#5 Think long

Brands need to think long, and short — efficiently, and effectively balancing performance and brand-building efforts to deliver immediate returns and long-term growth. As a marketer, you need a consumer-centric strategy that ensures you win high-value segments by inspiring consumers to DO MORE with your brand, by purchasing, advocating, and reviewing. Meanwhile, you also need to reach the broader market and inspire them to THINK MORE about your brand, by forming relevant brand associations and seeding demand space cues.

To achieve this, you need to change the way you view the consumer landscape: targeted activation and brand building need different types of insights, but these still need to be aligned. Consumer research or segmentation traditionally focuses on highlighting differences. This helps to design targeted, benefit-focused, short-term activation. But to drive long-term impact on the market, you need to increase your reach by understanding what unites segments, not divides them.

Targeted activation for short-term growth focuses on the differences between segments, while longer-term brand building activities leverage their similarities. Working coherently together, you can achieve optimal, scalable and sustainable growth for your brand.

A broad reaching, long-term strategy needs to encompass two strategic avenues: upscaling targeting activities to increase reach and future growth, and the cultivation of brand connection.

Rationally linking your brand with broader demand entry points

Broadening your brand’s reach from the center to the periphery helps you win consumers’ future purchases by creating clear associations to a wider space of relevant demand entry points. This is the new marketing model adopted by Coca-Cola, who aims to drive profitable long-term growth for its entire portfolio of brands in this way. CEO James Quincey explains that their “new marketing model is focused on adding and retaining consumers. And we’re doing this through an ecosystem of experiences that link consumption occasions with consumer passion points.”

"This entails identifying common contextual cues, that your brand can own across multiple demand spaces to maximise mental associations and top of mind awareness across a broader consumer base. The objective here is that you futureproof your demand by ensuring that once you achieve saturation in your targeted growth space, your growth is not limited since you have already built associations in the minds of consumers with your other future demand entry points. This ensures that future consumers already know your brand and associate your brand with a broader set of demand entry moments, so when the buying moment arises, they have a higher predisposition towards your brand.”

Emotionally linking your brand with unifying human truth

This entails discovering themes that consumers across all segments and communities value, so you can build your brand on messages that deliver a net-positive impact across the market. Insights gained from this process will help you build a brand famous for its purpose and values, by aligning your brand’s ‘Why’ with where consumers see value, to generate a higher brand worth. Our GfK Brand Architect research shows that whilst Brand Purpose and Brand Values have lower impact on driving market sales volumes for brands, they do have an impact on justifying a Brand Premium.

Increasing brand premium by investing in brand building is a strategy Coca-Cola has adopted: driving concrete worth in all consumer wallets, with the objective of securing revenue growth amidst the crisis. Chief Financial Officer John Murphy said the decision to increase spend was made to “create more value” for Coca-Cola’s brands, and to “continue to earn the respect of price points.” GfK Market Intelligence data from 2008 proves this strategy in the Consumer Technology and Durables sector: our sales data showed that price premium goods grew at the cost of standard-priced goods, both during and after that financial crisis.

“Successful brand building investment has a second but highly attractive long-term impact, it can influence your consumer’s willingness to pay a higher price for your product. By connecting your brand truth to consumer truth, you add additional value to your product, value beyond reason, a result is a reduction in consumers’ sensitivity to price – a marketing outcome that is especially crucial during inflationary times.“