Brand prioritizes perception, demand prioritizes behavior; integrated marketing teams tend to have stronger cross-functional relationships, are more involved in strategy, and generally have larger budgets
Marketers who succeed at integrating brand marketing with demand marketing tend to produce better results. That’s according to a new report by a creative consulting shop called Prophet.
The company polled 300 marketers North American marketers with annual budgets of $10 million or more – and then conducted qualitative interviews with 30 of them. The sample was about evenly split between B2B and B2C.
The “top-quartile” of marketing organizations have “more extensive brand-demand integration” and “significantly higher business performance.” More specifically, higher performing marketing teams experience the following:
- Make “greater contributions to the strategic decision-making process”;
- Maintain “strong, collaborative relationships with internal and external partners”; and
- Increased “budgets in the past 12 months and/or in the next 12 months.”
The report calls the top quartile “winning marketers” and refers to the rest as “laggards.”
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The difference between brand and demand marketing
The study sees phrases like “demand generation” as synonymous with “performance marketing.” It does a good job of describing the difference in purview between demand and brand marketing too.
According to Prophet, brand marketing “prioritizes sustained performance.” It strives to build trust over time with cohesive messages that differentiate a brand from the competition. This “ensures sustained relationships that go beyond rational demand and enables long-term premium pricing.”
By contrast, demand generation “prioritizes immediate outcomes.” It strives to reach buyers who have a need for a product right now and convince them to make a purchase. As the report puts it, demand generating “accelerates customers along their journey and nudges them to next best action, moving to conversion and usage.”
That take reflects my experience too. I also see brand marketing as long-term and strategic – typically associated with market programs. Programs have a starting point but never end. Demand generation and performance marketing are tactical, typically associated with campaigns, and aimed at attracting buyer-ready leads. Campaigns are finite, with starting and ending points. The report sums this up nicely when it says, “brand goes after perception” and “demand goes after behavior.”
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Connecting brand and demand
When terms are broken down like this we know it’s obvious that perception and behavior go together. Moreover, those marketing teams that “connect brand and demand” tend to “consistently outperform competition.”
The report says winning marketing teams are “3 times more likely to be fully integrated” by a measure of 39% for winning marketers versus 12% for the laggards. Overall, “90% of winning organizations” – that is those in the top quartile – “are fully or somewhat integrated.”
In fact, 87% of winners “have a marketing structure that is optimized to integrate brand and demand” compared with 61% of laggards. That’s a 26% difference, which does seem significant.
But wait, there’s more!
- Customer insights. 86% of winning marketers “are responsible for customer insights” compared with 60% of laggards;
- Segmentation. 95% of winning marketers “own insights, segmentation and targeting” compared with 77% of laggards;
- Positioning. 87% of winning marketers “use customer insights for brand positioning and value propositions” compared with 66% of laggards;
- Planning. 78% of winning marketers say “marketing owns the integrated planning process goals” compared with 33% of laggards; and
- Partnerships. 79% of winning marketers say their “organization has the partnerships it needs for brand building and demand generation” compared with 64% of laggards.
If you look at these metrics and feel like your marketing team is behind, there’s one actionable thing leaders can do immediately to improve things. Put your team in regular direct contact with customers and prospects – this is a huge deficiency in marketing.
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Integrating makes the whole company better
A couple of other findings stood out to me in the report.
First, winning marketing teams, those that integrate brand and demand marketing enjoy strong cross-functional relationships with IT (71%), finance (66%) and product (41%).
Second, winning marketing teams also expressed a greater sense of shared customer understanding across the organization. Nearly 9 in 10 (86%) of winning marketers say their organization has a shared understanding of the customer compared to 63% of laggards.
The report ties these two statistics together neatly:
“Much like holiday rituals or annual trips for families, integrated, cross-functional planning sessions can become the glue that binds all brand and demand pieces, and a touchstone moment to bring all parties together.”
In other words, integrated marketing has a clear positive impact on performance, but this study also suggests it also has a positive impact on culture. That speaks volumes because the only thing better than winning in business – is winning in business with friends.
The full report is available for download here – Brand & Demand: Marketing’s Great Love Story. I first learned about it from an article on Marketing Charts.
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Image credit: Marketing Charts and respective report
