Marketing
Your brand: the long
and the short of it
In the next part of our marketing ‘back
to basics’ series EN interviews industry
creative Ian Bamford of Foundry12 about
how to build strong brands
B
inet and Field, famous for The
Long And The Short Of It, a study
published by the UK’s Institute of
Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) that
demonstrates the long-term commercial
benefits to a business of balancing
short, and long-term marketing
strategies, recently updated their
findings for the B2B markets.
The study found that B2B growth
centred on building a strong brand,
expanding the customer base,
harnessing the power of emotion, and
balancing the budget between brand
building and activation. Just as in B2C,
investing in both brand and short-term
tactical is a more effective strategy than
investing heavily in lead generation.
can become salient, memorable and
consistent. Tough ask.
Instead, marketing focuses on short-
term tactics and channel efficiency.
The explosion of data, proliferation of
MarTech, and last touch attribution
ROI further magnify the focus on
‘performance marketing’ and what’s
happening now in dashboards.
This creates a situation where
understanding how audiences perceive
brands, and how their attitudes to
brands change over time, gets neglected.
Yet effectiveness studies continue to
find that long term brand building is
what delivers successful growth (check
out The Marketing Practice’s - The Long
& The Short of B2B Marketing, a study
on B2B effectiveness inspired by Binet
and Field).
Addressing the situation, to achieve
a better balance between activation
and brand building has to move up
the agenda for a business to grow
successfully.
Why is brand important?
Firstly, every business has a brand,
whether conscious of it or not, and it
directly affects how successful they are.
But, what is it exactly? Well, it’s
far more than a logo. A brand is the
intangible, emotional relationship
between an individual and a product
or service, built from the sum of all
expectations, experiences and feelings
at every touchpoint.
Successful brands exceed the
perception of their audience by
consistently delivering positive
experiences at every touchpoint to build
trust and advocacy. The result is that
successful brands are also successful
businesses. Their behaviour builds price
So why is brand building a challenge
within events and exhibitions?
It takes investment over time to
deliver long-term goals. Set against the
pressure to deliver short-term sales,
and meet lead generation targets,
it’s hard to make a business case for
such spend. Try convincing sales led
management they should reallocate
resources towards brand building to
create distinctive brand assets so you
April — 35