All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Stacking Growth Live. Looking forward to this conversation. We're going to talk a little brand versus a little demand. This came up on a stacking growth about a month ago, and so we kind of scrolled it away and put on a list to come back and talk about.
Also comes up quite a bit in terms of our conversations with customers. It's come up a lot in my career as in running marketing for big companies and small. It seems to be a topic we see a lot of on LinkedIn. So what we thought we'd do is cover this topic today, try to break it down, make some sense of it, give everyone some takeaways and thoughts that they could use going back to their company to kind of figure out what is brand and how is that compared to the man and so forth and so on.
So I love a lot of participation from this crowd because this is a topic that people have a lot of perspective and opinions and views on. So feel free to jump in whenever you're ready to jump in. With that, I'm going to introduce Ramin and Darian introduce themselves who are here as a co-host with me. And as I introduce themselves, I'm going to start with Tori.
I wanted to answer the question of what comes to mind when he gets asked about the relationship between brand and demand. Tori, over to you. Hey, thanks Cassidy. Hey everybody, Tori Kinlick, VP of Demand Gen here at Refine Labs.
And as far as for me, what comes to mind when asked about brand and demand, brand versus demand is for the most part, I really feel like they're almost one and the same. At least as it relates to the demand creation aspect of demand generation. And we'll get into all the wrinkles and nuances. But I'm definitely one of those people that sees a whole lot of similarities between brand awareness, brand marketing, brand lift.
However, you want to call it or measure it and demand creation, which is effectively kind of doing that same thing, creating that awareness about your company, your organization, your products, and what you solve. And so yeah, I think those are my opening thoughts. I know that we will go much deeper on some of these things. But yeah, for me, I feel like oftentimes they're one and the same.
And if you don't see it that way, then maybe we'll be able to change your mind by the end of our session here. Interesting perspective. Thanks, Torey. Darren.
Yeah, thanks. See how my name is Darren Perucci. I'm a director of demand here at Refine. Same with Torey.
When I think of brand, demand, all those things, first thing comes to mind mind is organization. I think I always want to ask for questions like how are you defining this? How are you organizing this? What's the structure?
And then the second thing that comes to mind is all the dates that we always have after I ask those questions. So again, I'm a Torey. I tend to think that they should be lumped together as much as possible. And there's a ton of nuances and tons of details I'm excited to talk about.
Awesome. Thanks, Darren. So what I thought we'd do first is get into some definitions. I mean, before we start having a conversation about the comparing and contrasting a brand demand, we got to know what we're talking about.
So I'm going to put Dory on Spot. And I'm going to ask him to define how we think of demand. There's three types. I'll let him walk through that.
So we'll start with demand, kind of break that down from our perspective. And then we'll get into brand next. So Dory putting on Spot. So yeah, for how we define demand generation, I think it's commonly, especially today, looked at as the difference between demand creation and demand capture.
And I think that there's another layer of this as well, which you're starting to see surface more and more in conversations and on LinkedIn, which is damning the demand. And so to take them one by one, right? Demand creation. And this is the part that I feel is most anonymous with brand, brand awareness, and brand lift.
Is that that ability or that effort to put your brand, your company out there in front of your target audience with enough consistency and with enough clear and concise and borderline repetitive messaging, so that people understand exactly who you are and what problems that you can solve for them with the real ultimate end goal being that once that trigger event does occur, they're going to know who you are and they're going to know the best ways to get in contact with you, so that they can either learn more or get a demo of your product or whatever it is that they're really looking to do as an next step. And so then that kind of lends itself into the demand capture effort, right? And demand capture is when you're able to convert those people who you have been ideally putting your brand, your logo, your content in front of into a contact or there, I say a leader MQL in your system, but you're effectively able to capture their information and pull them into your sales motion or product motion. And then there's damning the demand, which to me, it almost kind of lives in between the two, probably much more aligned to demand creation, but damning the demand is a strategy, as far as I know, that was coined by Christopher Lockhead and all of his legendary marketing efforts and concepts, but damning the demand is almost a way to siphon off or steal existing demand in a category from the category leader or a brand that has more awareness, more traffic, more inbound than you do, and finding a way to really help a person understand the connection between your brand and this market leader, but at the same time helping them understand the difference and why that difference is better.
And so I actually randomly just posted on LinkedIn about this last week, and I think a good example right is the air fryer market. So many of us have air fryers right now and they weren't out there necessarily trying to just get started with selling an air fryer or a convection oven, but rather they were trying to position themselves as an alternative to deep fryer. And so while there were people out there that love food that was deep fried, it's also unhealthy and it's messy. And so I think the air fryer market effectively started damning demand.
There was existing demand for this product, this category, and they found a way to siphon some of that demand off in their own direction and start to kind of create the buzz that way. So there's a lot of demand creation element to that, but then there's also the demand capture, right? They need to be able to effectively pull these people in and convert them. So that is my, I guess, kind of summary as far as the three different buckets of demand generation and the differences between all of them.
And hopefully kind of helps us at the stage a little bit for Darren here and how we dovetail that into the brand discussion as well. Yeah, thanks, Tori. I appreciate that. Very good explanation.
I do hope that the leading air fryer companies out there have, how did you hear about us on their form? So when I go to get an air fryer, I can say I heard about it in dark social from Tori. Good. So we got create demand capture demand and ban the demand.
Try to say that fast. Now, I want some audited participation here and Darren's going to help. The next thing we're going to obviously do is try to define brand, which is a little bit more difficult. So I'd love to hear what people on this call have to say, with regard to how we would define access, important, we start.
So Darren, you're going to get a harder question here than Tori. No, Fensatory. How should we or how do we define brand? Yeah, I welcome all the comments to and I will be offended to be disagree with whatever definition we have a brand.
So a couple of different ways to really like define brand. One way I liked is a brand is a way a product company or individual is perceived by those who experience it. That's folks on the user who's like consuming the brand, if you will. Another way I like to hear about it is a brand is a summation of all customer touchpoints with your company.
That's one of my favorite ones because I think brand is a lot more than just the look and the feel and the logos and the colors and fonts. Like it is what you deliver and how you deliver it. And that, you know, amalgamation of all those touchpoints is really like what his home for me as what brand is. Any thoughts from the audience?
I'll give a, get ready to add your comments to the chat. A brand, I just googled this, right? So good way to figure this out. A brand is an intangible marketing or business concept that helps people identify company, product, individual.
That's the first thing that came up when I googled it. A few others, very similar to what Darren Outline, a brand is a way a product company or individuals perceived by those who experience it. I think that's the first one that Darren commented on. I think that's a, that's a sink way to think about it.
I've got a few more coming in here. Yeah. And Cassie, maybe while more people are contributing their definitions, sometimes I like to, instead of like pure definition, because sometimes that can become lost, I like to think like almost like a checkbox in my mind. Like, do I resonate with this brand?
Is it something I trust? Do I go back to them? Do I refer back to them or it? Maybe I should refer to it.
And that sometimes helps me to know if somebody has a strong brand because it checks off a lot of boxes for me, like, you know, maybe emotionally rather than just trying to define it too. I like that. So we got a few here. Brand is the emotion regarding your product and company.
Cognizant belong here. Demand is about why by one brand is why by ours. That's a nice way to think about it. There's a common quote.
B's is that a brand is what people say about you after you leave the room. I like that reputation, every touch point again. Awesome. Branch be memorable through what it has to offer.
Okay. So my question then is maybe for you Tori, who owns like brand? And so when we think about like this idea, I get everybody understands brand is kind of how people feel about your category, your product, your service, your company, how they have the culmination of the experiences they have with your company. So how's that manifest itself?
We have a day to day like we have these teams called brand teams within a marketing organization. What is that vis-a-vis this kind of definition in your opinion? So, and I think this is kind of where I do have a little bit of a stronger point of view on this. I believe that a lot of those brand teams that exist today are a bit antiquated.
So originally, right, and someone mentioned the cognizant blog, which I came across as well recently just kind of doing a little bit of prep work for our conversation today. But I think that originally where a lot of this separation between brand and demand comes from is likely the B to C space like a lot of things in B to B. And so what I mean by that and how I kind of link it to that cognizant blog is, you know, the way I look at it is brand is why us and demand is why now. And so when you're thinking about that B to C transaction, it's linear.
It's an individual. And so when you think about the individual buying process within all of that, right, it is easy to split out the long term play versus the short term conversion play. But in B to B, especially as it pertains to a lot of the narratives that, you know, we have refined labs and our colleagues and our peers and followers are putting out their demand generation is so much more than just capturing and converting, right? And it is about that demand creation and that long term play.
And so I think that for a long time, it made a whole lot of sense for companies to break apart the brand team and the demand team because, you know, a couple years ago, that was the approach that we all took as far as our go to market motions. Brand was a long term play. And I feel like that companies adopted that as a way to buy themselves a little bit of time, right? Because we all understand that brand marketing does take a little bit of time to generate traction.
But I think more recently, you know, what teams are rising up to is that demand creation and demand capture should be done in parallel. And so I think that's really my rationale for why I don't believe that there should be a separate brand team. I think the brand should effectively be owned by everybody within the marketing organization. Everybody should carry the responsibility.
Everybody should have accountability around it as well. And I think, you know, this approach of like, you know, brand why us demand why now is maybe a little bit outdated and teams might want to start rethinking, you know, how much sense it really makes to keep those teams separate when, you know, demand creation is something that is ongoing and sure it's long term, but it doesn't have to be that long term if you're doing it the right way. Yeah, Tori, I like what you're saying to about, and I actually agree that they should be combined. Two of the things I've seen in Microsoft, so far as usually there's some sort of disconnect between connecting it within marketing, like digital marketing or whatever, and then also like the creative marketers.
So I feel like, I don't know, I'd be curious if anybody else has this experience as well, but I feel like those are always two things I'm trying to figure out is okay, where do we bring creative to create this brand really together and how do we work together in the right way? That's right. I feel like the disconnect usually happens is every once to own it, because every nose is important. I think companies like are genuinely trying to do it really well.
I know a company who outfitted all their door to our salesman with like full Lulu lemon get ups because they're like brand is so important. And we want them to think of us as this, this instead of that, but that's just looks like I'm gonna take a less it transcends and everything else that the marketing students, you know, I want to play a little bit of a devil's advocate on this because I think in many aspects brand awareness and demand creation are synonymous. However, you know, isn't brand a lot of times and bigger companies like the creative team like the creative team needed a new name so they called a brand and that might be a little bit of a shot. But at the same time, there is some credence of that, right?
So you have big company and multiple products, you have thousands of people and you're trying to create consistency across what everything we do. Like in the spirit of creating consistency across touch points, you need some somebody kind of govern that. Does that have value today or is that just it does? It's just called a creative team is that called a brand team?
What any thoughts on that? Let's just say the visual aspects, the visual identity of a company, of course, that is highly important and something that, you know, does require a lot of thought, a lot of strategy and teams dedicated to ensuring the consistency of how that logo is used and represented. But does that need to be an entire team at a company? I suppose, depending on the size of the company, when you get into the upper tier of the enterprise space and you're talking about millions of dollars being spent a month towards one would consider brand awareness or demand creation advertising.
Perhaps then you can justify having, you know, dedicated headcount for something like this. But I think that the companies that are doing this the best right now, there is that shared accountability where it's owned throughout the entire organization. And certainly, you know, I was talking to a friend recently that she leads a global marketing team and she almost positions each one of the regional teams that are regional leaders as effectively a mini CMO for the company. And so that person is responsible for distributing their brand, their tone of voice and showing that there is consistency with all that inside their market.
But there are going to be nuances with how things are interpreted or leveraged within each of the global markets. And so that's the job of that one person. Now, how can you effectively put a brand team on top of all that because they would miss out on a lot of those nuances? And I think that there's a little bit of a maybe a disconnect with how things were previously that was very effective and maybe how things are still utilized today.
And does it still need to be operating the same way that that it once did? I question if it does, I think that, you know, there's companies that are doing it very well out there today and are still able to create that consistency with their message, their visual identity, even some sonic branding that applies across all markets without a overarching brand team that, you know, owns some of these responsibilities. So let me, yeah, there's a lot of good comments here. So I'm not ignoring them.
I'm reading that. I'm going to try to frame the reframe them into a question back to Tori Naren. And that is a lot of times demand is thought of as performance marketing. And so we would call that capturing demand.
You know, when I think about the structurally, when it may be easier to be like, listen, the demand team just goes and captures and the brand team goes and creates. And so maybe it's like a reframing of really think of this is kind of pulling it into one team called demand and they have like capture, create and ban in one team. But maybe the other way to think about this is like we break them into different teams and we're going to give brand a purpose that purpose is to create a band. Yeah, I'll jump in.
So it's kind of connecting back to that whole like brand awareness does brand awareness people demand creation. Just add more nuance to it. It's funny. I feel like it depends on how you do it.
I've heard in a band company where brand awareness was like the bucket where we put everything. We're like, oh, like, yeah, let's put like a sponsorship under brand awareness. We'll put, you know, trade show can go into brand awareness. Like anything that we didn't really want to be accountable for, it got plump under brand awareness.
And I think that's not the right way to do it. And I don't think that's how you really build a brand that like develops affinity or that people have affinity for. So I kind of want to know like maybe brand is more of a precursor to performance rather than something I should sit on top. Maybe it needs to come before so that the different kind of organizations who are trying to get that message out are all aligned.
That makes sense. I'm just kind of curious what other thoughts are on that actually. I agree with Cassidy. It should be that there's a demand capture team and there's demand creation.
And you could call the demand creation team brand. You could call it awareness. You could separate it by tears the way David's been saying like a strategic overview versus per solution. But these terms are just hurting us.
There's too much closeness between creating demand and creating awareness. Because what are you creating awareness for? You're creating awareness of your own demands for our product. So I feel like we're just really as marketers shooting ourselves in the foot with having these terms be too mixed up.
And as someone who's been in brand for years and been part of several reductions in force because brand is the first one to go and brands first want to go. Even though the brand team was doing all the demand. We were like, but we just didn't brand ourselves that way. And the demand team was doing all capture.
So going forward in my career as I build an organization as I get to be in charge of my own org charts, I definitely would say everybody in marketing is in charge of performance. Everybody in marketing is in charge of demand. And we have different roles within that. I appreciate that.
Thank you for jumping in on that. That's very good. I went to the go to David. So David, I've seen a few of your comments about this seems to be more oriented towards small to medium sized companies and not large companies.
I happen to agree. I would love your thoughts though on how do you see this evolving as we get into larger and larger companies? Most of us on here, maybe in small companies, but our aspiration is to be in big companies. On your experience, how have you seen kind of this evolve where in this small company, maybe one in the same as aroundlining, but as a company grows, marketing grows, your product lines grow.
I've got these thoughts on that. Can you see this kind of evolve? Like many people here, I've worked at small companies with one or two solutions. And the two solutions are very related.
And sometimes the product name is the name of the company goes as far as that. So the company name is X and the product name is X. And so it becomes very, very blended there. When you're marketing the company versus marketing the actual solution itself.
And as I mentioned in an earlier comment, brand and demand are two sides of the same coin in many ways. And I love the experience idea that I think it was Darren, you were bringing up that brand is that experience that one gets from a particular organization. But when you get into a bigger company, so let's say you've got five, 10, 15, 20, 35 solutions, there's the brand work you do if you're at Oracle. And then there's the demand gen work that you do within a particular business line into a particular market at Oracle.
And of course, the demand gen that you do benefits from that Oracle brand positively or negatively depending on one's point of view. Right? What could I do that? And so you may go where that brand is better received or better accepted or better something.
And they're very different. The point made about trade shows. Yes. Interesting.
Trade shows are often more of a brand experience because the justification isn't around the demand generation per se, but it's more about the glow of being a dominant player within a particular business line solution set vertical. And so the largest companies you're going to find that trade shows are separated and have their own budget and are operated by a trade show team group, like a mini company within the company, if you will, that the business unit leaders will work with. And that for the smaller regional type of activities that might happen, those might be more in field marketing potentially and have more of a demand gen. Kind of presence.
Any sales rep you ever speak with will always want more marketing and more brand recognition with their customers or their prospects, of course. But if you're in a very large company where you only sell one of the solution lines into one of the vertical areas for that solution line, your demand gen your demand gen activity set that you'll feel marketing team or your your home based marketing team do. That's what you really care about because great branding is wonderful. So your company did a golf tournament, NASCAR racing or some very large kind of event.
Does it bring in the leads for cybersecurity to manufacturing, for example, right? Just to kind of put a face on that. So that's been my experience. The larger the company, the more the brand is separated and has to operate at a different level than when it's a smaller company, which is perhaps more of our experience here today among this audience and among my own history, most over the very different.
And I think the thing that's become true is that I definitely think that the modern marketing way of doing things is leveraging more of the branding motion in some respects that the line is blurring. I'll kind of include this in full focus reaction. I think that's really helpful. It's been my experience as large companies as well.
The way you outline that and the way you use examples, Rachel, see a plan similar was going through my head to kind of react to that. And that is as we kind of pivot this discussion of what does it mean and what do we do next is I do think when you're in a smaller company, there's a modern way to look at this and you're kind of looting to this where these things come together. We've been talking about that brand really gets measured by the ability to create demand for your one product or your couple of products in your company. And as you get bigger, though, it seems a dovetail away.
So there's a paradox that happened my head. It's a real example. I don't know what to do with it in this context. So that is real world scenario, massive company, great brand.
Brand awareness is probably 100%. Everybody, massive community, well loved the brand in its category, missing its revenue numbers, not growing fast enough on a decline, losing market share. And so when I think about that, and I think about like, if I were to ask that marketing team, whose responsibility is that? Is that a brand responsibility?
Because I've been a responsible and I'm just curious about that answer. I don't have an answer, but it's kind of an interesting paradox as you grow, you go from a world where everything's kind of measurable and like is a company growing or not. To these things become measured differently. We're not measured at all.
Don't know if any thoughts of that, David or Tori, or something, can I kick it back the audience? Because I don't have an answer for that. It gets difficult because the larger the company and the more separation there is between demand generation and branding, the harder it is to really measure the difference between the impacts that either of those teams are having. So I worked for an enterprise company for a long time.
When I moved to a smaller company, one of the things that was so eye-opening for me was was not having that brand awareness to fall back on. All of a sudden my marketing efforts, it became a lot more clear what was impactful and what was not. When I worked in the enterprise space, I was on a team of maybe a hundred other marketers and the segment I was responsible for was doing a great job. But was that because I was doing a great job or was that because we had a really strong brand that existed for decades before I did?
And so I think that the measurement is where it gets really difficult. And the moment that you start to say that one team is responsible for this current situation, this current problem, and another team is not. The finger pointing happens. There's riffs that get created within the organization.
And so I think whatever approach is taken and organizationally, the thing that's most important is alignment on how you're measuring the impact of those respective teams, whether that be branding or demand creation or whatever you want to call it. I think that the titles here make it a little bit clugey. But as long as you can find the right approach to measurement, that's what I think is ultimately needs to be the North Star, that guides the company and dictates who's going to be responsible for what tactics and what strategies and what components of brand lift, even that the team might be looking to measure. And from your perspective, what does that measurement framework look like or how does that evolve?
I think that there's a couple of different ways to look at it. So the way that we like to look at in terms of a North Star metric that we like to look at things that we're fine-lumps, it's that pipeline velocity or sales velocity, whatever you want to call it. And so the number of opportunities that are created in a quarter, the win rate, the average contract value over the sales cycle in the days and the period. And so that formula I think is a great North Star metric for demand teams, brand teams, whoever, because you're looking not just at the number of leads that are coming inbound, right?
But rather, you're taking a much more holistic view of are there more opportunities being created? Are they moving through the pipeline faster? What is the deal size, so on and so forth? And so I think that that's a great indicator for the demand creation efforts that you have.
But I think there's also other approaches that you can take, right? So larger organizations, one of the things that I think is most important, and this is zooming out a little bit, is just understanding the business objectives of the company and figuring out what marketing KPIs you can impact that you can tie into those respective business objectives. And so that, of course, is going to be a great way to ensure that your marketing activities are aligned towards the right goals and that those goals are, in fact, providing some type of improvement on your brand awareness. And then there's the more traditional look at things, which is more popular in the enterprise space mainly because companies have the funds to afford it, but like a brand lift analysis, a brand lift study.
I think really what you're looking at there is some leading indicators like your website analytics, your direct and organic traffic trends over time. But then additionally, I think one of the things that's great about this brand list studies is that it includes qualitative data, right? So there's interviews, there's surveys where you're effectively doing whether it be social listening or measuring the amount of mentions or tags that are happening on social media. I think that there's manual ways that we can do that for those that can't afford a brand lift study.
We can talk to our customers and our prospects. The social listening is something that can be done a little bit more manually just with searching different things on different social networks. Self-reported attribution, of course, is a really popular one that we certainly recommend quite a bit. And even something as small as your social engagements on your paid ads.
So if you ran an ad for six weeks previously and then you started investing significant amounts in more brand awareness, are you seeing more of those engagements from your ICP, from your target audience, inside a similar time period? Those are all different ways that you can measure the impact of brand that you can measure demand creation efforts as well. And that's why my feeling is that those two things are really one of the same because you can measure the effectiveness of both of them the same way. And that's why I feel like those terms are effectively interchangeable.
One thing I would just want to even further nail down is when you do it right from the beginning, it makes all those questions that we're talking about way easier in the end. I think a lot of companies start off small and like to your point, yeah, you know everything that you're doing because if you don't do that thing, you don't grow that month or that quarter. And so I think when we're in small businesses, we get used to knowing exactly what we're doing and how those levers are actually impacting the business. And then we're not really accustomed and we're not really well equipped to deal with the nuance that like hazy area of measuring brand when we get to bigger companies or bigger budgets.
And so my recommendation is always like try and nail down those ways of measuring things early on. And then you're not trying to have those conversations later on when you're trying to scale and because that's always like a point of friction. I like that, Darren. So one of the things, I'm looking at some of the questions here.
I want to pivot to our last kind of wrap this up and start talking about what can this audience take away from this conversation and implement. We'll start with like smaller companies given us where most of this audience is. Anything kind of dove out into a major company grows out of these things change. So maybe what we could do here, Tori, is just it feels easier in my head to start with like mapping demand to brand and kind of what like are we creating different teams for capture versus create versus damn.
How would you think about your advice that you would give to small names as company, maybe one you're working with when this topic comes up on how to like assess this moving forward structure your team, your organization, your measurement, so forth. I think structuring the organization where you have separate teams, separate headcounts for demand creation and demand capture. I think that that's a great starting point. Right.
Those are very unique skill sets. I think we could debate all day about which one is more important to the health of the business. Certainly it's a little more clear when you talk about short term versus long term impact. But overall, I think that it's ideal to have those two teams separated so that the teams can have their own respected budgets, ensure that they're measuring things the appropriate way, but also that those teams are very, very connected and maybe even reporting, you know, into the same leader, a layer under a CMO, just depending on the number of people at the company, the size of the marketing team.
But yeah, having the two teams broken out, I think is a perfectly sound approach so that you can really keep the balance the right way of, you know, are we grabbing the people that are in market today and are we doing an effective job at that? And you have a separate team that is focused more on those longer term plays, finding the connection between the two teams. So yeah, I think splitting them out is a sound approach and something I'd certainly recommend or be happy to support a team working in that structure. We have a capture demand team, a great demand team, maybe a great demand team is a brand team, one and the same.
What I'm trying to get out though is there are elements of creating a brand that we go through and I'm curious if they're important at this stage or not. So they're going to come to you. Things like strategic narrative, things like, you know, unique positioning, tone of voice, design attributes, like, you know, you try to think of the entire experience, even as a small company, somebody's going to have with you and your team and you want to design that to be distinctly different than others. How important is that early on or is that something that just is a luxury that, you know, this demand creation team shouldn't go through?
I think it's really important. And I've seen this with a lot of companies where when it's done well, especially like a narrative and that positioning and really knowing your audience, like, I feel like you can't own brand unless you know your audience, you know, your customers, right? So the better you can do that early on, I think the better everything goes after that. I've seen two sides of the coin, honestly, where one company I worked with spent so much, like almost painstaking.
And I remember, I remember being like, oh, we're spending way too much time on this. This is not worth it. But if I did it in big time, you know, years after that, because we knew who we were, we knew who we were going after and we knew how to talk about it and people really resonated with it. On the other side of the coin, I worked with other companies who had way cooler products, like a way they're offering, but because they didn't spend that time initially to really figure that out, they could never really reach product market fit.
And ultimately, the product failed as a result of that. So in my mind, it's almost like the new restaurant town where it's like, hey, opening soon and every walks by and they're like, oh, this is going to be so cool. I can't wait. But then they go and it's terrible and no one goes back.
Do you mean? So set it up, make it good. Then when people come by and we know it looks really cool. And then they actually have a pleasant, like positive experience.
And that's what starts to build that brand awareness and affinity. And I think that's, again, just pays dividends big time. Whether it's a big, big or small B, like a subset, a team should go through the create demand or brand team should go through even an early stage company. That's basically, could you agree with that?
Yeah. I understand. How do you think then you alluded to something? I want to tie back to this in like the old world, we would think of brand and that experience that you have in market with a company.
And ideally, we want that to turn into awareness and demand and you want to capture that demand and so forth, which we've talked about. But more and more, like the experience you have with the company happens in the product and you have alluded to this, like lack of product market fit for the restaurant example. Where does this sit in terms of this overall conversation? And I'm curious, like, Tori, your point of view on this and that you can create an amazing brand, a unique narrative that resonates.
You're doing all the things that you need to do to create the man and you have to capture that on the back end that we talked through. And you've set up your structure and your marketing team to do that. But a lot of that experience that a company has or a customer has with your company happens, like, past the point of purchase using the product, engaging with their professional services or customer experience team. How does that get tied into this?
I think I'm back to your maybe your first question you asked about the definition of brand. And in my opinion, it's all about your reputation, right? The same can be said for an individual, but like, how do people talk about you, your company, when you're not around? What is that lasting impression that you've made?
Of course, it's much more than the visual identity. And especially now with social media being as popular as it is, those customer experiences are possibly one of the most powerful forms of marketing today. And so I think that what I was saying earlier, right about brand and trying to create that brand affinity should effectively be a shared responsibility throughout all marketing disciplines. I think you can include customer experience in there as well.
Wherever customer experience sits in your company, you know, they are equally as impactful towards that outward facing brand reputation as any other part of your company or marketing organization. And I would say that arguably they have maybe the most important job, right? Because there's all the prospects that you're out there talking to and trying to create these theoretical and hypothetical experiences for them about what it would be like to be a customer. But when they start engaging with real customers and understanding what it's really like, you know, that's the most powerful way to really attract a new business for your company is helping people understand what amazing customer experience you're already offering out there.
So yeah, I think that you can layer the customer experience team in with all those others that need to have that shared responsibility and accountability for overall brand and brand lift for a company. Yeah, it's a call just like to step up our game as marketers. You know, it's easy for us to be like, oh, like we got in here like, oh, they have a bad experience in the brand or in the product like, oh, well, but I feel like, towards point, that's where we can step up our game as marketers and really have an impact on that overall brand. And I think it's easy to just be lazy sometimes and be like, oh, like, we're just going to put campaigns out and hopefully stuff comes back and not worry about any other part of the business.
And rightfully, that's why sometimes we get like a little bit of a wrap as marketers, but I think we can be better than that. So let's, I want to make it a little bit more tactical. So who owns making that better? If I go back, I think about our conversation or framework, we put together, we've talked about this idea of like creating demand in the market.
This kind of synonymous with like doing good brand awareness. Let's call that brand awareness and creating demand, one in the same. There's attributes of traditional brand building that should be applied to demand creation, et cetera. But there's other aspects if you think about these touch points and the overall experience of reputation.
So then there's like the product and there's kind of post sale. Is this something where how to be sure, especially as our company grows, that consistency is there, that promise that we're creating on the upfront is actually delivered on the back end. And he thought like who owns that? Like you're the early stage, like I've built a marketing team who should be the one making sure that our product delivers on our product and our services team delivers on our on our promise.
I'm curious. I'll throw it out there. Just a thought, but you know, why not assign that responsibility to the entire leadership team at the company? Right.
If they are effectively responsible for the different disciplines throughout, whether it be product or marketing or sales or finance, there are ways to map those individual disciplines to the customer experience, the product experience, the brand reputation. And so at that level, you know, of course, many of the leaders are not focused on the tactics, but they're focused on the higher level strategies. But you better believe that they're also the people that can ensure the people who are focused on the tactics are going to be staying aligned and keeping focused on the right things, the right portions of their job or their departments that can't have an influence on those those KPIs, whichever KPIs you're kind of settling on for, you know, each of those leaders and their teams. I like that answer.
That's a good one. So the CEO and the leadership team ultimately own brand. Yeah, I was going to my answer. I was glad you answered first because I was not sure myself.
Also, I do think senior leadership is in charge of building the vision, the mission, and then any good leadership team has to communicate that downward and then individual units or or ones that ensure that, you know, if it's CX, like, what does that mean to us? Are we, you know, marching towards our part of that vision or our contribution, you know, marketing product, all the different groups in line to that, but if senior leadership doesn't do it, it's not going to happen. So it's like company values. The leadership team doesn't put those forward and really like that drum.
It's not going to take off. So who owns kind of getting the senior leadership to be aware of this? So I think this sounds good, but if I'm sitting here as like a marketer on this call, trying to figure out, I'm getting excited about this. This makes logical sense.
But like, if the CEO and the leadership are not aware or, you know, explicitly aware of this, it's part of like what they should pay attention to. How do you get them aware? Yeah, Brandon is probably most top of mind for the marketing leader and, you know, within that group. So I would say that that should be the person to spearhead that conversation that dialogue within the rest of the leadership team, you know, right or wrong.
They were probably the person or team that was assuming a lot of those responsibilities previously. And so elevating it to, you know, the level of that marketing leader of the C level at the company, yeah, it's probably best served. If it's done by the marketing person who understands it likely the best and, you know, the different key performance indicators that, you know, that each of the respective teams should focus on or should be looking at lifting and elevating that conversation up to the leadership team. So that everyone understands that it is that shared responsibility.
So that's probably the best person to run point on it. I like that. So let me try to summarize this. There's a bunch of chat.
I'm going to give this a shot and then let's see what I missed. So kind of a series of recommendations. I think starting with a smaller company and kind of scaling it out. We got three types of demand capture, create and damn.
We talked about the notion of the definition of brand being kind of the reputation of the company and kind of the experience and the totality of how prospects and customers deal with for you and your people. Structurally, we've got to come to this agreement that we should have a separate capture demand team from a create demand team in that in essence, a great demand team is synonymous with building a brand awareness, at least early on and that can start as one team and over time as you grow, you may have to break that out into several teams as you go globally as you go with the multiple divisions and so forth and so on. One of the things I think is important is this. There's an exercise that goes through around values and strategic narrative and kind of point of view that I think if you take that, it should be owned by the CEO and leadership team, especially early on in this creation, but probably needs to be shepherd by the marketing organization.
So the CNO shepherds is across the leadership team to make everyone kind of understand what is the narrative of the company, what are the values of the company and how does this and trickle down to every part of the organization. So the leadership can take ownership of making sure that we instill and deliver on those values and that brand promise across the organization seems to be a good step. Measurement wise early on, I think we've covered that if you're creating demand, we talked about how to measure that. That's a good proxy for brand awareness and brand effectiveness at least early days.
I should cover it because more sophisticated, there's going to be more kind of semi qualitative ways to measure your brand as it gets more disconnected from demand. But the point I think Darren made is like we want to try to keep that as tight as we can for as long as we can. If you have the comments in here on building a narrative and building a point of view, jobs will be done framework, much of books on that. There's a whole thread in the chat.
I think that's imperative as far as like a good starting point. It's a great framework. What else did I miss? I think the only thing you missed is that brand is that brand is so much more than just the logos and colors and fonts that you use.
Yeah, there's one point that we can drive home here. It's exactly that. It really should share responsibility and accountability throughout the entire company, certainly throughout the entire marketing team. Yeah, there's a lot of different creative ways that you can measure the impact that your teams are having on those brand awareness.
But more than anything, just getting that understanding that it's so much more than just your visual identity. And it's not just one or two graphic designers or writers that are responsible for this, but it is something that the entire marketing team should really be taking ownership of. Darren, what you're thinking, Dave is going to throw out budgets. Can you come back and say what we missed?
We missed budgets. So who pays for this? I've always liked Kyle Laci's approach towards it where he looks at. I think it's like maybe like, I don't know, 75% of his budget that is focused on some form of attributable marketing and 25, 30%.
That is not. And so I think that that 25, 30% understanding that it is not going to be held to the return that does open you up to a little bit more of a long term play that people are going to be more patient around. It's a little bit more experimental. And so I think that that's a good, certainly a great starting point.
And then from there, just like anything, finding the different components or investments that you're making within that 30% of your budget that are working and finding out how you can scale it. And if it means that you're killing off other elements that you have been experimenting with so that you can double down on what's working great. If it means that you need to borrow from the portion of the budget that is maybe focused on more of that more attributable work, then I think that that's a perfectly fair approach as well. But yeah, that might be a good starting point for everyone out there is kind of that 70, 30, 75, 25 split.
Yeah, I would add some thoughts that early on. I think the splits are a good place to start. But I would say early on, you want to be able to try to measure as much as you can back to the demand and the revenue that you create because it's going to be a lack of tolerance early on to be spending money on things that you can't measure in some way. And we talked quite a bit about how you measure these things on other podcasts.
And I think over time that splits going to change when you get into things like reputation and David gave a great example is like, sometimes you have to be at the trade show or you have to start going to run your own event because it's a show of powers to show of market leadership. It's kind of your demonstrating category dominance and those things are important, especially when you have a global audience and multiple divisions and so forth and so on. I think early on, the safest thing to do is be creative and how what you spend and what you do to build brand actually drives to demand and demand and revenue. All right.
I mean, last thoughts. I think if you're listening to this and you care, you're probably doing more than most. So just buy yourself back a little bit and realize that because you're trying to solve these problems, you're going in the right direction. I just want to say kudos.
I know it can be in the battle and it's not done at the beginning. It just becomes difficult. So keep fighting the good fight and wait to be here and think about it. That's awesome.
I'll add one more thought on that. I would say my vice based on experience in small to medium sized companies is really positioned hard on create demand and roll your brand activities underneath that. It'd probably be an easy way to sell that through the company versus trying to split these two things apart. So just my two cents on what I've seen work firsthand.
All right. With that, thanks everybody for sticking around. I hope you found this entertaining and enlightening at least and any future topics that you think we should talk about on these events. Feel free to shoot it to tour your day under myself and we'll put that in a queue and make sure we address them.
All right, everybody. Have a good day. Thanks everybody. Thanks.