Why Better Data Changes Marketing Performance

That's fascinating.

A lot of the people that we talk to on these podcasts, we spend a lot of time you know, talking about measuring the performance of campaigns or doing AB testing, you know, and getting return on investment, you know, your advertising dollars and things like this.

But, you know, before coming on, you had mentioned something that really, really caught my attention.

There's a difference between brand measurement and performance measurement.

Would you care to elaborate on that? I know you were starting to already, but they're really not the same thing, are they?

No, I don't think they are.

Thank you for raising the point.

There are a couple of things to say to start off with.

So performance measurement through the funnel is very important, so I wouldn't deny that for a minute.

But on its own, it's not enough.

What we believe is that you need to measure the brand and the brand equity as well, because that gives you a different and a better lens through which to measure what is actually happening.

So ultimately, in our view, you're not investing, you're not providing marketing investment in order to get just greater consideration or just greater awareness or greater conversion, although that obviously is incredibly helpful.

You're actually investing to build brand equity over time and certain elements and attributes around that brand equity which will actually stand you in better stead.

The truth of the matter is you have to do a bit of both.

The problem is that we find with many clients is that because the funnel marketing can be measured um quite quite easily in many ways it can be measured constantly and very often non-marketing stakeholders instinctively understand that terms like awareness and conversion that's all that's measured the problem with that is that if that's all you do and you don't feed the brand you will end up turning the handle faster and faster and faster to less and less effect.

It's very interesting that, and by the way, it's not a client, but about two, three years ago, the marketing director of ASOS, the online clothing retailer, said, my goodness, we've spent so much time doing performance marketing only, we've neglected the brand, and our performance is suffering as a result.

So you've got to do both.

The problem with brand measurement is actually much harder to do, which is often why it's not done.

You actually have to create quite a lot or put aside quite a lot of investment.

Because essentially what a brand is, obviously, is something that's a perception that exists in the mind of a consumer or a customer.

So in order to really understand what has happened with your brand, you have to go and ask consumers and customers.

That takes time, that takes money, and whilst there are obviously easier ways of doing it now with AI and there's another lens around LLMs and so on, the fact of the matter is you kind of have to go out of your way in order to understand what people think about your brand and therefore the way in which brand is impacting the way in which they buy and how often and how much they pay.

So the first thing is that the underlying issue is that clients end up measuring things that are easily measured, not because they're wrong, but they are not enough, they're not sufficient, and they don't put enough time and effort into measuring other things that are also important because they're quite difficult to measure.

The second thing that is actually really important, and I'll be brief about this, is that there's a really established myth that performance marketing drives the here and now and brand isn't worth investing in because it takes ages to have an impact.

It's simply not true.