Marketing's dual communication mandate
Emotional repetition builds associations for the 95% who aren't buying. Rational proof converts the 5% who are.
I’ve been deep in a bunch of marketing research lately and keep finding things that challenge how most of us actually work.
Like this one: brand building and activation aren’t really separate functions. They have different purposes, but they’re two halves of the same system. And they work through different mental processes.
Brand-first messaging uses repeated emotional experiences to build mental availability that accumulate until (hopefully) someone automatically thinks of you when a need comes up.
Emotional messaging is repeatedly shown to be most effective at capturing attention and creating salience for people in low-attention states—like people who aren’t in-market for your product today.
The hope is that your brand is associated so strongly with a specific product category, use case, or outcome, that buyers automatically think of you when a problem moves them into the market.
That’s when they start paying attention to your evidential messaging, and where activation messaging comes in.
Activation messaging converts that mental availability. When buyers enter evaluation mode, they need to address buying criteria with rational validation like proof, features, outcomes. You need to supply them with detail that gives them confidence in choosing you over the competitors.
What makes this all so tricky: brand building works slowly through accumulation. And since buying cycles can be years in B2B, the results of that brand effort can be very long tail.
So, if your success is being measured quarterly (like most of us, gotta pay the bills), you’re probably being guided toward activation campaigns where results show up quickly. They’re easy to attribute and the numbers look great on dashboards. And once the sales leader gets a little hit of that sweet sweet direct response, it’s literally all they want to see.
The problem is that activation only works on the 5% who are actively in-market right now. You’re sucking up easy wins today, but maybe at the expense of building a steady supply of mental availability tomorrow or 1 year, 5 years down the road.
It’s supported by data, too!
In “The Long and Short of It,” Les Binet and Peter Field found (among many other things) that emotional campaigns are nearly twice as likely to deliver very large profit growth at the three year mark. But they underperform for the first six months. So they’re at risk of early scrutiny and closure.
And wide reach really matters for brand: Campaigns targeting the whole market (rather than just existing customers) are 10x more efficient than those targeting existing customers.
The hard part isn’t knowing this information. It’s getting people on board with patiently investing in things that can’t be neatly measured. Still working on that one, myself!