Why Brand Building Is More Important Than Ever.

If you want the short answer, it’s official, science tells us that brand building is critical for long term profitability and growth and that emotive video creative is the best vehicle through which to build your brand equity in the minds of consumers. Here’s the evidence:

Earlier this month two of the world’s leading authorities on advertising effectiveness, Rob Brittain and Peter Field, and globally-acclaimed researcher in media science, Professor Karen Nelson-Field, launched a new major report on measuring advertising effectiveness, Australian Advertising Effectiveness Rules: To ESOV and Beyond.

Source: Why aren’t we doing this? How long term brand building drives profitablity. By Peter Field

The report further reinforces the importance of long term brand building and developing mental availability (the propensity of a brand to be noticed and/or thought of by consumers in buying situations), continuing Peter Field and Les Binet’s ongoing work into the ineffectiveness of too heavily favouring short term sales acquisition tactics over long term brand building.

In 2018 a report authored by Field and distributed by the Communications Council of New Zealand, titled Why Aren’t We Doing This, How Long Term Brand Building Drives Profitability, explored the differences in effectiveness between short term sales acquisition tactics and long-term brand building.

The report determined that “short-termism” was a highly attractive proposition due to its fairly immediate results and metrics that demonstrated short-term ROI but that it didn’t offer any potential for growth over the long term, whereas brand building exercises took much longer to generate results that outweighed sales activations (typically 6 months) but retained gains over much longer periods, continuing to build growth and profitability over the long term.

Source: Why aren’t we doing this? How long term brand building drives profitablity. By Peter Field

In this study, Field offers his solutions in the seven rules for brand building effectiveness:

  1. Focus on building mental availability for your brand.
  2. Use advertising to create distinctive assets for your brand.
  3. Get emotional. Emotional advertising primes behaviour more powerfully and over longer periods of time.
  4. Get Creative. Original advertising is more distinctive and more likely to get talked about: both boost mental availability.
  5. Be consistent. But allow for innovation around a consistent theme.
  6. Reach wide with advertising. Do not be seduced by the idea that it is wasteful to talk to people who are not about to buy. It is vital to do so.
  7. Balance media. Brand building and sales activation spend should be approximately 60:40. Choose the media best suited to each role.

Per rule seven, Field explains that brand building and sales activations work most effectively in tandem with a typical budget ratio of 60% towards brand building and 40% towards sales activations and describes the best method of delivering brand building messages as being through story-driven and emotive video.

Hmmmm, if only there was an agency that was really good at that.