Medtronic’s Senior Paid Media
Specialist writes “The world has never been a certain place. It was uncertainty that would lead to building castles and that should lead you to be focusing on your brand.”
It took my wife and I two years after we got married to go on our honeymoon. Now, in our defense my wife is a nurse that needs a year’s advance notice for time off combined with
the fact that she had a specific place to go…Napa Valley. While there I discovered that Napa Valley has a castle in it, the Castello di Amorosa, an authentic, and authentically built, replica
of a 14th century Tuscan castle. The world has never been a certain place, to be sure, but today it seems even more uncertain. It was uncertainty that would lead
to the building of castles, and it is uncertainty today that should lead you to be focusing on your brand. Your brand is your castle in uncertain times and each brick you lay allows you to weather
that uncertainty a little easier.
Here is the first thing to know about castles, and brands. They. Take. Time. Once more together, they take time. A brand is not a
short-term spur of the moment thing you undertake in between performance campaigns; brands require attention and sustained effort over years. The advantage of building a castle over building a brand,
however, is that one can see the progress of building a castle. Sadly, it is extremely hard to see the progress of building a brand. We could see this progress in easy to measure things like clicks or
sales, but it is also just as likely to show up in things that are incredibly difficult to measure. Maybe you see that fast growth, but it is almost as likely that your brand instead serves to only
bolster your results and instead of decline you see a steady trickle of results. Maybe people do not always remember the name of your brand but maybe they generally recall your brand or maybe they
simply do not have a negative impression of your brand that you have to work against.
Castles were focal points where they were built but a castle by itself was
worthless. They required the communities around them. They were built to protect and to thrive. Brands are the same, working to build a brand by itself is worthless without any performance marketing
to support the brand. You need the results that performance marketing drives, the revenue, the audience and yes, even the awareness. But at the same time brands serve as the focal points for these
performance efforts, because a brand gives those efforts a long-term anchor from which our strategy flows. The building of a brand gives all of our marketing efforts a focus and provides a long-term
goal to aim at. Like the fields around castles will produce crops if you have planted them, but that seed is produced from previous harvests. Our brands require performance marketing, but our
performance marketing requires a brand.
Brands, if built well and reinforced with effort, can stand the test of time, after all we see brands all around us like castles
that were built centuries ago. But they require work and the patience to wait but the rewards can be that very endurance. While the storms of uncertainty blow all around us there is a sense of
security from within us those stone walls that give hope that this too shall pass.
If you’re interested in submitting content for future editions, please reach out
to our Managing Editor, Barbie Romero at Barbie@MediaPost.com.