The Hidden Cost of ‘Cheap Clicks’: How Performance Marketing Undermines Businesses and What to Do Instead

The crucial distinction between brand-led and performance-based marketing is that the former nurtures long-term relationships, while the latter prioritizes testable tactics and quantifiable data. In a faceless digital landscape, however, consumer trust is only as strong as your brand. So why does performance marketing persist when we know it degrades long-term brand value? Do the ends ever justify the means?

In a sense, there is no comparing the two approaches because strong brands confer sustainable advantages in every area of business – organic growth, customer loyalty, premium pricing, access to partnerships and opportunities, market differentiation, and resilience in a crisis, to name a few – while performance marketing gets you a quick bump in numbers which may strengthen or weaken your business down the line.

The Disruptor’s Dilemma

In a digital landscape dominated by big businesses, challengers face a Catch-22. To compete for customers, you need funding, talent, and publicity. But to get those things, your new venture has to prove that it already has traction and momentum in the market. But how can upstart sidestep performance marketing when Alphabet, Meta and the rest control the digital landscape with bottlenecks that drop you right into their sales funnels?

Performance marketing promises quick fixes, but what will you have to show for your investment? Cheap clicks are short-acting, and habit-forming like a drug. Keep your marketing spend tied up this way, and your brand will simply spin its wheels in a state of arrested development where it can’t mature enough to help your business.

Conversions Vs. Conversations

When performance is the purpose, a marketer’s focus shifts away from building momentum toward demonstrating it. Without mutuality, the customer feels neither seen nor heard – encounters feel one-sided, arbitrary, soulless, impersonal, scattered, and transactional. For today’s digital consumers, who engage with excellent brands daily, performance marketing makes us even more aware of the discrepancy. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to reinforce the strength and longevity of the business, regardless of the situation: Lead with brand.

When you have multiple firms handling your social media, PR, and digital marketing, each will express your brand differently. Brand leadership alone can guide all the other specialties and ensure consistency across every touchpoint.

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The Coded Language of Brand

Branding is a coded language of self-expression and belonging, so community connections are almost inevitable when your brand message is relevant, authentic, and clear. When your brand storytelling conveys your values strategically, customers can bond with your brand. When they bond with each other over your brand, communities arise, improving your cultural credibility, customer loyalty, organic growth, and customer acquisition costs. Because communities arise from shared truths and meaning, they’re more than just buckets of customers created through ad targeting.

A current example of brand communities driving business growth and resilience is the case of On Running, a performance running shoe maker enjoying viral success through intensive brand investments and community-building. The company announced plans to pivot toward direct-to-consumer sales channels to capitalize on its engaged communities of brand loyalists. Brand leadership makes this kind of disruption possible.

Meaning Over Metrics

Brand leadership is a systematic, analytical, ongoing approach to enhancing your competitive advantages and what you mean to customers. It gives your marketing team something to believe in – and permission to stop chasing unsustainable customer acquisition costs. And it shows customers they matter to you by creating experiences that matter to them.

To matter, you have to stand for something.

Have you ever been met someone who loves Old Navy? Probably not, because Old Navy’s brand is as cheerfully vague as a Teen USA contestant. Its personality isn’t polarizing enough for anyone to love or hate. Performance marketing suffers from the same problem – because there’s nothing there for people to care about, success metrics can be misleading. For example, today’s excellent user acquisition numbers may ghost you when the promotion expires, leaving you right where you started.

The polar opposite of Old Navy is Lisa Says Gah, a brand-driven retailer whose cheerful, maximalist aesthetic you love or hate. “I created the blog first, which was a series of inspirational images. And I designed the website to give people a feel for the brand aesthetic,” founder Lisa Buhler pointed out.

The company’s brand-led marketing strategy is emotionally evocative and consistently coded for a specific audience. It conveys authenticity in spades, because Lisa doesn’t just try things out to see if they sell. She commits to designers and products she believes in, and everything sells out because she has the right community dialed in.

Make Brand Your Hardest-Working Asset

Brands serve as proxies for people – their actions and attributes help us detect differences and discern our preferences. In our ultra-filtered reality, brands have become a utility for consumers, authenticating businesses and conferring accountability in an otherwise shadowy, anonymous realm.

As business leaders and entrepreneurs become more brand-aware, more will pivot away from performance as a primary objective and toward making meaningful customer connections through brand.

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