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The Power of Branding
When I talk about branding and sales, I always enjoy this because people are incredibly passionate on both sides of the aisle, and I’m obsessed with being a marketer, branding, and I associate and equally obsessed with my enjoyment that I’m into sales. I like it, I think both are incredibly important. That’s first and foremost. That being said, one man’s humble point of view, the reason branding is more important in sales is because I did not buy this sneaker because somebody knocked on my door and sold it to me, or I landed on a website that explained why I had to own this. I had to own this on my own accord because this swoosh matters and allows me to communicate who I am and why I knew I wanted it without anyone telling me why I needed to buy it.
This is a brand I want to be associated with. Brand is more religion than anything else. Branding, it comes to you, sales is you go to them. I believe that sales is what you do when you’re not great at brand. Both are important, I know I made a big statement there. I will say it again. Some of the biggest companies in the world are fully sales organizations that actually do a terrible job branding. Very common in B2B sales and very common, believe it or not, in CPG, in consumer goods. There’s a lot of organizations that are great with their infrastructure, with the retailers, but their marketing misses the mark. So this is a very big issue and opportunity. But I will say that every influencer that has come up in the last decade has won on branding. They’ve won on reputation, personal brand. We don’t call it personal sales, we call it personal brand. And so do I believe reputation or how one thinks of something matters? I sure do. Of course, that can be achieved in a minute when you’re selling someone something, but it’s a heck of a lot better and more importantly, converts a lot better when they’re coming to you versus when you’re coming to them.
Measuring Return on Investment (ROI)
Look, I say something pretty controversial inside my company that drives everyone crazy, which is you can’t measure brand because I do think it’s like measuring God or love or like it’s very lofty. I can’t measure the ROI of my mother, yet I can sit here in front of this camera and tell you every single thing I’ve achieved professionally is directly attributable to her, right? And so there’s some things that you struggle to measure, good parenting. How do you measure that, right? It’s hard, so the industry of marketing has come up with a lot of ways to try to measure brand. How do we, if we spend a million dollars on this and there’s no direct call to action for sales, how do we know it’s working? I’m empathetic to why we’re trying to measure it. It’s hard to spend money and justify spending money. You need a framework.
The way I like to measure brand is ironically by measuring sales. I like doing brand work, things that bring awareness to you, in silos where we don’t do anything else and everything was consistent and we have consistent data. If you’re doing 50 podcasts as a guest, because you grew up a celebrity nutritionist and now you have a nutrition bar that you’re selling and you’re doing all the sales stuff, Google AdWords, and social media. But if you then spend the same amount of money, and again, if you’ve had a consistent track of sales, if you then go do 50 podcasts for brand, you’ll be able to see if it worked. At the end of those 9 months, you’ll be able to see it. Your business was going a certain way and now it might be going a different way.
When I was building my father’s wine business, the way I was noticing if we were building brand was based on the fact that I had to spend less money on advertising every year, but was achieving higher sales every year because after 5 or 6 years of good work, I could see that the word of mouth and the reputation, the brand, was carrying the business. And so, I think at the end of the day you have to measure brand based on business results, but you’ve got to play that out for a long time. If I came in to do full brand for any business in the world, big or small, and the boss said, she said to me, “Gary, I’m gonna measure you on brand in one way, is our business up in 3 years?” I can handle that. Of course, anything can happen. I can be selling something and then there was a big innovation, the world might change. There’s things that can happen, but usually they don’t. And within that framework, if I’m getting 3 years, I feel like I can play that game. And of course we could put reports and justifications along the way, but getting 3 to 5 years to prove it out, that’s really the punchline of brand building. There’s ways to measure brand if you want to measure brand.