The resurgence of brand & storytelling

Marketers in the digital age have long relied on behavioral marketing, retargeting and bottom-of-the-funnel results to justify marketing spend. This has largely been to the detriment of brand work.

Performance marketing and judging the impact of all channels will become more difficult in 2023 due to multiple factors effecting the advertising ecosystem. Therefore great storytelling only becomes more important.

All businesses need to make money and drive sales. 

However, the organisations that can embrace this focus in the short term and simultaneously implement a long term strategy based on engaging consumers with great stories and nurture brand equity, will reek the long term rewards.

This is not a revelation and has always been the case.

But the proliferation of digital advertising, tracking and short term focus has made this disparity more pronounced.  

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Marketers should be focussed on how to engage new and existing customers with great stories served in the right place.

In a landscape where cut through is difficult, scrolling is endemic and the average consumer can see up to 10,000 ads in a day, the appetite for storytelling has diminished.

However performance marketing will be harder than ever post cookie, silos and data regulation.

The 2 biggest impacts are that

1.    Storytelling and brand work is going to be more important

2.    Knowing your audience and understanding what they will resonate with, is central for all comms  

This can be seen in how AirBnB are negating low hanging fruit, implementing a longer term strategy where they commit to great stories http://bit.ly/3Clu0iZ

This brave and bold approach, if done right, will pay dividends in the long run, bringing in a lot more new consumers and evolving the positioning of the brand.

Brands need to be very tactful over how and who they engage. Doing all the appropriate due diligence to tell the right stories to the right people. They need to engage their known audience, go through a lengthy research process of appreciating the right way to engage their consumers, whether that is through utilising known audience insights, using semantic research tools and social listening, or relying on qual or quant support.

The right brand activation can enable a brand to build scale, but most importantly can take a lot of the pressure currently building on bottom of the funnel and performance marketing, such as paid search or retargeting.  

If there is one key takeout here, its that marketers have a great opportunity to tell interesting stories. Now is the time to focus on this. The right brand approach has never been more important and aligned with a refined performance strategy can build the platform for both short and long term success.