How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together.

Marketers often worry that performance marketing and its focus on short-term sales is crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer perceptions of their brand—and is sometimes working against brand strategy. Brand-building activities are typically measured using metrics that have no predictive or retrospective connection to financial returns. And performance marketing typically lacks measures that account for its impact on brand building, focusing only on sales, leads, and clicks. To achieve performance- accountable brand building and brand-accountable performance marketing, firms must create metrics that measure the effects of both types of investments on a single North Star metric: brand equity. That is then linked to specific financial outcomes—such as revenue, shareholder value, and return on investment—and deployed as a key performance indicator for both brand building and performance marketing. In doing so, companies are better able to make decisions that fortify the financial contributions of both and get them working better together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]