Is there any real value in brand marketing? Let’s say you have paid a marketing consultant tens of thousands of dollars to help you sell more products. The consultant plans a big event where your company will be the title sponsor and your product will be featured. The event draws a lot of people who eat a lot and drink a lot, all on your tab. The event looks to be a hit. But at the end of the month, you take a look at your sales figures and find that they have actually dropped. To add insult to the situation, no one at the big event has purchased anything from you. You call in the marketing firm to ask them about this. You thought that the point of marketing was to lead to sales. The marketing rep shrugs his shoulders and says, "I know we were not able to deliver any sales, but at least we were successful in promoting your brand.”

Promoting your company brand too often has been used as the fallback position of failed marketing campaigns. If marketing is not leading to a sale, it is not successful marketing, period. But before we toss all brand marketing campaigns out in the street, let’s take a closer look at some very positive aspects of corporate branding that do lead to sales in time. What is a brand? In very simplistic terms, it is the name by which your company, your products, and services are known in the marketplace. It defines you and your products. Red Gold is a brand associated with tomato products. Honda is a brand associated with automobiles. Juicy Fruit is a brand associated with chewing gum. Some corporate brands carry the product brand as well, like General Electric. Some products are stand-alone brands, like Kleenex brand facial tissues produced by the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. Some combine the corporate brand and the product brand together to form a sub-brand, like Microsoft Excel. The obvious first rule of marketing is, in a free market, your brand has to be known and understood before anyone will do business with you. Therefore, the first action in marketing is to make potential customers aware of your brand.

We expend a lot of energy in marketing making people aware of product and service brands. It is the entire thought behind the creation of catchy logos, positioning products at the point of sale, making a value statement with the brand (Walmart has branded itself around low prices, Saks Fifth Avenue has branded itself around the very best quality in its products). There is one aspect of brand marketing that most do not consider in the sales proposition. That is promoting the corporate brand to persuasive opinion leaders who may not buy from you, but certainly influence those who do. You may question why a corporation would sponsor a philanthropic cause or a big event. Millions of dollars are spent on these types of ventures with no plausible connection to sales for the company. If all marketing leads to sales, where does this fit into the equation? One of the most important roles that marketing and communications professionals play is to put the company brand in the most favorable light as possible. Every company needs a good name in the community in which it operates. It needs to be seen as a good corporate citizen who is a strong employer and contributor to the local economy. That engenders a sense of good feelings towards the company. At a very high level, that impacts how the market regards the company and that has a huge influence on where they buy. It also impacts customer loyalty. When corporate branding is working, you will have a continued good relationship with a customer so that they come back to purchase from you time and again.

We are entering the time of year when sponsorships of events start to pop up. If you have been asked to sponsor a golf tournament, a charitable event, a food tent at a local festival, take part in a silent auction, etc., take a long view of corporate branding. Ask yourself if the people connected with these events are influencers of opinions, especially those of your customers or potential customers. Do they hold sway with the community where you are operational? Spending marketing dollars on such events may not impact your sales goals next month, but they may be impacting your sales for the next 5-10 years. Promoting the company brand is all about making inroads with influential opinions for years to come. Keep this in mind when you cut the check.

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Illustration by Oaltindag