In a world demanding short-term results, brand marketing isn't a separate luxury. It is a critical investment that builds top-of-funnel awareness, ensuring that lower-funnel performance tactics have a sufficient audience to convert and ultimately work harder.
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The brand's media strategy prioritizes top-of-funnel entertainment to build massive, broad awareness. This continually fills the pipeline with new audiences, which makes lower-funnel, conversion-focused tactics like retargeting cheaper and more effective than chasing a limited pool of in-market buyers.
High-growth companies must transition from performance to brand marketing. The best marketers make this shift proactively, using experience to anticipate the inflection point. Waiting for data to confirm the need leads to inefficiency and a potential "death spiral."
Before scaling paid acquisition, invest in a robust brand system. A well-defined brand DNA (art direction, voice, tone) is not a vanity project; it's the necessary infrastructure to efficiently generate the thousands of cohesive creative assets required to test and scale performance marketing campaigns successfully.
Brand campaigns reach the 95% of buyers not currently in-market. Instead of relying on vanity metrics, Square ties this investment to business outcomes by tracking the subsequent lift in organic traffic, which they've found converts better than paid channels.
Stop viewing brand as a top-of-funnel activity. For elite companies, brand isn't a precursor to selling; it is the selling. It creates inbound demand that bypasses traditional conversion tactics like search ads or affiliate marketing, making it the most powerful and sustainable growth engine.
Hanes finds online video and CTV highly effective in retail media networks, traditionally seen as performance channels. This highlights the need to cover the full purchase journey, using brand-building video to feed the conversion funnel and make all media work harder.
Effective demand generation is a barbell, requiring strong top-of-funnel brand investment to create awareness and great bottom-of-funnel product marketing to convert interest. Viewing performance marketing as a standalone function and funding it in isolation is like "throwing money at a problem but not solving it."
Shift the mindset from a brand vs. performance dichotomy. All marketing should be measured for performance. For brand initiatives, use metrics like branded search volume per dollar spent to quantify impact and tie "fluffy" activities to tangible growth outcomes.
Position marketing as the engine for future quarters' growth, while sales focuses on closing current-quarter deals. This reframes marketing's long-term investments (like brand building) as essential for sustainable revenue, justifying budgets that don't show immediate, direct ROI to a CFO.
For a massive brand like Hanes, a collaboration with a niche retailer like Urban Outfitters isn't about massive sales volume. Its primary value is marketing—generating 'brand heat' and cultural relevance. This is strategically distinct from a new category launch, which is a pure volume play.