• by Paul Parton , Op-Ed Contributor, Yesterday

I started my career in performance marketing. Direct and database marketing to be specific. And spent the first six or seven happy years of my life defining high-value audiences, developing test matrices, and running response analyses. And like most all marketers now, I loved the precision and the predictability that came with performance media. And, in full disclosure, I also loved the ability to lord my knowledge of what would work over my less-certain brand marketing colleagues. 

But over time, one thing that became abundantly predictable about performance marketing is that activities at the bottom of the funnel don’t work unless the top of the funnel is firing on all cylinders too. Or put another way, performance marketing without a strong brand in support will become a war of attrition with activities yielding predictably worse and worse outcomes over time.

But although this may be true, most brands today are struggling to find a workable balance between their performance marketing and brand marketing activities. 

The issue is simple to state – but rather complex to solve. Some very good research on marketing effectiveness over a ten-year period identified an excellent rule of thumb for the split between the proportion of a marketing budget that should be allocated toward long-term brand building activity and the proportion that should be allocated to what they called short-term sales activation (what I’ll call performance marketing). The ratio was 60/40. With 60% of the budget being put against brand building and 40% being allocated to performance marketing.

And therein lies the rub. Because today, marketers are spending closer to 64.5% of their budgets on performance marketing and a paltry 30% on brand building. The ratio has been turned on its head – and then some. With the predictable result – as was found in the same piece of research – that marketing efforts have seen a progressive decline in effectiveness over that ten-year period.

But that’s a thorny problem. There are few marketers in the world who feel that they can dramatically reduce their performance marketing budget to spend more money on the brand. Google needs to be paid, Amazon needs to be paid, carts need to be optimized. And those costs aren’t going down. So how can that conundrum be resolved?

The question really becomes, ‘how to create effective brand marketing with smaller budgets’ and the key to that is to reprioritize allocations in the OESP model.

Most legacy marketers still anchor their brand-marketing efforts with traditional paid advertising. But the reality is that in the current performance-marketing era, they can’t really afford to do that anymore. Brand marketing costs haven’t gone down as performance marketing costs have increased. In fact, they have increased too. It’s now four times more expensive to reach the same audience with traditional media as it was five years ago. Prices are going up even as audiences are getting smaller. But there are countless brand building opportunities available to marketers if they just rethink the objectives and budget allocations of the unpaid elements of the OESP model.

Our owned media should be the bedrock of our brand building activity for example. But it’s easy to forget that our packaging will be on the shelves of the families who buy us much longer than it will be on a retailer’s shelf, so why not use the opportunity for brand reinforcement in our packaging beyond the logo, brand name, and product description that defines most packaged goods. The delightful surprise that came with Domino’s redesigning their pizza boxes to look like a game of dominoes. Or Budweiser’s short-term introduction of the ‘America’ can. Fun, brand-appropriate, brand-reinforcing actions that don’t cost incrementally more money.

Equally, while we know that’s it’s central for our U/X to be seamless and functional, it wouldn’t hurt for it to be occasionally delightful too. Like the opportunity to search categories such as grand pianos, treehouses, and ‘OMG!’ on Airbnb.

The brand-building effect of shared media is often overlooked but can be very powerful when employed well. Simply viewing influencers as voices to build the brand rather than simply mediums to promote it can make a material difference. Finding influencers that embody the same values, the same principles as your brand does and committing to long-term partnerships with them. Co-creating with them. Innovating with them. Making them part of your brand message not just your brand’s megaphone.

And finally, but perhaps most importantly, marketers will have to emerge from a legacy of using paid media to build their brands and significantly increase the emphasis on harnessing earned media to build them. The evidence continues to grow for the view that fame is the most effective and efficient driver of brand growth and market performance. And marketers don’t need the constraint of controlled, broadcast messages to create fame for their brands. On the contrary, it is often the uncontrolled – even uncontrollable – idea that becomes famous. And earned media that results from the event, the experience, the stunt, the declaration, the media moment, or the heart-melting moment can make brands famous.  

The most famous brands in the world all know it. From Trump, to Tesla, Barbie to BTS, the brands that can harness, engage, and manipulate the media for their own gains are those that are winning.

Their brands are famous, their funnels are full, and I can fully guarantee that their performance media is performing.