Move the Metrics that Drive Brand Growth
Learn how marketers can create integrated campaigns that balance short-term sales activation with long-term brand building.
CONTENTS
Marketers are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their strategy delivers results through strong return on investment (ROI) and a tangible contribution to growth. However, in the pursuit of profitability and key performance indicators (KPI), too many brands take a short-term view of marketing—which can come at the cost of long-term brand building. And while these brands may demonstrate results in the short term, they could optimize for long-term success—by focusing on building brand, as well as driving sales.
Studies show that brands with strong equity tend to be more profitable over the long term. According to one 2018 study,1 the world’s strongest brands collectively grew their brand value by 21%, nearly $750 billion. From 2006–2018, powerful brands analyzed for the study grew by 172%—a significantly higher rate than the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (S&P 500), which grew 102%—demonstrating that investing in brands delivers long-term profitability.
Define your goals
Despite the proven correlation between brands with strong equity and better financial performance, marketers sometimes prioritize other areas above brand building—but failing to invest in long-term brand building can be costly. According to a 2018 Deloitte study of marketers in Australia,2 businesses whose brands stagnated over the previous year typically saw their revenues fall by an average of 13% over this period. Put simply, for a business with annual revenue of $1 billion, this represents as much as a $130 million decline in revenue.
The challenge for marketers is to balance short-term returns with long-term brand growth. The key is being very clear about the objective for each campaign—whether short-term sales or long-term brand building—and monitoring the effectiveness of the campaign in achieving that goal. Ultimately marketers want to know if their investment is supporting their objectives and optimizing their campaigns to drive the most impact. Here’s how marketers balance short-term sales activation with long-term brand building.
Adjust for changing consumer media habits
The way to achieve both short- and long-term objectives via digital media comes through a deep understanding of how consumer media habits are evolving. Traditionally, marketers have focused media spend in places that can secure broad reach, such as TV.
However, in the last decade, patterns of media consumption behavior have changed remarkably, and continue to do so. Today, people are clearly spending vast amounts of time on their mobile devices. In fact, in the Asia-Pacific region, time spent on mobile devices (2.7 hours per day) has surpassed traditional TV viewing (1.4 hours per day). The shift to mobile is particularly pronounced in Southeast Asian markets like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, where people spend 3.9, 3.7 and 3.4 hours, respectively, on their devices.3
Even among TV-viewing audiences, many are engaging with other devices, such as tablets and mobile phones. In fact, an eye-tracking study in Indonesia found that over half of the audience paid no attention to the TV ad and only 18% viewed the ad all the way through.4
TV ADS CAN STRUGGLE TO HOLD OUR ATTENTION
Attention erosion of a 15-second ad spot in Indonesia
Leveraging this insight to inform media planning is a critical element for marketers to succeed whether their objective is short-term sales, or long-term brand-building.
Build for long-term success
Digital media is well established as a channel for driving short-term sales—people see an ad and respond to it immediately by downloading the app, for example, or visiting the website or contacting the advertiser. This reassures advertisers that their digital campaign works and that they’re delivering ROI.
However, digital campaigns contribute to long-term brand goals, too, helping brands build connections with people and strong recall, so the brand immediately comes to mind when shopping.
To understand a campaign’s role in brand building, advertisers need to measure lead indicators such as awareness, consideration and association. These may not have an impact on sales immediately, but they drive growth and loyalty over time. To build campaigns for long-term success, effective brand marketers allocate media budgets wisely. A good place to start is by understanding how each medium contributes to brand metrics—which media drive brand metrics most efficiently—and the role creative plays.
Marketers need to consider a channel’s reach and impact in conjunction with spend to ensure that they are striking the right balance. In a Kantar Millward Brown study of campaign media effectiveness in Southeast Asia, we found that campaigns relying too heavily on a single medium were less effective overall, while those with a more varied distribution of investment delivered better results.5 Advertisers in Southeast Asia have an opportunity to build more balanced media plans across multiple touchpoints.
For example, among the campaigns that achieved a greater lift in brand awareness, results showed that TV and digital channels were the most significant drivers, contributing evenly to impact. But despite similar overall contribution to brand awareness, digital media was 3x more successful at delivering this impact compared to TV. In addition, campaigns with a very high TV investment were 2.4x less effective at delivering impact than those with a more balanced media mix. The findings were similar for other key brand metrics, such as consideration and association.
While current media planning uses TV as the top medium for reaching mass audiences, our study shows that synergies exist between all channels—and that certain combinations drive stronger results. TV and Facebook together demonstrate stronger overall impact, including changes in attitude that wouldn’t have happened with exposure to the message on individual media only.
Boost sales with digital media
Digital ads have already shown to add incremental reach to TV campaigns, but it’s harder to measure whether they can drive offline business outcomes like sales.
A joint study by Nielsen and Facebook found that digital campaigns drove a higher proportion of value to the proportion of spend than other media for the campaigns studied. The study conducted in Latin American and Asia-Pacific regions of 2016–2017 campaigns showed that digital marketing contributed 28% of sales, with Facebook driving higher ROI than other channels for these campaigns.6
IDENTIFY THE MOST EFFECTIVE MEDIA FOR DRIVING GROWTH
In this study, Facebook delivered higher ROI than any other media evaluated.
Total Media spend: $92m
Media sales
In a separate cross-media study conducted using Nielsen’s Total Advertising Ratings (TAR) applied to 10 advertising campaigns in South Korea,7 we found that Facebook provided an average 19% incremental reach to TV advertising by accessing audiences difficult to reach by TV alone, such as light TV viewers or younger audiences. In other words, brands that added Facebook ads to their TV campaigns connected with an average of 3 million more people than those with TV ads only.8
Beyond this, to reach full campaign potential, marketers need to ensure they’re planning the right level of frequency for their ad campaigns to stick. According to the first Nielsen study,9 ad frequency remained too low to drive visible impact. For 40% of brands, Facebook execution was too low to break through, and was below the optimal range for 60% of brands. Having this kind of insight empowers marketers to review their media investments to ensure that they have the optimal investment across each channel—this has the potential to deliver greater impact, at reduced cost.
DRIVE SUFFICIENT SPEND TO MAXIMIZE ROI
What it means for marketers
Build measurement systems that empower your marketing decisions.
Whether the goals are brand building, generating sales or both, an effective measurement system provides an early indication of progress toward those goals, allowing marketers to adjust accordingly and ensure that their digital marketing is delivering the desired impact.
Plan for changing consumer media habits.
Use insights into consumer media behavior to inform media planning. Balance investment choices across media to drive effectiveness and impact for both sales and brand outcomes. Try and test cross-platform targeting among different audiences to increase a campaign’s success.
Embrace a test-and-learn mindset.
Evaluate the metrics used for measurement and adjust them to ensure accuracy for real goals, whether sales or brand-oriented. Measurement through gold-standard methodologies like incrementality can provide a glimpse of the true value of different touchpoints in the advertising funnel. Learn how other advertisers are embracing this philosophy in “Unlock Business Growth With Incrementality Measurement.”
