There’s a problem in Australian marketing, believes, Stephen Downward, head of SEO at Atomic 212°. We’re all too focused on showing up when consumers are in the right mindset to buy—rather than creating a proper brand experience across the funnel. And it’s doing our work a disservice.
Attending the Ahrefs Evolve conference in Singapore in late October was an eye-opener. More than 500 marketers from all walks of life gathered to bemoan Google, predict the unpredictable and pretend that we have all the answers to everything. There was a single word that reverberated through every presentation: brand. Brand-building, brand relevance, brand activity—these were the heartbeat of every speaker’s presentation.
And it struck a chord with me. Having previously lived and worked in the ASEAN, I was always captivated by one thing: marketers in the region such as Toyota, AIA and Radisson Hotels don’t just get the value of brand-building; they live it in every strategic recommendation. Brand activations and community engagement campaigns? Second nature to them. Long-term brand value? Core to their strategy.
Returning to Australia in 2016, I was full of ideas and inspired by the creative spirit I’d become accustomed to. I pitched a flurry of brand-led concepts to clients often expecting applause for creative genius. The reaction? Crickets. Not one to give up easily, I shared examples of the work we’d done, campaign results and spoke endlessly of their impact—these were strategies that delivered fantastic results. And yet, here in Australia, my clients were unmoved by my passionate pleas for budget allocation.
Was it the ideas? No. These were well-researched audience-driven campaigns. The issue wasn’t the campaign ideas; it was a mindset, a mentality that is deeply embedded in the Australian advertising landscape.
Fiercely loyal and addicted to our immediate KPIs, it feels as though if it’s not last-click, ROI-focused and measurable in Google Analytics, it doesn’t even exist. But here’s the rub: funnelling 95 per cent of your budget to reach the five per cent of consumers who are actively in-market doesn’t build lasting brand value. It’s like only showing up when someone’s already got their wallet out.
Don’t get me wrong: performance marketing is fantastic for reaching that in-market audience and driving measurable ROI. But being the obsessives we are, we spend half our time endlessly analysing those who clicked while often ignoring the majority who didn’t. As marketers, we need to ask ourselves if perhaps we too are guilty of losing sight of the bigger picture. Shouldn’t our goal be to build a brand that’s there for the long haul, one that’s cutting through the noise, poised and ready for that 95 er cent of consumers taking their sweet time to make a choice?
In a fast-moving world, we’re all obsessed with the here-and-now. We’re stuck in the weeds of return on ad spend, all the while ignoring the more important and often more difficult conversations: brand loyalty, future customer lifetime value, market share and, worst of all, declining market share.
Imagine if we shifted just a little more of our focus from immediate sales to future customer value. How would that change our media strategy? How would it reshape the way we advise our clients to invest in their marketing? Sure, it’s not rocket science and we are all aware of these age-old concepts, but are we talking about them often enough? Are we raising these questions and challenging our clients? Perhaps, but there is still a great deal of work to be done.
Professor Byron Sharp has been quoted saying that “paid search, in-store displays, price promotions – these are all there to catch people when they’re ready to buy”. That might be true on the surface, but it’s not entirely accurate.
Anyone who has spent more than a few hours on TikTok could attest to that. Let’s take the brand Dr Squatch as an example. While I’m yet to buy any of its natural organic manly scented soaps, it’s clear they have managed to build an entire brand and mass market awareness through content led performance marketing across TikTok, YouTube and even Google Ads.
Brand-building and performance marketing don’t have to compete for every dollar; they can complement each other by creating a cycle where brand activities support performance goals, and performance metrics help inform creative-led brand campaigns. There is a fantastic opportunity to bring these two worlds a little closer together, to unify and share the same goals.
And while I still don’t really understand what makes Singaporean and Malaysian brands so ready to embrace big, brand-led campaign ideas, if we want to see a shift in the Australian market we need to start challenging ourselves and our clients to perhaps think a little differently about the idea of brand building. Not every client has $5 million at hand to run mass reach brand campaigns, but they also don’t need to.
As marketers have a duty to challenge the traditional ideas of brand building and start to embrace more creative and cohesive channel planning. Who knows, you might just get out next big idea off the ground?
