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BB06: Yes, I speak Brand
Brand terms worth knowing for your marketing strategy
Schema Agency
March 14, 2024
Prada and Carsten Höller’s The Double Club collaborated with Drake and Luna Luna in Los Angeles.
Wallows released a short film to announce their “Model” world tour.
Nova, a private Instagram community helping creatives find opportunities, is launching their app on March 16.
Philippines-based eyewear brand Sunnies Studios launched Sunnies Flask, a customizable flask.
Yes, I speak Brand. Some brand terms worth knowing for start ups and small business owners.
This week we have a lesson in the language of Brand. Small business owners, startup founders, and other people new to brand marketing may feel a little out of their depth the first time they engage an agency to help them with crafting messaging for their brands. To get you up to speed, here are a few terms you may encounter and why they would be helpful to keep in your brand marketing toolkit.
The Brief of the Brief
Channel Strategy
A channel strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a business intends to connect with its target audience and fulfill their needs using a range of marketing channels, both online and offline. Typical marketing channels include: email marketing, websites, social media, mobile marketing, digital advertising, and print advertising.
Why would a channel strategy be important for you and your brand? If you have a limited budget, a thoughtful channel strategy would help you see the big picture of your marketing spending to see where it would be most worthwhile to invest.
For example, you are running a D2C haircare brand targeted to younger millennials and Gen Z. You know from your research that this market isn’t active on Facebook and would be hard to reach via print channels. You do recognize the value of OOO (out-of-home) advertising for exposure, so you choose to invest there. A great channel strategy will help you maximize the roles of each channel you choose to pursue and where you want your messaging to be prioritized.
Marketing Churn
Churn in marketing refers to the rate at which customers stop interacting with your brand at a specific period. Churn, in brand marketing is a great way to track the effectiveness of your messaging, designed materials, and other consumer-facing executions you may have launched at any stage.
How to track it? Here’s an example: Say you have a campaign, and you’re trying to understand it’s impact on your follower count. At the start of the campaign, you have 5000 followers and as you create your post-mortem report to track your initiatives, you notice that you have lost 1000 followers by the end of the campaign. Using the formula above, your churn rate is 20%. You take note of this number and analyze your campaign to see where and why there was dropoff so that you can improve to keep your churn down with your next one. While you can search for industry averages of churn for marketing, it’s always best to test your own initiatives and develop an internal baseline to measure future initiatives against.
Brand Affinity
Brand affinity is the emotional connection that exists between customers and companies. When people share the same values as a brand, they are more likely to purchase its products and recommend them to others. Apart from generating sales, every brand’s goal should be to create affinity with their audience, which means that the entire buying process is highly influenced by an emotional bond.
Brand affinity can be developed, for example, by interaction and engagement with your audience. It reaches another level when consumers not only stay loyal but also become advocates for your company, expanding your reach and authority. Other ways to build brand affinity? Think of ways to foster your relationships with your customers, helping them feel seen, heard, and appreciated. They are, in fact, the reason why your brand continues to exist in the first place! Whether it’s customer service, loyalty programs, activations and events, exclusive perks, or surprises… think, what would you want to see a brand do for you?
Consumer Touchpoints
Consumer touchpoints are the points of interaction between a brand and its customers. They represent every opportunity a business has to impress its brand image upon consumers and can occur across various channels such as sales, customer service, or social media. These correlate heavily with your Marketing Funnels (more on those in a future BB).
Why are these important to think about? You never know where you might be missing the opportunity to make a positive, and memorable, impact on your customer. For example, a customer viewing a product advertisement on social media is a touchpoint, and a customer receiving post-purchase support from a company's customer service team is another touchpoint–they may seem unrelated, but they’re both opportunities to reinforce brand.
To create an impactful brand, your brand’s DNA must be present at every point in which you interact with your consumers. Often, when there is a disconnect between brand and brand practice, the customer’s experience may fall short and you will fail to develop affinity (that emotional relationship we touched on earlier) for your brand.
If you don’t care to speak Brand, and prefer to speak English instead, we can help condense and digest these concepts into executions that make sense for your brand at any stage, here to chat and give insight, always. Give us a shout at [email protected]
