There’s no such thing as ‘performance branding’ marketing

The news that ANZ picked up a gong for Brand of the Year and another for Excellence in Marketing Communication Strategy at the YouTube NZ Marketing Awards last week in Auckland probably passed you by. There are enough marketing award ceremonies in the UK (1,567 at last count, about five every day of the week) to occupy you. New Zealand is a small market and ANZ, despite its heft and reputation south of the equator, is probably a bank that you’ve never heard of.

But there are very good reasons to pay attention to what happened last week in Auckland. ANZ is a very well-run brand and its redoubtable CMO Astrud Burgess actually knows what the fuck she is doing. Which makes a change. And her journey to commercial success and those big marketing gongs is a salutary one.

The brand seemed in good shape when it introduced a new campaign centred on the Sharma family in 2021. New Zealand met a family of four who were the epitome of Kiwi life. The ads were big, emotional stories carefully constructed by long-term agency partner TBWA to follow the hopes and dreams of this complex, 21st-century family. ANZ was part of the story – its products and things like the bank’s long term sponsorship of the national cricket team played out around the periphery – but this was really the story of a family who occasionally used ANZ. Not the other way round. And it became a huge hit in New Zealand.

But over time Burgess saw the campaign begin to slip. Internal customers at the bank wanted to see more product in the advertising and a more overt focus on sales. Gradually the longer ads and subtle narratives turned into the Sharma family ostensibly selling stuff – card management controls for example – in six second digital video ads. Briefs to the agency began to ask for both brand messaging and product features. “When you have two masters,” Burgess observes, “and you try to build brand and achieve customer acquisition all within the same ad, you end up not doing either one particularly well.”

Performance vs brand

We should pause here and acknowledge the experience of Burgess and ANZ because it runs very much against the current discourse about long and short marketing here in the UK. A decade after Peter Field and Les Binet’s incredibly important publication, The Long and the Short of It, we are beset with experts telling us that brand and performance is a false dichotomy. You can have both, at the same time, in the same ads. Famous copywriters list ads that build brand and sell products in the same 30-second spot, and go on to decry long and short thinking. Fractional CMOs post about “brand performance” or “performance branding”. We burn our churches quickly in this marketing parish. Almost as soon as they are completed, someone is looking around for matches.

So, let’s be clear, because the nuance of Field and Binet’s work is often lost on those critiquing it. The ‘long’ and ‘short’ are not as binary as the authors portrayed them to be. Not because the godfathers of effectiveness were naïve about these things, but because they were trying to create clear conceptual daylight that would help marketers avoid fucking up the future.

Clearly, you can sell product in the same ad that builds brand. It is not impossible. It might be unavoidable. And it happens all the time. But what you will find, just as ANZ found, is that usually these ‘double-duty’ ads don’t deliver as well as campaigns that split up their budgets and approach the two missions of brand and sales in a separate but contiguous fashion. Of course there will be exceptions. But they are exactly that. And, of course, it is grey rather than black and white. Marketing usually is. But these nuances are not an excuse for ignorance.

The reason that ‘brand performance’ ads usually underwhelm can be found in the nature of long and short challenges. Field and Binet might have used these two words to title their monograph, but their thinking is much bigger, much wider and more important than simply showing marketing works over a short period and a longer period of time. That is just the start of it.

Short does not deliver long and, eventually, that means short stops working too.

When we say “long”, what we really mean is mass-marketing, emotional, enduring, memory-structuring, demand-generating, TOFU, brand-focused, salience-driven communications. Exactly the kind of work that saw the Sharmas enter the consciousness of the Kiwi public. The kind of work that takes a long time to truly deliver and, when it does deliver, it happens via the short-term marketing investments that suddenly start to perform better.

And when we say “short”, what we really mean is micro-targeted, more rational, multiple campaigns, aimed at harvesting existing demand from the 5% of consumers who are currently in the market; BOFU, product- and proposition-focused ads with a clear behavioural objective. And, unlike the long stuff, it can and should be measured with more basic ROI calculations.

The point is that you can do both at the same time in an ad but it rarely works well, because you aren’t just trying to satisfy long and short agendas in the same 30 seconds, you are also being both rational and emotional. You are targeting a smaller group and the whole market. You are communicating the overall brand message and a specific product benefit. You are trying to change memory structures and elicit an immediate response. You are aiming for the top of the funnel and the bottom. You are driving your marketing car in fifth gear and reverse at the same time.

The Long and the Short of It maps exactly onto the challenges of global marketing

A major wrinkle in all this is that long-term brand stuff does, almost by accident, kick out some pretty good short-term sales. The System1 data shows again and again that almost all the ads that do a good job of brand building also drive immediate sales too. Long delivers short in other words. But the problem with marketers telling us that we can therefore do it all in one ad is that they miss the problem and the real reason Field and Binet wrote The Long and the Short of it.

It wasn’t because there were lots of marketers spending too much marketing money on brand building at the expense of short-term, sales-focused advertising. That almost never happens. It was because a massive swathe of marketers put too much of their money into short-term, apparently more proven performance marketing. When you do that, you eventually fuck yourself because, as the System1 data also clearly shows, campaigns that excel at short-term sales are usually poor at brand building. That’s the asymmetry that critics of the long and short miss. That’s the reason you need two pots of money and two different approaches. Short does not deliver long and, eventually, that means short stops working too.

Brand health and commercial success

While it may appear obvious that marketers need to build brand as well as promote products, we continue to see companies struggling with this challenge. The recent debacle at Nike (of all companies) reveals what happens when performance marketers, with a passion for ROI and a mistaken belief that you can build brand and sell product within the same execution, take control of even the biggest brand.

We need the long and short metaphor, not because the distinction actually exists but because we need a way to get marketers to always put money away for less direct, less apparently valuable brand-building work. And as more and more senior marketers emerge from initial careers in digital and performance marketing, we need even more emphasis on the long and short to make this point clear to them.

That’s what ANZ ultimately discovered with its own campaigns and the slide into brand performance, or whatever the bozos are calling it on LinkedIn this week. And that’s what Astrud Burgess went on to fix with her own advertising. She returned the Sharmas to their emotional, TOFU brand-building best with a new series of long-form, super-effective ads that she refers to as her ‘preference’ campaign. And on the other side she invested in more basic, rational, targeted ads, united with the brand work through the ANZ brand codes, that pushed the different products that the bank offered for immediate sales. The ‘pathway’ work as she calls it.

The point isn’t that ANZ would have failed completely had it continued to blur long and short. But it would not have done as well. ANZ is in very fine shape in New Zealand at the moment. Both long-term brand health and short-term commercial performance are all pointing in the right direction. Meanwhile, the impressive Astrud Burgess knows exactly what she wants to do in the years ahead – and its not performance branding.

Mark Ritson is an award-winning columnist and marketing professor, currently teaching on the Mini MBA. His 12-week, 100% online courses run every April and September and are designed to help busy marketers feel more confident and effective in their role. Learn more and book your place here. Mark teaches the long and short (with due deference to Field and Binet) on the Mini MBA in Brand Management, starting next week. Places still – yes, still – available.