In our first episode of Mind Your Business, Connor Archbold unpacked why most businesses still don’t speak brand. But getting your C-suite brand literate is only the first step. The next step is bringing the commercial proof and that’s where Tracksuit’s Caitlin Filmer comes in.
If there is one sentiment that riles up even the most level-headed of marketers, it’s being seen as the colouring-in department. You know the feeling. It’s infuriating, partly because it’s kind of rude but mainly because it simply isn’t true.
Caitlin Filmer, our VP of Customer Success here at Tracksuit, has worked in marketing most of her career so she’s familiar with that quip too.
Caitlin’s team supports hundreds of marketers to bridge the gap between brand literacy and commercial proof — many businesses struggle to make the connection between the two. That missing link is often the reason brand marketing isn’t recognised as the strategic driver of business growth it actually is.
Sure, proving the connection between your brand marketing and commercial success can be challenging, but it’s not impossible.
So we’re officially shaking off the image of marketing being a nice-to-have. It’s serious business building brands, because brands seriously build business. But in order to prove that, you’ve got to bring the receipts – and Caitlin is here to hand them to you.
The missing link
Quantifying brand value has previously been really difficult; where performance marketing gives you a clean closed loop, we haven’t traditionally seen that with brand marketing. The other factor is that brand building is a long game. In all businesses, there's an appetite for immediacy, and that mismatch in timeline can make brand budget the harder one to defend or grow.
“As a marketer you can’t just say to your CFO, ‘Trust us, we need multiple millions of dollars to run a TV campaign.’ You need to draw a line from an investment that you've made to an outcome,” Caitlin explains.
Brand health measures are one piece of the puzzle. Alongside other metrics, they let you draw lines between the brand work you’re doing, to how people feel about your brand, to how that activity layers into your tangible sales, profitability and margin.
Drawing lines
Awareness, consideration, usage and preference – all of the metrics in the marketing funnel play an important role and tell a different story. Caitlin’s hot take though? Consideration is the sweet spot. It’s where the connection between the funnel and your P&L is the easiest to see.
“I’m aware of lots of brands that I would not necessarily purchase,” Caitlin explains. “If someone is considering your brand though, they're essentially forming a shortlist that says whatever you're putting out is resonating. You become part of the consideration set.”
Consideration tells you whether your brand is trusted to deliver on category drivers – the things customers actually care about. Different categories have different drivers. In phones, it might be design, security and status. In bone broth, it might be that it’s good for your health.
Consideration ties neatly to trust in your brand. And a commercial outcome your CFO cares about: market share.
“Consideration is one of the brand metrics that if you see significant changes over time, that can correlate really strongly with commercial impact,” Caitlin maintains. “Even harder to do is to build preference – or loyalty. Really tricky to do, really sticky once you've done it.”
Proof is in the P&L
Every layer of the marketing funnel maps to the P&L, not just the top line. Yes, brand shifts revenue. But it also impacts other commercial outcomes that your CFO loves, like pricing power, margin, market share, and how efficiently your performance marketing dollars work.
Awareness is the entry point for building future profit over time. The more people who are aware of you, the more who are available to consider purchasing you.
Market share links to consideration: that’s how many people would consider buying your brand versus your competitor set. Knowing where you sit against your competitors from a brand perspective, and understanding what's driving people to consider you in the first place, is how you grow your market share.
“Pricing power is a beautiful example of brand power at work too,” Caitlin says. “It’s evident every time I go into the store and buy a $20 bottle of olive oil instead of a $5 one. I know nothing about olive oil and I'm not sure I could properly differentiate the taste. Same with my wine. But strong brand loyalty and preference is what lets you price your product at a point where you can make healthy margins.”
The bonus? Your dollars go further on your performance marketing; you get more bang for buck. Lower CPA, higher CTR, higher ROI. If you have a strong brand, it's much easier to capitalise on performance campaigns because you've already done the hard work of cementing what your brand is and building trust.
“Brand data is hard to move and slow to move but incredibly impactful when you do it. Once we see those shifts in time, they will have a sustained impact on the top and bottom line.”
Hitting shelves
Picture this: you’re a challenger brand in the premium breakfast cereal category. You’re going up against entrenched players, big global giants with lots of brands on a crowded shelf. Cutting through is hard.
This isn’t hypothetical though — it’s one of our customers.
“Their brand team made some pretty bold creative bets in their marketing campaign and they set up Tracksuit to measure how the brand was performing as they invested,” Caitlin recalls. “They saw a 7% jump in awareness, which is a sizable shift. Consideration lifted by 6% and usage went up by a couple of percent too. As you go down the funnel, moving those lower metrics is no mean feat.”
The commercial results followed: double-digit uplift in baseline supermarket sales at one of the major retailers where they were advertising. Not only that, they took those results back to the retailer to expand their distribution and get a new product listed.
“It comes full circle when you can paint the picture in a really clear fashion,” Caitlin says. “Both from a pure sales metric and the brand impact behind it – because brand points to a real longevity of those sales improvements.”
The bottom line
“It's much easier to make the case for brand when you can trace things in detail to show something as an informed decision,” Caitlin says. “Brand isn’t a budget line item. It’s something existential about the business in and of itself and it impacts every commercial outcome that the company is managing.”
The line has always been there. Now you know how to draw it.
Our webinar, 'Brand, Translated for the Boardroom', featuring Caitlin Choate (CMO of Boatsetter) and Sam Brough (Head of Brand at Tracksuit) gives a masterclass on how to make your case.
