Magazine: Brandformance – brand building and sales support at the highest level

MITTE Communications and ADDICT Interactive prepared a study with the participation of 36 marketing and communication managers of 32 companies from 11 sectors. According to this, branding lays the foundation for a product or service, but without performance marketing companies aren’t able to communicate their brands effectively and can’t produce good business results.

In the 20th century marketing communication split into two areas: brand building activities such as image advertisements, sponsorship, event marketing, content marketing, etc., and sales supporting marketing tools such as sales promotion, in-store marketing and performance marketing. These days branding-type campaigns needs to get closer to the domain of performance marketing. The so-called brandformance (brand- and performance-focused) marketing generates fundamental changes in creative planning: when planning brand communication, creative specialists also have sales performance in mind, while performance creative specialists keep reflecting on the brand. However, brandformance marketing planning can’t be used in every sector.

In brandformance marketing those channels and tools are the most important which have been used by both areas so far, e.g. most online marketing tools (social media, influencers, content marketing), mobile tools (mobile apps, mobile geotargeting, mobile ads), and integrated and multichannel solutions. Which channels work best in brand building? Online, social media and TVC – experts say TVC is right behind online and social media tools not only in image but also in sales-focused campaigns.

According to the study, advertising budgets are different from sector to sector, but corporate cultures and the attitudes of managers also have great influence on the brand communication activities of companies. Online tools are used more and more widely, but not every brand is able to bring out the best in them. Experts believe that in the near future besides company operations, long-term strategic challenges will also influence how the market works. The research results make it clear that a tool-based approach doesn’t work in the 21st century, because without an integrated strategy there is no successful communication activity.

Because of the market’s size no Hungarian company or expert has the luxury of testing brand building and performance-oriented marketing results on their own brands, examining them separately and in combination – only an integrated approach is viable. The specialists of various sectors accommodate to the peculiar characteristics of different fields when using brand building and performance marketing tools. At the moment it isn’t perfectly clear when to give priority to which and how the two fields can be connected the most efficiently. Performance marketing knowledge needs to be integrated into the brand building-related processes of marketing communication planning, plus there has to be a connection between the experts of the two fields from the beginning. //