Today on Stacking Growth, we have the first part of a brand measurement event featuring Matt Chanelah and Dale Harrison. This is part one of three. We're releasing them in part so you have a chance to really engage with the information presented. Today they're covering the importance of brand and performance in your marketing strategy, including the differences between the two as well as the impact they have on your overall brand.
There's psychology, cognitive science and audience questions that will make this a really informative introduction to the series. Hope you enjoy. We're going to start by just talking about why this stuff actually matters because there is, there's almost two schools with on there almost feel like they're clashing with each other all the time. I'm running all performance marketing where I'm running PLG or I'm running this single base outbound with Clay or something like that or I'm running all brand and the only thing I'm interested in is share of search and then just looking at the incremental lift of my of my amount from it.
But obviously you need both in some way, shape or form and you need to balance it. So I think we're going to start by talking about why this matters, how they differ and then how they interact with one another. And I think those are going to be sort of the three things that key in on for you guys and then we'll get into like heuristics about budget allocation and what's best there. I'm dying to hear your use cases also here in the audience.
So if you're running into a challenge or a situation where you have a bunch of peers here and we can talk it out and I really would love to hear those use cases and Dan and I can ruminate on those as well. Drop them in the comments. Stephanie will moderate those and where it's advantageous. Stephanie will ask you to just interject and ask the question and then we will shoot on it.
If that's okay. That sounds good to you, Dale. Sounds great. All right, let's go man.
Let's start by talking about why brand and performance matter. Right. So what does it matter? Especially in B2B.
I mean, I think it's it's they're slightly different case if you're in say fast-moving consumer goods on the B2C side. But in B2B, it really matters that people know who you are before they come in market. If they don't, if they don't know you exist until they stumble across you after you're in market, you've largely already lost the game. And so, you know, we now have multiple studies just within the last few years from Gartner from Boston Consulting Group and then more recently, really good stuff out of six cents.
This shows that somewhere between 80 to 85% of B2B buyers have what's called a day one consideration set, which means they already have a set of typically two to three brands that they're already fully familiar with before they ever have a need that brings them in market. And then about 90% of the final purchases come from that day one list. And as you move upscale from mom and pops to SMBs to, you know, up toward the enterprise, this becomes a stronger and stronger effect. You know, it's very, very hard to sell, especially if you're selling into larger companies or enterprise level companies, it's very hard to sell them something that they were not already familiar with before they had a need.
So if a buyer does not already know you and see you as a purchase option before they come in market, you got relatively less chance of being selected. And what this really means is that companies simply buy from other companies that they know and trust, and this is especially true for B2B. But we still need to get in front of buyers when they're ready to buy. So we can't rely just on brand alone, nor can we rely entirely on performance, trying to catch them as they come in market.
So if we know that 100% of either is not the right solution, then there's got to be some sort of a correct profit maximizing balance between 100% brand versus 100% performance. And that's a lot of what we're going to talk about here is how do you get some sense of what that correct profit maximizing balance is. So let's start with what do we mean by the difference between brand versus performance? Because I think this is a huge area of confusion, especially in B2B, you know, because people say, well, we have our logo on the, you know, right next to the call to action.
So it must be a brand ad, you know, or it's a brand performance ad all rolled into one. So there's a lot of confusion. You tend not to see this level of confusion with large B2B to see companies. You know, if you're selling consumer packaged goods, there's a really, really well understood distinction between brand and what they call sales activation or point of sale marketing.
So what do we mean by brand versus performance? So when is something brand? When is it performance? And can it be both?
And if you think of this in terms of jobs to be done. So a brand marketing piece, and again, it probably makes sense to make a distinction between a brand, brand elements. So what I call distinctive brand assets and then brand marketing. So a brand is a product's unique identity.
It's what makes that product look like itself. And part of what makes it look like itself is that there are distinctive brand assets, logos, colors, we'll go into a list of these in a minute. But in the same way that we are unique individuals, part of how our friends recognize us as, you know, that we are who we are and not, you know, and don't mistake us for say, our mother or our father or our cousin is that we have very distinctive looks. You know, and humans are really quite tuned in on being able to see very subtle distinctions and sort of visual looks and sounds and smells that help us immediately identify the characteristics that make a unique person unique.
And a lot of what we're doing in brand marketing is we're leaning into these sort of evolutionary capabilities that have developed in humans to be able to see subtle differences to identify uniqueness and unique identity. So if we think about what a brand's brand marketing's job to be done is to implant a refresh durable memory associations between the brands distinctive brand assets and the product category, along with recall triggers tied to specific buying situations. So if all they do is remember the logo, we haven't really gotten very far. You know, even if we can get them to make that connection between who we are as a brand and the product category that we're offering a product in, if they don't think about us when they come in market, if there isn't a good recall trigger, we failed.
So in the end, brand is about creating recallable memory structures. And just to talk for a quick second about this idea of DBAs, so distinctive brand assets. So these are all the things that make you look like yourself and make you look different than others that are similar to you. And one of the things that you often see, especially in B2B, is there's often a tendency to look for different brands to end up looking very similar to one another.
Same colors, same fonts, similar sorts of logos. And one of the things that you see is that in some areas, there can be very high misattribution rates among brand marketing, where someone will see an ad for company A, but it looks so much like company B, because using similar colors, the same fonts, very similar sorts of logos, it looks so much like brand B that they completely think that they have seen an ad for brand B, or that that ad will actually trigger a memory of brand B. This is a real problem if you're a small brand working against large competitors. If you look too much like your large competitor, your ads won't trigger a memory of you.
It will trigger a memory of your competitor. So this is why the creative side of the Saint-the-Bran assets becomes very, very important for success. But these things are like logos, taglines, colors, and fonts. Mass gots, which turn out to be very little used and extremely powerful, because we have a tendency to remember anthropomorphic things, animals and people.
And we see this with something with a really highly successful brand like Salesforce. From day one, Salesforce used Mass gots. When they made a large pivot in around 2010, 2012, part of that pivot was around pivoting away from the, what they call the Sassy Mass got, which was basically a person in a costume that had the no-software logo over to Astro, the kid in the raccoon costume. And now, it's this whole collection of animal mascots that is present in every single ad that they do.
The other thing, that turns out to be very significant, because again, we have this ability to remember auditory cues, or jingles, bumpers, and stingers. So not just a song, but just a single four notes in a row that are unique. And you look at something like, for those that are old enough to remember, the AOL, you have mail ding, highly distinctive, it was like a two note or three note ding, the logon ding for Windows that was around for a long time. And then things like packaging design.
And again, you see this with Apple, where part of our example, very distinctive, isn't just the product, but how the package looks. You see an Apple package. You know, you know that that is Apple without ever having to see the Apple logo. Yeah, I'm going to go back to this.
I want to add a little bit to this, because I think one thing that I see a lot, we see a lot of companies really only have the first three, right? Logos, sometimes tagline, colors and fonts to your point. Mass gots are a super underutilized distinctive brand asset. Even for smaller, smaller challenger brands, I mean, I think most of us found this event on LinkedIn.
And one brand that's a smaller brand, even that I think is taking advantage of Mass gots as a company like Fiddler, which uses the pink lion almost throughout everything that I'm hungry in his team does. And I think like, you don't have to be a large brand to use a Mass got effectively as a distinctive brand asset. I think they're, I'm seeing a brand like Fiddler use that super effectively. Another, the Jingle's Mumbers and Singles.
I think these things to me are like some of the most memorable things that you actually associate to brands. You, you cited a bunch of examples. One thing that is like etched in my memory is like the ding from teams. Like I always know what the sound of a Microsoft Teams message is because I just hear it so often.
And so like the sound of your brand actually matters quite a bit. And I think companies that use that really effectively, especially when they just, when they're consistent about it, really make it last. I had a question for you on this too, because I don't know if this actually falls into this category, but I just wanted to think about it a little tactically, because I'm, I was reading a lot of the, I was reading a lot of the, the output of like the Con Festival last week and like influencer marketing was like one of the huge topics, even though it's been around forever, but for whatever reason, all those huge brands now are, are taking a puppet in when I want to present on it. But how do influencer efforts like help or hurt you when you want to look like yourself?
I'm curious kind of how you, how you view something like that in relation to this. Well, and that's a challenge because, you know, if the influencer is well known or at least well known to their audience, you know, are they reinforcing their own brand or they reinforcing your brand? Yeah. And there's a lot of evidence that, that, you know, the influencer presenting your brand in many circumstances can be very weak in the sense that it's what it's really triggering is members of the influencer, as opposed to members of the brand that they're, that they're presenting.
You know, the other thing with, you know, especially in the era of video where I think everyone has video marketing assets, there's no reason you should not have a highly distinctive bumper and a highly distinctive stinger, you know, at the beginning and the ending of those videos. And even something like jingles, which are considered kind of old school, I'll just tell you a quick anecdote. In the late 1940s, Alka Seltzer came up with a short little jingle that was plot, plot, fizz, fizz, I won't try to sing it. There were people of a certain age that all you have to say is plot, plot, and they can immediately break into that jingle.
What's interesting is the last time that, and they, and Alka Seltzer really heavily used this in TV advertising and secondarily radio, but heavily TV. The last time an Alka Seltzer commercial ran with that jingle was 1975. And 50 years later, there are tens of millions of people who can, you say the first two words and they can finish the song. And so that gives you a sense of kind of the power and the long lasting memory structures that something like a jingle can, you know, or, or these bumpers or stingers can, can provide you.
These are, these are simple to do and very powerful in terms of, of adding to the list of distinctive brand assets. Dale, we have a question in chat from Amit who wants to know what the line is between DBA and something that's replicable, like a department store who's known for heartwarming, tear jerking, creative narratives during the holiday season. So where do you ride the line between something that's distinctly yours and something that's more thematic? I mean, I think a good thing.
I mean, a reasonable dividing line is if someone else uses it, can I sue them? Because that then means that you're establishing a moat, you know, that you've got a sufficient intellectual protection. And the reason these laws exist are because this is what companies for decades and decades try to do is basically steal each other's fame by a recognition by mimicking their assets. And you know, and so the reason that they're very clear laws about how close you can get to matching someone else before you get sued is because that's really where the demarcation is.
You know, you can't, you can't intellectually protect a feeling or a concept or an idea, but you can definitely protect a jingle, a bumper, a mascot, you know, a logo. And you know, and even things like colors and fonts, if they get heavily copied because they're not that protectable. So you can't rely just on something like colors and fonts alone. And this is why some of these other distinctive brand assets really give you a deeper moat.
Because you have a higher degree of legal protection for a longer period of time. You know, you look at someone like Coca-Cola or BMW or Nike that, you know, Coke 120 years, BMW, you know, now 130 or 40 years Mercedes, you know, more than 100 years with essentially the same core distinctive brand assets. So, you know, they're highly successful companies that have been, you know, that have had really stable use of these sorts of devices for a long time. It's sometimes not just the brand asset too, but how you use the brand asset as well.
So like, you know, we'll get into this later as we get into more of this presentation. But the amount of reach you try to give those assets across your service will attainable market also matters quite a bit because there's lots of brands that have distinctive brand assets but will over index on things like performance marketing where those things don't really take the hold or build the moat that they're initially designed to do. Right. So we looked at, you know, what's brand's job to be done.
Performance is job to be done is to basically trigger an in-market buyer to take an immediate physical action that will advance an active buying process. So performance is about driving some sort of an immediate action. And one of the things that we see right away is that, you know, these are touching very different parts of the brain. So there are fundamental cognitive differences between the process is involved in durable memory formation and the process is involved in responsive action.
And it's really effectively impossible to do both at once. There are cases where you can do them sequentially, one behind the other, but there's really no mechanism to where you can effectively do both. And you know, which is why we need to really think in terms of separate streams of brand versus performance marketing. And there are actually some very good studies that have been done within the last 10 years showing that that even highly performing performance marketing ads tend to leave no durable memory and especially no durable memory in the minds of people who didn't execute the action, the call to action.
So and again, there's some very good research out of neuroscience that explains why that is. But you know, if we look at the cognitive difference between brand and performance is memory formation works best. First of all, when it's triggered in an emotional response, triggered in association with an emotional response. And the second thing is that future buyers who are not currently in market are simply not willing to invest the attention and focus on complex sort of logical presentation of product and features and details.
So what that means is brand ad should be brief, focused on a single memory association and they should trigger some sort of an emotional response to work well. The emotional response has to do with some very kind of ancient pathways in the brain because one of the problems that all animals have in humans as well is that there's an enormous amount of stimulus coming into our brains constantly from the outside world. Most of that stimulus is noise. Most of that stimulus has no real meaning.
And so in the brainstem, there is there is a section of the brainstem called the reticular activating system that basically acts as as a filter for sensory stimulus coming in and it's constantly trying to decide is this something that's important enough to pass up to the conscious brain or is this simply noise that I can ignore. And one of the mechanisms that a reticular activating system uses to be able to make that decision is did this stimulus arrive simultaneously with an emotional response? And because again, the emotional responses are happening at a sort of a subconscious level in the brain. And when it sees that, it says there's probably something important here.
I should pass it up for the smarter parts of the brain to take a deeper look at. And the example in this is, you know, many of us go to the store every week, go to the office every day and we will go through a stop sign or a red light every single day for thousands and thousands of days in a row and have no memory of having gone through that stop sign because what happens is we pull up, you know, we see the sign that triggers an immediate response which is stop and look both ways. If everything's fine, then we move. The only time we remember that stop sign and that intersection, you know, is that day that someone almost de-bonds us because they ran the stop sign and scared the crap out of us.
And it's that sort of very basic everyday stimulus that occurs simultaneously with eliciting an emotion that then causes that to then go up to the higher levels of the brain and form and trigger the process for memory formation. If we look at the performance side, responsive action requires a separate pathway for immediate action and you usually need some sort of factual information to drive the decision-making. So future buyers are simply who are not in market or just not willing to invest the sort of attention or focus that you're going to see in a good performance ad. You know, so again, performance ads should be information heavy with a clear immediate call to action because our goal here is to get them to do something right now if they're ready.