Award-winning marketing strategist, Dr. Viv Sin, recently shared his insights on brand marketing. Talking in the context of marketing, he says;
People take years to understand something so basic—building a brand is like raising a child. Your approach and contributions towards your child's development keep changing, depending on their growth stage.
What you do for a fetus is quite different from what you do for a newborn baby, and your efforts keep changing from toddlerhood to teenage to adulthood.
But when it comes to building a brand, people become clueless. They keep feeding baby food to their teenage brand, teaching algebra to the newborn, ignoring nutrition in the fetal stage, and all such wrong combinations. And that's the biggest mistake that they make.
Your marketing approach should be dependent on the stage of your brand. Something that worked for a similar brand at a different growth stage will not work for you.
It is a process, and its ultimate aim is to take your brand to the next stage so you can pivot to the following marketing approach till the brand is an adult and ready to embark upon a more extensive journey with her new life partner (say, the investor who acquired the brand).
What are those stages of brand building
For a consumer, there is not much of a difference between a brand and a human. We will get to this point in a while. For now, let's acknowledge that a brand grows through the stages as a human.
(i) Fetus
(ii) Infant
(iii) Toddler
(iv) Teenager
(v) Adult
Fetal Stage
In the critical phase of brand development, known as the fetal stage, the destiny of a brand is shaped. It is during this internal growth period that the founding team must nourish their brand with utmost care, determining its positioning, category, offering, and strategy. Instead of launching yet another generic product, the brand must strive to introduce an irresistible offering that captivates the market. I refer to this as discovering a winning niche. To provide actionable guidance on this matter, I have detailed a formula in my upcoming book, "Build a Winning Brand," set to be released in 2024.
WN = 1MS + 1CFCD + 1CP + UM
Any brand that merely launches a me-too product faces stagnation right from the beginning. Its progress relies solely on the crutch of advertising dollars. Once the flow of advertising investment diminishes, the brand falters. During the fetal stage, every aspect, including finding a niche, positioning, creating an ideal customer avatar, setting product pricing, and establishing a brand name, significantly influences the brand's path to success.
If a brand enters the market with a high-potential segment in an untapped market space, it can be confident that it has successfully navigated the fetal stage.
The Newborn Stage:
This is the stage where rubber hits the road. When you first introduce your brand to the market, immediate cash flow is a must for sustaining and scaling. Therefore, the brand must prioritize Direct Response Marketing—a dynamic and aggressive approach where each dollar invested in advertising yields a return of $4, $5, or even $10 within 30 days. In this stage, the brand explicitly prompts consumers to take direct action, such as making a purchase, downloading a report, providing their address, or availing free products. In my book, I reveal a proven direct response marketing strategy that sucks in results like a vacuum cleaner on steroids.
I find it intriguing when new brands attempt to emulate major global brands, replicating their every move, only to wonder why their efforts fall short compared to the giants.
"Is it because we're new?" No, it's because you lack their distribution channels. When someone encounters a Coca-Cola advertisement and goes grocery shopping the next day, they can readily find a bottle of Coca-Cola there—a sale is made! Conversely, where does the consumer find your brand after encountering your campaign? Nowhere, unless they are specifically directed to your website or one of the few retail outlets available. The campaigns of major brands do not merely ask for action; they establish a relationship and position their product where customers can find it effortlessly, even when not actively seeking it. Thus, how can a new brand replicate the same level of communication and expect consumers to take action without being prompted?
Therefore, in the absence of extensive distribution, it becomes necessary to prompt consumers to take an extra step and locate your brand. This is precisely why starting with direct response marketing is crucial. Direct response marketing is not a passing fad; in fact, numerous major brands, including Coca-Cola, Rolex, Palmolive, and Pepsodent, have employed it successfully during their initial stages.
Look at this direct response ad from Rolex, where the brand asks for a lead in exchange for a free lead magnet.
Here is another example of a direct response ad from pepsodent
This goes on to prove that even the major brands started with direct response marketing before pivoting to the next marketing strategy.
The toddler Stage
This is the stage where the brand transitions into a more branded approach. Once your direct response marketing (DRM) campaign starts generating an annual revenue of $1 million, it's time to take things up a notch and shift to Direct Response Brand Marketing (DRBM).
During this stage, the core process remains the same, but now you need to focus on making your website, content, and overall approach more branded and recognizable. This involves paying attention to details such as typography, font selection, brand colors, and incorporating consistent brand elements into your ads. The ads themselves should have a higher production value and reflect the branded identity of your business.
In the DRBM stage, the goal is not only to generate results but also to create memorable ads that effectively convey the unique tone and essence of your brand. These ads should capture the attention of consumers, introduce your brand and its unique selling points (USPs), and provide a clear call to action that encourages consumers to make a purchase.
So, as you progress into the DRBM stage, it's important to ensure that your brand shines through in every aspect of your marketing strategy, from your website to your ads, reflecting a cohesive and recognizable brand identity.
Remember that Dollar Shave Club ad? That's the kind of content I am talking about.
The Teenage stage
If applied correctly, the DRBM phase brings you to a stage where a major chunk of the market is aware of your product. People start recommending it, prospects begin to consider it, and you see a spike in your growth.
The expectations rise, and you find yourself in a position where you want to scale past the virtual game. Offline distributors start sending your products across the shelves. The offline market gets to try the product they have been seeing on their screen for a long time. And then, unexpectedly, you hit a saturation point—somewhere around $5M–$10M per annum.
You started with selling one product through one sales channel. Soon you expanded the web of your communication to multiple channels. Then you strengthen your brand and communication to be more effective. It was followed by launching more products to scale the brand from where it started. Now, it seems that you have reached the boundaries of where performance-based advertising can take you.
Direct response marketing gets exhausted from carrying the burden of your brand's growth for too long alone. This is a call from branding, asking you to invest in long-term strategies.
This is the middle point, where direct response marketing reaches its maximum potential while the branding world calls you to create an identity at a bigger scale. This is the stage we call 'performance branding.'
To define it simply—performance branding is the first step in the branding game. That is when you start the branding process with a tracking mechanism attached to it, so you can still measure and optimize the results of your branding efforts as you go along. By doing so, you can ensure that your branding campaigns not only build brand awareness and emotional connections with your target audience but also deliver measurable business results, such as increased website traffic or sales. This data-driven approach allows you to make informed decisions and optimize your branding efforts for maximum impact and return on investment.
In this stage, instead of just promoting the product, you start to promote your brand's identity, its core focus, and its distinct style. This stage is about selling an image that the consumers want to associate with.
Take the 'Real Women. Real Beauty' campaign by Dove, wherein the brand promotes its core focus and ideologies, that its target consumers can relate with.
Now, see, brands like Gucci, Prada, Dior, and Louis Vuitton may appear to have similar visions, but their market segment makes a big difference in how they stand apart from each other.
Gucci is known for its bold, eclectic style, mixing traditional craftsmanship with modern designs and targeting a younger, trendier audience. Gucci's campaigns often feature bright colors, whimsical patterns, and bold graphics, appealing to fashion-forward millennials and Gen Z-ers. Hence, they celebrate their market segment through their marketing camapigns—selling an image that the consumers can relate with.
LV, on the other hand, is known for its classic, understated style, focusing on timeless elegance and high-quality craftsmanship. LV's campaigns often feature sophisticated models in chic, neutral tones, highlighting the brand's heritage and craftsmanship. LV appeals to a slightly older, more established audience with a higher disposable income.
Dior, like LV, is known for its classic, elegant style but with a touch of romanticism and femininity. Dior's campaigns often feature dreamy, ethereal imagery, highlighting the brand's romantic and whimsical aesthetic. Dior appeals to a wide range of women, from young professionals to older, established women, with a focus on luxury and sophistication.
And as you start to promote the identity of your brand, you attract a larger group of the market and emotionally connect them with your brand. That's when your brand is ready for the last stage
The adult stage
Now is the time when we enter the Branding stage. Branding is nothing but a game of perception.
Take a moment to reflect and ask yourself this: "How did I initially come across those prominent global brands?" Chances are, it wasn't through their advertisements alone. More often than not, it was due to repeated encounters with their products in brick-and-mortar stores or the buzz generated by people discussing, wearing, or consuming them.
When a brand truly starts to soar, a pivotal moment arises. It's when the number of people who recognize your brand through your own marketing campaigns gets surpassed by the number of people who have learned about your brand from other people and places.
Let's take an example to understand this phenomenon.
Consumer Reports released a report that suggested that Mcdonald's makes better coffee than Starbucks. This conclusion was reached after an extensive tasting phase. The tastings were led by a professional tester and included staffers from Consumer Reports' food-testing division.
However, the consumer doesn't care about that. Despite being better in taste, an average consumer will prefer Starbucks over McDonald's for his coffee. And it's not just one example. We keep such trends in almost every industry. Let's take the example of the Pepsi Challenge, for instance.
In the Pepsi Challenge, participants are given two unmarked cups, one containing Pepsi and one containing Coca-Cola, and asked to taste both and then choose which one they prefer. In many cases, participants chose Pepsi as their preferred drink.
However, when participants are told which cup contains which brand of cola, their preference often shifts in favor of Coca-Cola. This phenomenon is known as the 'Brand Effect,' where the brand's image and reputation can influence consumer preference even if the product itself is not objectively better.
It does not matter who is better. It is about who owns a clear image for what.
It does not matter what the brand says about itself. People care about what other people say about a brand.
That is why in the adulthood stage, the brand must channelise its focus on publicity and public relations (PR)
PR is the tool for getting other people to talk about your brand so a bigger market is influenced.
Here are a few activities you can do for a rounded PR strategy :
(i) Celebrity Endorsement
(ii) Event Sponsorship
(iii) Distributing leadership content through media channels
(iv) Creating buzz through influencers
(v) Leveraging the power of press release
(vi) Participating in industry events and exhibitions
(vii) Hosting community events
Once a brand starts investing in PR, it witnesses a desirable change in the way people perceive the brand. That is the stage where a brand must meet perception with its products and services and focus more intensively on distribution.
About Viv Sin and his upcoming book
Viv Sin is a marketing scholar and the founder of BRANZIN, a company that provides marketing services to mid-sized brands. His book Build a Winning Brand reveals an unbelievably actionable marketing framework for a complex and abstract process like brand building. The book is scheduled to launch in 2024.
