In today's saturated media environments, allocating budget to build a memorable brand may seem wasteful, hopeless or both. High-priced music, celebrities and fancy copy fight for your customer's frayed attention. And that's before Rihanna slays it at the Super Bowl.
For startups and growth stage companies, being remembered or even noticed in this context may seem unlikely–like that time you wore fun socks the Met Gala. Better to scrap brand investment, and just buy non-branded, low funnel leads, no?
No, not better.
Buying synthetic customers as a core marketing strategy is a bad investment (see subprime mortgage crisis). If you're building a pipeline of one-off transactions, you're not building a pipeline at all. You're just building a cost center.
Sure, it feels good to string together a few quarters of gross revenue charts that go up and to the right, but since these customers were never really drawn to your brand to begin with, they will forget you the moment you stop paying the algorithms.
Even worse, the charts will start moving down and to the right when your competitor's organic traffic surpasses yours. That will be the hangover moment. The one where your biggest competitor rolls out a new brand platform and uses its organic traffic advantage to bid up your keywords and feast on your margins. *Note: this will lead to a pretty uncomfortable series of board meetings.
And why shouldn't they be? Low funnel marketing is a tactic, not a strategy. It convinces consumers to buy something from your business instead of giving them a reason to buy into your business.
That's a meaningful distinction. In human terms: it's the difference between a stranger and a friend. The stranger doesn't know you, so they will only interact with your business through discounts, inventory and speed. If they remember you at all, it will be for the transaction, nothing more.
Unless your business is like Amazon or Shein–where price, availability and speed are your superpowers–this is not a great outcome. Your business has become a commodity, not a brand. And commodities, unlike brands, compete on thin margins and invoke phrases like, "race to the bottom" and "downward trajectory."
Price, availability and speed are your only differentiators because that's all your synthetic leads see in your tactical ads at the bottom of the funnel. So why shouldn't they see your business as a commodity?
That's how you've positioned yourself.
A Different Path
Brand investment should be allocated to efforts that identify and solve problems for the customers you want. The final output–the Brand Platform–should be rooted in first principle thinking, calibrated to solve a human problem, and ultimately measured through NPS, organic traffic and repeat customers.
Real life, alive ones.
It is a long-term, compounding growth strategy that sees beyond your product and addresses the underlying human problem that your product uniquely solves for your customer. This means near-term marketing activities with targeted campaign strategies and goals will echo the Brand Platform.
An approach like this is valuable to the business because it amplifies the brand's power, deepens the connection with its customers, and unifies brand communications across channels. If done well, this investment will drive repeat, referral and organic traffic, sending more revenue to your margins instead of Google's.
I developed and drove the strategic, operational and creative elements of Outdoorsy's Brand Platform, which decreased customer acquisition costs, increased organic traffic, and added new revenue streams to the business. While at Airbnb, the initiatives I led–in service of the Brand Platform–delivered a 20% advantage over our closest competitor on marketing spend as a share of revenue, and repeat guests accounted for 69% of Airbnb's revenue coming through direct and unpaid channels.
When you set out to build a powerful brand, the primary goal isn't to simply become a verb. The aim is to build a community of customers who know you, return to you and enjoy telling others about you. When this takes hold, the customer acquisition costs are heavily outweighed by the revenue that customer delivers to the business in the long-term .
That's a defensible brand moat.
Building the Moat
But how do you build a Brand Platform that delivers on this lofty promise? The answer starts with understanding its purview within the business. When you set out to build a Brand Platform, you are creating a tool that product, sales, marketing, human resources, and business development can leverage to attract customers, employees and investors.
Given its potential impact, it is important that the following inputs are collected, analyzed and interpreted: stakeholder interviews, market analysis, competitive analysis, white space identification, customer segmentation, customer insights, journey mapping and brand positioning.
All of this intelligence is then channeled into a Brand Platform which distills the findings into a creative and emotional framework for TLDR consumption. This will include your brand belief, purpose, values, positioning, identity, personality, voice and target audience. You will often see the first creative expression of this platform take the form of a manifesto film or a vision deck, but it will also spiral out into a whole ecosystem of product, marketing, and employee communications.
But, this world-building exercise is just the beginning. Marketing uses it as a foundation for full funnel brand and seasonal campaigns. It can also become a briefing tool for new initiatives like product design systems, user experience flows, 'about' pages, onboarding materials, organizational restructuring, employee education, presentation decks, company comms, integrated marketing campaigns, ESG initiatives, PR, business dev and much more.
By its very nature, a Brand Platform is designed to be a change agent and a rallying cry for the business. By challenging assumptions, it clarifies values, sharpens focus and builds excitement for every stakeholders in the business .
When employees and consumers feel an authentic connection to something bigger than themselves–whether it's the products they purchase or the company they work for–productivity and consumption go up and marketing costs go down.
A well-crafted Brand Platform delivers this type of experience to your customers, your employees and your investors.
A Long Term Investment with Short Term Gains
Look under the hood of any iconic brand from Airbnb to RXBAR, and you'll find a rigorously defined Brand Platform fueling their tremendous success– a holistic operating system for distinguishing their narrative across every conceivable touchpoint. It's this level of alignment - this commitment to an anchoring brand philosophy - that elevates companies from unknown to iconic.
So whether you're building the next unicorn or rebooting an established titan, defining that Brand Platform should be a key priority. In today's supercharged media silos, that strategic north star will keep your brand story clear and consistent as it scales.
