‘Brand building and performance marketing need to go together’

At the e4m-GroupM Programmatic Summit 2023 held on Tuesday, industry experts brainstormed over the importance of brand building and performance marketing with some saying it needs to be “hybrid” and some stressing on the need for brand building

During a panel discussion on ‘Brand Building versus Performance Marketing, moderated by Priti Murthy, President, GroupM Nexus, speakers deliberated on augmenting awareness, loyalty and experience of a brand via programmatic advertising.

“To have a longer funnel of customers, you have to spend and invest in the brand. We have been continuously doing it and we have upped the focus on that. We are the title sponsor of WPL. We are trying to reach out to more and more people. We are reaching a stage where the brand spends are naturally flowing and helping performance marketing. It has to be hybrid,” said Kaushik Chakraborty, Head of Marketing and Corporate Communications, Tata Capital.

Sharing his view, Suyash Dongare, Head of Digital Marketing, VIP Industries, said brand building is important but the foundation is performance marketing.

“To address the whole point of what is better, brand building or performance, the industry that I come from is a very commoditized business and for a brand that I represent, which is VIP, the brand equity is very strong. COVID has taught us that when everything came to a standstill, multiple brands came up and made a difference.

“No longer you see luggage as a category which is a mundane. It has become fashionable. If you ask me the mechanism, they all do performance marketing. They did go for branding to a certain extent. But the foundation is performance marketing. We think both is important. We are trying to push the envelope for the consumers primarily because anyone here cannot guess the fact that luggage industry has only 12% penetration in the Indian market,” he said adding that an average Indian does not travel more than 100 km a month, so there is scope of growth in the industry.

There comes a point for any category when they have to heavily invest in brand so that they recruit more consumers as lot of promise comes with it, he said.

According to Apoorva Maheshwari, Head of Marketing, Bestseller, a great product that delivers, builds the most loyalty.

“It is clearer to derive customer’s lifecycle or lifetime value, should the distribution be unilateral. It gets quite complicated in an omni-channel scenario. We try and overlay our brand metrics along with retail metrics. Like in our own stores, we do measure our footfall.  We try and understand what are the business metrics that whether through brand marketing spends or performance spends you can influence.

“A great product that delivers builds the most loyalty. If you don’t fail as a brand and as a product to the customer, you will have the customer coming back to you through whichever channel or marketing funnel you activate,” Maheshwari said.

Adding to this, Chakraborty said, this is true for a touch and feel product.

“For a company like mine where there is no touch feel, we are aiding you to reach our goal. There loyalty is build over a long period of time by customer service promise and how you handle when something goes wrong and being transparent apart from other attributes.”

Sharing a different perspective, Ritu Mittal, Head of Marketing & Digital, Bayer, said that a brand needs to continue investing in its awareness and fundamentals consistently.

“Globally, personal healthcare is a category where the top five brands have not changed over a very long period of time. So there is apparent loyalty that people have because when it comes to personal health, that’s the last space where we want to change the brands that we use. Despite that, I believe, there is nothing called brand loyalty anymore.

“I think if a brand believes that I have built loyalty and I can go back and enjoy the love of this consumer base, that’s not going to happen. A brand needs to continue investing in its awareness, brand fundamentals on a consistent basis, keep building its brand equity metrics and there is no alternate way to that if we want long term sustained business model,” she said.