A couple of years ago, frustrated with the overwhelming short term obsession and knee jerkism in the marketing world, I set about creating a set of Principles based on what isn't likely to change soon, or ever, for brands and advertisers.
By speaking to the marketers running the most successful businesses in the country like Yorkshire Tea and Nestle, to the disrupters in eye-watering growth like Astonish and Olly’s, then going on to look at a longer list of the most successful brands in the world, and finally comparing to the emerging weight evidence in effectiveness from the likes of WARC, the IPA and System1, I was able to land on a set of four brand communications Principles that I believe have the biggest impact on lasting brand growth.
Principle #3: Visibility (and the death of the golden goose)
Not every brand that’s visible is seen.
But every brand that’s seen is visible.
Of course, not every brand that’s seen is noticed. Nor is every brand that’s noticed remembered. And not every brand that’s remembered is selected.
But unless the brand is visible in the first place, worrying about the rest of it would be like fretting over the upkeep of a garden at a house you haven’t even bought.
The irrefutable truth is the brands that are seen more often, by more people, in more places, sell more, more regularly.
This has always been true, and it’s such an incredibly obvious idea that it’s been a natural concept for marketers and advertisers ever since cobblers and greengrocers started putting signs in their windows.
Except in the past twenty years… when the silver-bullet of hyper-intelligent media targeting promised to usher in a new era where marketers could simply pick off their perfect customers - serving ads only to the very few people that are most likely to need that exact product, at that moment. No more waste. No more guessing. Science trumps Art. Tech trumps creativity.
So what happened to the golden goose? Why have we seen campaign effectiveness across the UK fall off a cliff since 2008? Why do half of all ads make no lasting impact on a brand? Why has public favourability towards advertising hit an all-time low?
The reason is very simple; marketers became more interested in the media, than the people looking at it. We completely forgot that people neither care about brands nor advertising. We forgot that people are more worried about who’s picking the kids up from school than which dishwasher tablets are most effective at low temperature.
We forgot that humans are irrational animals more concerned with getting in and out of the shop with the right stuff than assessing each purchase with objective rigour.
That’s why visibility, be it at the point of purchase, in a living room or on a small screen in the palm of a hand, is inescapably one of the most important factors in driving brand growth. The brands that are seen more come to mind quicker, and stay there longer, for more people.
The brands that are seen more, grow most.
On the surface, that means the biggest brands with the most money, and the largest slab of the category’s share of voice, will stay biggest. And this is true most of the time.
But when you can’t outspend, or outshout, there are ways to outthink.
Not all visibility is created equal
The difference between good and bad visibility is about much more than just quantity. It’s not enough to just buy millions of impressions at the cheapest possible rate. Paying £0.005 for your brand to appear amongst five others on a web page somebody’s quickly trying to wade through for an ingredients list isn’t necessarily better value than paying 10x more to show your brand on the big screen in the living room while that person is eating their tea.
That’s why it’s vital, if you want your brand to come to mind quicker, to prioritise high attention media that’s contextually relevant to the brand or product and the audience you’re trying to reach.
In fact, campaigns that run mostly across high-attention platforms report a 65% increase in very large business effects, such as profitability and customer acquisition (WARC, 2023).
Use the full armoury
Paying to put your brand in front of your audience is the easiest, and often most effective way to get your brand seen. But when a larger competitor has more to spend, you can’t expect to grow using paid media alone. They will always have more.
To punch above your weight, you need to look for opportunities with earned and owned media.
What can you do to get your brand spoken about in the news or on social media? If you had just £1 to spend when launching a new product, what could you do to create visibility?
And how can you be smart with the channels you already own? Your website, your social media channels, but more crucially, your main touchpoint with your audience… the product itself? The fact it’s impossible to divide a Tony's Chocolonely bar evenly is a perfect example of product as media. People notice it and people speak about it.
3. ‘And’ over ’or’
On one hand, the proliferation of media in the past couple of decades has made it infinitely harder to decide where to invest.
On the other hand, it’s created more opportunities for brands to be seen in different places and at different times, which is one of the most effective ways to make a budget work harder.
Because even if you know you can reach your entire audience repeatedly and efficiently through a single channel, like paid social, TV, or out of home, you’re only ever reaching them in a single place, in a single context.
Yet to establish a place in the mind, to build memory structures and associations around your brand, it pays to be seen in different places, at different moments and in different scenarios.
So much so in fact, that (on average) the same media budget invested across five channels instead of just one, increases ROI by 35 to 65% (magic numbers, 2024)
A + B is greater than 2a or 2b.
So the takeaway for marketers looking to grow their brand? Firstly, without visibility, everything else is immaterial. Once you’ve committed to being seen, remember: not all visibility is created equal. High attention media is more effective. Blending paid, owned and earned can bridge the gap to bigger competitors. And spending smarter with an ‘and’ not ‘or’ strategy, will make every pound work harder.