Marketing panel: Short-term growth and long-term brand building not mutually exclusive

Balancing short-term growth and brand building while leveraging the right data to serve the customer continues to present both challenges and opportunities, local marketers say.

In the latest episode in the Marketing Dividends series presented by AANA on Sky News Business, Wavemaker chief growth and product officer, Jame Hier, spoke to top Aussie marketers to see how brands are driving long term growth, while leveraging the power of data in the process.

Panellists suggested driving short-term growth versus longer term brand building were not mutually exclusive. For KFC Australia CMO, Angela Richards, it’s about continuing to build long term emotional connections even when the immediate goal might be a short term tactical one – and focusing on ‘wrapping each message around the right emotion’.

“We have a really big innovation funnel and a really strong retail calendar, but for us more recently, that functional retail calendar has morphed so the brand directs the retail calendar – and the brad’s job is to create that emotional connection,” she said. “For us, what that then translates into is that we have a large pipeline of NPD, but it’s OK now to say we are less reliant on that NPD to drive those sales because that emotional connection of the brand leading the retail calendar is driving core sales and core growth. So for us, that’s a win win situation.”

Kellogg A/NZ marketing director, Tamara Howe, said Kellogg's has conducted a lot of research around this and how to better go to market by leveraging the power of neuroscience.

“We know that with neuroscience marketing and behavioural economics that the brain doesn’t make decisions based on rational information,” she explained. “We actually post-rationalise our decisions, but we don’t make our decisions based on rationality, we base it on emotion. And as a  marketer, that’s very freeing to know, how people make decisions, and then through evidence, design marketing plans accordingly and create great emotional connections with consumers.”

For the tradies’ industry, hipages chief customer officer, Stuart Tucker, also agreed emotion has a large part to play in the decision-making process, while keeping budget and marketing spend front of mind as the brand continues to grow.

“For us, the tension between brand-building and performance activity is very much alive, we don’t have unlimited budgets and we come from very humble beginnings,” he said. “So for every dollar we spend, it needs to be accountable because we don’t have the kind of budget the larger brands enjoy.”

As digitally-led brands face even more fierce competition, panellists said the power of leveraging data is more important than ever before.

“Data is in our DNA at hipages,” Tucker said. “At the very start, we have jobs on the demand side and we have tradies on the supply side and the data matches those to find the right tradie for the right job. In marketing, we use data every day to drive our performance-based decisions across all our media platforms.

“We use data to inform every decision we make. We’re moving in an agile, fast-moving environment where if we’re not using data in real time, then we’re not able to tap into those market trends and keep moving at the pace we’re expected to grow.”

Richards also saw a great opportunity for data to build better customer experiences for the KFC brand.

“People are looking for simplicity and ease,” she said. “We want data to help us deliver that. But at the same time, it isn’t always as easy to execute as it may seem, especially for more established businesses with legacy systems, and we need all those systems to talk to each other - and that takes time.”

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