Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

Eco­nomic pres­sure has cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion where mar­keters are ask­ing for imme­di­ate results before they ask for per­ceived lux­u­ries like brand recognition.

Clients are demand­ing met­rics that con­nect mar­ket­ing to sales. Met­rics for things like brand recog­ni­tion are tough to tie to con­crete things like sales and thus to ROI.

They’re also push­ing for media plans to focus on Web and direct because they pro­vide con­crete track­ing data. While tele­vi­sion, where brand­ing has thrived is receiv­ing less inter­est of late.

What does this mean for the prac­tice of brand­ing in the future? Well, I think in the short term it means less money spent tak­ing chances on things like this Web video that offer no mea­sur­able call to action, direct tie to a prod­uct or prod­uct mes­sage. Heck, all it does is get con­sumers excited about a brand? Heck, it’s not like Nike built an empire doing that or anything.

Many in the dig­i­tal sphere are call­ing for an end to the dis­ci­pline of brand­ing. They say brand­ing was devel­oped for mass-markets and we can now reach indi­vid­u­als behav­iorally and tar­get them with more rel­e­vant mes­sages tai­lored to their indi­vid­ual behav­ioral pro­files — demo­graph­ics are now old school.

Some peo­ple may see behav­ioural tar­get­ing as very Minor­ity Report but it usu­ally means more rel­e­vant comu­ni­ca­tion for the con­sumer. And causes less stereo­typ­ing of the tar­get audi­ance. And that’s good, right?

Well, until we start fac­tor­ing scale. It makes sense for peo­ple with very large mar­ket­ing bud­gets and for retail­ers with spe­cific prod­ucts for spe­cific peo­ple. Ama­zon does a good job of this on me. But what if you have a lim­ited bud­get  and mar­ket and can’t cre­ate indi­vid­ual mes­sages because your audi­ence isn’t Amazon-sized. In some cases, it means turn­ing the focus back on the brand and the ben­e­fit it offers con­sumers as a whole.