Figuring out the Brand:Growth ratio.
The two core promotional arms of marketing are constantly battling for attention.
Brand seeks to improve your status and positioning in a market, while Growth is aimed at predictably increasing your company's revenue.They are both essential and thrive off of one another.
A bulletproof growth strategy fails when a product isn't positioned correctly & a beautiful campaign with perfect positioning fails when you cannot measure its impact and optimize.
The solution is to work on both… but at an early-stage company, time is your most critical asset, and focus helps ensure you're maximizing your time.
Sarah Emmott and Holly Chen wrote a great article in First Round Review a few months back, which did a great job tangibly breaking down how you focus your efforts when thinking about different types of ad campaigns.
That same framework can be applied to marketing efforts, resourcing, and spending at large.
Here are the core items to run through in your marketing org, along with my current answers for Hiive.
- How big of a purchase is this product? Higher value = more brand
- How much competition is there? More competition = more brand
- How is the market trending? Risk averse markets = more growth
- How searchable is the product? More searchable = more growth
- What is the company's reputation? Better perspective = more growth
- How saturated is growth? More saturated = more brand
- How much budget do you have? Less budget = more growth
We're scoped to focus 75% of our effort on growth and 25% on brand.
Our company is in hyper-growth mode, and we're still trying to hone in on our core audience, which makes a significant investment in the brand costly, especially if (when) we need to pivot a bit.
Once we start to find a bit more of a perfect fit in the market, I see the pendulum swinging back the other way so we can differentiate and establish ourselves as the leaders in our market.
