Why do people engage with a marketing message or ad? A new consumer study from Epsilon shows it’s because they are “familiar with and like the brand”. This was the most selected option at 60%, whereas only 37% said their engagement was driven by a need for what was being advertised.

Marketers have long acknowledged the importance of brand marketing, given ‘brand’ is the context in which all purchase decisions are made. But at the same time, performance marketing – which focuses on driving more near-term outcomes – commands most digital budgets, as marketers strive to demonstrate their investments are driving a return.

In a world where marketing spend is under pressure, which of these two objectives should you prioritize?

Astute marketers have come to realize the flaw behind this question. Specifically, that brand marketing and performance marketing need to be treated as two separate and mutually exclusive objectives.

It’s time we stop talking about ‘brand marketing’ versus ‘performance marketing’ and just talk about ‘effective marketing’. With effective marketing being defined as driving sales in the moment, while at the same time building the brand relationships needed to drive sales longer term.

Think about it this way: Each time a marketer engages a consumer to drive near-term sales, they are also impacting the consumer’s perception of their brand. And it’s that perception that drives sales over time.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Cool, that’s all great in theory, but how do you actually do that?”. You can start by ensuring every message you deliver is actually relevant to each consumer who receives it at any given moment in time. This will go a long way towards ensuring you both achieve your objective (for example, reach an in-market consumer with an offer) and deliver a positive brand-building experience when you engage them. Because they like your brand, they choose your product over any other options – harking back to the study’s findings of why consumers engage with brands in the first place.

As we know, however, this is easier said than done. Particularly in digital channels, where our ability to recognize the consumers we want to engage is limited by the nature of the channels themselves.

‘People-based marketing’ and the underpinning technology referred to as ‘identity resolution’ were supposed to address this, but the research also shows that they clearly have not – and there are consequences:

• 91% of respondents say they see at least one irrelevant ad or marketing message every single day.
• More than three-quarters (76%) say they view brands negatively when they include inaccurate information about them in their marketing message.

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These stats haven’t really changed much since the advent of the term or the technology around people-based marketing. Given the identity graphs used for resolution were primarily based in the digital world, ‘people-based’ often equated to ‘audience-based’, with the people in those audiences generally being collections of digital identifiers. As the world of third-party cookies continues to crumble, so will the efficacy of the legacy technologies that were built on them.

So, will things just continue to get worse? Will 91% be closer to 100% when Google finally makes good on its cookie-killing initiative? Will we have to continue to think of branding and performance as disconnected initiatives, given that when we deliver our message, we often don’t even know who we are speaking to?

The good news here is that a new generation of technology, which leverages artificial intelligence working in conjunction with what many are referring to as ‘person-first’ identity, can not only address the immediate Google-initiated crisis, but also deliver the improved personalization that legacy technologies have failed to do.

Person-first is a term I’ve heard a lot of marketers start to use when it comes to personalization. It generally implies five elements:

• It starts with first-party data – and it ends with first-party data. Marketers who embrace this concept have realized they can’t evolve approaches that were originally built on third-party data to fit a first-party data world.
• When it comes to using this data to recognize consumers in channels, the foundational element is an understanding of a true person, that is rooted in offline, verified data.
• The person-first understanding of the consumer is used to unify martech and adtech, ensuring communications are harmonized across paid and owned channels.
• When it comes to engaging consumers, the decisioning that takes place in the tech stack, whether driven by AI or classical algorithms, starts with the person you encounter, as opposed to where you find them (i.e. it’s person-first, not channel-first, which is what guides much of marketing today).
• The approach puts the ‘person’ the marketing is delivered to first. Both in terms of consumer consent and ensuring they receive relevant content.   

I believe this approach, and the new technologies that underpin it, will not only allow marketers to navigate the deprecation of third-party digital identifiers, but also allow marketers to finally reap the benefits that come from delivering truly personalized messaging for each individual consumer. In so doing, they will move beyond treating branding and performance as two mutually exclusive objectives.

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