Marketing has a positioning problem

Marketing is one term, but this gets applied to 2 different jobs. Brand marketing and performance marketing.

Brand marketing is building awareness and consideration in your future buyers.

Performance marketing is capturing the sale with in-market buyers.

Brand marketing is like the lifter in a rugby lineout. Performance marketing is the player being lifted. Different jobs. And without being lifted, your performance player is only going to catch the balls not being contested.

So lumping them together makes little sense. Businesses don’t treat warehousing and distribution as one job. They’re both part of logistics, but are recognised as separate areas of activity. Why don’t we recognise the separate areas of activity in marketing - brand and performance?

Marketing has a positioning problem because marketers have forsaken brand marketing for the alluring but shallow beauty of performance marketing.

They’ve lost sight of the heavy lifting brand marketing does and fallen for the seductive appeal of last-click attribution (which conveniently ignores the impact of other touchpoints in the customer journey).

This has been fuelled by digital agencies as they propagate the benefits of targeted marketing (while also conveniently ignoring the impact of all the other touchpoints in the customer journey).

The solution is to have two categories in the marketing budget with distinct activities and KPIs.
- Generate future demand (brand awareness and consideration)
- Capture current demand (conversion)

This would make sense to a CFO. With the added benefit of when they want to cut your marketing budget, they can easily understand what they’re giving up.

This isn’t rocket science, but our tendency is to complicate the simple, to add not subtract. Common sense is often less common than we sense….