Branding for Results - Part I

May 03, 2011

While many people seem to focus on building brands externally, based on advertising, my philosophy to branding for results is that it must acquire market share and sales.

To achieve this is never easy,

• first of all many advertising companies dislike the pressure of associating their campaigns with sales,
• the second more difficult component is how to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and show the correlation to sales.

While most marketing gurus talk about the external in terms of branding, companies need to associate their brand campaigns to sales and measure ROIs in terms of sales generated. I do not advocate doing away with publicity or advertising altogether, but advocate that the advertising campaign must be strategic and must have a clear return on investment.

The old days of advertising through press ads, TV commercials and other forms of advertising just because everybody did it is no longer applicable in today’s competitive environment.

One of the ways to get a clear Return on Investment (ROI) is to link the campaigns that you are going to run to some sort of behavioral action that can give you the sale or set you up for it.

Just to highlight an example on branding for results, when I handled marketing and advertising for Osram in Malaysia, we always came up with advertising that took into account the way the industry was set up and also the psyche of the consumer. While we were working on a limited budget for advertising, the company wanted to increase market share aggressively.

The first Press Ad we did sold 50 000 energy saving light bulbs, because we got major re-sellers excited by working a campaign with them. We told them if they ordered a certain quantity of light bulbs we would put their company names and phone numbers on our full page advertisement to help them generate publicity for themselves, this even though they were carrying competitor brands. These companies responded bought a big quantity of bulbs from Osram which they subsequently pushed to shops and this eventually went to the consumer.