Marketing Advisory, Strategy and Analytics
Forethought agrees, the ideal scenario for marketers is to deliver both brand and sales activation communications simultaneously.
Brand Strategy
7 Steps to Accelerate Your Brand Building and Sales Performance
Posted 18 Nov 2021The most effective advertising incorporates both brand-building, coupled with an ‘activate-now’ (sales) response stimulus. Two jobs, one communication strategy.
According to Binet and Field in ‘The Long and the Short of It’ based on the IPA awards database, ‘Brand response campaigns, around a brand idea that drives both long term preference as well as short-term behavioural activation’ is ideal. This is not to say that the communication cannot be mainly brand-building or mainly activate-now, or that they should always receive the same weighting.
Forethought agrees, the ideal scenario for marketers is to deliver both brand and sales activation communications simultaneously. This strategy, as Binet and Field agree – is the most reliable to achieve the desired commercial outcome.
Through our research, Forethought has found no reason for dividing communication into pure brand-building and pure direct response. In fact, we would expect an organisation that is applying a funnel approach to its advertising (ie brand building separate to activate-now) to not generate an optimum return on their communications investment.
So what can Marketers do to be clear and confident that their advertising has been purpose built to most efficiently build brand and drive sales?
The Forethought approach starts with asking consumers and providing quantitatively validated evidence that predicts consumer behaviour. This data is modelled using the proprietary analytics tool, Prophecy Thoughts & Feelings, to provide marketers with the insight to accelerate and then track Brand and Sales performance. Here is how.
7 INSIGHTS TO ACCELERATE BRAND BUILDING AND SALES PERFORMANCE
To give you clarity and confidence for your creative brief, Prophecy Thoughts & Feelings:
1. Measures and models the hierarchy of drivers of category choice for your consumers – Rational (Quality & Price) and Emotional
2. Validates how well your consumers believe your brand is performing on each of those drivers versus your competitors – so that you can understand where your opportunities and threats lie to inform your communications strategy
3. Provides the predictive insight for you to build your Triple Play – the tightly focused communications blueprint informed by the predictive insights from your Prophecy study.
As you have gained the certainty of your Prophecy Thoughts and Feelings model and the clarity of the Triple Play, you can now:
4. Provide your creative agency with the luxury of a tight brief with the Triple Play providing a narrow, incisive scaffold - allowing them to deliver the most impactful response.
5. Engage your internal stakeholders in the data and evidence so they share your understanding of what is driving choice for your brand, so they will understand the communications task, and support you and your agency partners when assessing the creative.
The Triple Play becomes your performance barometer, and we can use it to monitor and track performance of your advertising to:
6. Either pre-launch with rapid Prophecy ADvance Testing, to allow you to refine the execution prior to launch, or:
7. In-market with tracking to monitoring your brands improvement on the Triple Play drivers, as the driver of sales.
If you would like to read more, please contact us for a copy of:
If you would like to discuss your communications strategy and how you might evolve and improve its performance please contact us:
Andrew Slot, GM Consulting
[email protected]
Rachel Edwardes, GM Marketing & Org Engagement
[email protected]
ABOUT FORETHOUGHT
Forethought is a leading customer and marketing analytics and strategy advisory firm.
Forethought, with the largest marketing science team in Australia, partners 80 clients in Australia to drive customer and market share growth via providing the evidence and CMO advisory support focused on customer acquisition and retention strategy and market share growth. In North America, Forethought partners with the fastest growing airline, JetBlue as well as several category leading brands.