubiquity for the market space you occupy. And of course, awareness is what gets prospective customers into your funnel. Brand stickiness can help them move through it.
Branding fosters emotional connection. The value of branding doesn’t end at customer acquisition. A strong brand, buoyed by great products and outstanding support, can give customers the feeling of belonging to an exclusive club and reinforce their loyalty. More importantly, strong branding builds trust in your offerings.
Everything your brand stands for should reinforce these feelings. According to Abigail Ramlogan, Senior Brand Manager at NetBrain Technologies, “A product is tangible. A brand is emotional.” She adds, “Products compete. Brands connect. This shifts the conversation from a technical comparison to a cultural alignment.”
Branding’s ability to create differentiation on the emotional level is particularly valuable in markets and segments that are crowded, mature, and/or face commoditization risks.
Branding is a North Star. A tech company’s mission and values should be guiding all aspects of its operations, including its brand marketing. A well-developed brand should be an external representation of those values. It signals to the market what your company stands for (extending beyond products and services) and should serve as an internal reminder for employees to live your company’s values every day.
What does a brand entail?
Visual identity. This refers to logos, imagery, fonts, colors and visual elements of a brand. Brand creators choose these elements very carefully to reflect the company’s values, personality, and emotional connection they are trying to make with customers and prospective users.
Brand story. A well-developed brand typically has some type of folklore embedded into it. Think of Microsoft being started in a garage or Coca-Cola’s pharmaceutical origins. The broader historical, geographical, and political backdrop can play a major role in the brand story. Founding stories are layered with the founders’ personalities, customer stories, and cultural impact. However, a brand story must be supported by brand values to stand the test of time.
Brand values. According to The Branding Journal, brand values can be defined as the foundational beliefs that a company stands for. Ideally, these values not only guide all marketing efforts, but are also represented throughout every department. Brand values range from broad and abstract to detailed and esoteric. Here are some examples of values from each category:
Broad values
Honesty
Transparency
Joyfulness
Specific Values
Environmental conservation
Commitment to technical training for underserved communities
Promoting access to affordable travel opportunities
Essentially, broad values are broadly applicable across companies and markets. Specific values tend to have a more direct connection to a product, industry, geography, or founder interest, among other things.
How do I create and sustain a brand?
If you’re building a new company or looking to strengthen the brand identity of an established company or product, consider doing the following:
Undergo or lead a meaning map exercise. Meaning maps (also known as associative networks or brand concept maps) are a psychology-based approach to visually showing how different concepts are connected. In brand marketing, meaning maps are used in brainstorming sessions to plot all the associations that users and the general public make to a brand. These exercises can be done internally, with customer advisory groups, external consultants, or focus groups.
Capture Voice of the Customer. Regardless of whether you’re building a brand from scratch or bringing an established company’s brand up to speed, user voice matters. A brand shouldn’t represent an internal echo chamber. It is a living manifestation that should represent everyone who touches your company. Capturing customer voice validates your brand values and ensures that real experiences with your company are taken into account.
Be intentional. Branding can’t live in a silo with one person or just be part of a document that rarely gets referenced. Brand values must actively be modeled from the CEO down. Without coming across as “brand robots”, leaders across departments need to model brand values. Internal documentation, messaging, and naming conventions should always fall within brand guidelines.
Most of all, to be successful in having a “brand mentality” throughout the organization, employee experience has to be part and parcel of the brand. Employees and customers are both quick to detect the disconnect between a high-minded vision and mission and a suboptimal employee experience.
Conduct annual brand audits. A brand is a living concept, and should evolve with the times. To ensure your brand stays fresh, perform periodic brand audits. This rigorous process assesses all the different components of your branding, highlighting areas of improvement and new opportunities.
Don’t Know Where to Start?
If you’re new to building a brand, documentation is your friend. As you determine your brand imagery, color palette, typography, values, meaning map, and other brand elements, be sure to capture these in a living document. Building a brand is a major effort - and it is natural for it to feel overwhelming.
Greenefield recommends starting with your customers. Collecting user and analyst insights are great ways to understand how your brand is perceived and uncover hidden opportunities. User stories also reveal what customers associate with your brand, opening the door to connections that can lead to creating more resonant brand messaging, imagery, and storytelling.
Depending on your organization’s needs, enlisting an outside agency can help guide the brand process or build the elements that are more difficult to create in-house.
All said, the effort is worth it. While some facets of branding’s ROI are difficult to measure, strong brands are often associated with positive quantifiable outcomes in sales volume, customer satisfaction, and customer willingness-to-pay.
Need help articulating brand values or understanding the competitive landscape around your brand? Greenefield Consulting can help clarify your message and strengthen your brand foundation. Let’s start the conversation!
