By: Dr. David Bridwell, People Scientist and Jake McKenzie, Chief Executive Officer
We recently held a webinar where we discussed the balancing act of branding and sales. This is an internal struggle faced by many marketers as they seek to be successful long term while also demonstrating short term results.
The good news is that there’s plenty of research out there highlighting how important brand building is for long term success. Importantly, it’s something companies need to consider if they want to keep greater market share than their competitors, since having a strong brand means:
- Your brand is easily recognizable to your audience in advertisements. This means your advertisements will be perceived by a larger number of people and those people will process it to a greater extent.
- Your brand is easily recognizable on store shelves and/or online. Your brand plays a big role in making sure your audience makes a connection between the advertisements they see as they go about their day and the product that they see when they’re ready to purchase.
- People develop an affinity for your brand. Psychologically, we tend to develop a positive affinity for people or objects that we’re frequently exposed to. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important for brands to be constantly present instead of advertising in short bursts.
- We intuitively understand “who you are”. A strong brand conveys information about the product that establishes it within the product category, or evokes positive emotions, or evokes mental structures or memories for the audience as they go about their day. Brands don’t necessarily have to tick all three of these boxes, but they aim for at least two of the three.
The psychology of branding really underlies the strong business effects that result from good brand marketing. We’ve highlighted a number of research studies demonstrating these effects, including the foundational work of Byron Sharpe and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science as well as The Long and Short of It by Binet and Field.Â
In this article, we’d like to focus on yet more research supporting the power of brand marketing that comes from BBH Labs. Their findings (drawn from here and here) show that:
- Strong brands have three times the sales volume versus their competitors.
- Strong brands come with a 13% price premium.
- For major companies 84% of their intangible value comes from the value of their brand and 20 of their overall market cap can be represented by a strong brand.
Many big companies already know about the power of brand marketing and that helped them get to where they are. If you’re looking to build your brand be prepared to treat marketing like an investment in your brand infrastructure and assets and get ready to get creative. And give us a call at 800-624-9239 or email us at [email protected] to discuss how we can help your brand be top-of-mind for customers.
