It’s a tale as old as, well, marketing: balancing long-term brand strategy with short-term conversion tactics. In today’s digital world of instant gratification, many companies and sales leaders have grown accustomed to seeing immediate ROI. For marketers, that means effective branding strategy often gives way to performance marketing campaigns that meet short-term sales goals.
While we at (matter) know the importance of attention-grabbing PPC and display ads, paid search results, and other bottom-of-the-funnel tactics that lead to quick wins and high conversions, we also know from more than two decades of experience that prioritizing brand building is key to lasting growth.
In our work with clients, we’ve found that brand development informed by audience research provides the air cover that cascades down through the funnel, leading to qualified leads and loyal customers. That’s the approach we took with our recent client, Lunazul, and their funnel continues to rain revenue…and tequila.
Connecting Brand to Business
At (matter), we believe branding is not just a marketing initiative but a critical function of your business. Gen Z currently ranks as the largest generational cohort, with purchasing power in the hundreds of billions, and studies continue to show that brand affinity among this generation of consumers is driven by community, authenticity, and alignment with their personal ethics. If your brand wants to tap into the power of Gen Z now or in the future, then establishing an emotional connection with your consumers is no longer optional.
The good news is that creative campaigns and advertising perform best when they demonstrate a brand’s ethos. An audience that understands and relates to who you are can better understand what you do. Finding creative, ongoing ways to tell your brand story and introduce your audience to who you are as an organization can work in tandem with advertising campaigns that tell your audience what you can offer them.
An audience that’s had multiple opportunities to form positive associations with your brand – from live experiences they enjoyed to brand commercials they remember to that free tote they still carry – is much more likely to click through on a promo that aligns with the brand identity they know and love.
The (matter) Approach
The first step in building a brand that inspires your audience to choose you, is getting to know them. Our team at (matter) believes that robust audience and competitor research can create a more effective brand identity and actually drive creative campaign work rather than functioning separately from it.
For this reason, we start our branding projects by asking questions and doing deep audience research to uncover the key human insights that tell us who an audience is, what motivates their purchase decision, and, ultimately, what matters to them.
Whether you’re partnering with a creative agency like (matter) or considering your own brand research, starting with the basics can help set the stage for deeper investigation and more targeted questions:
It’s also important to remember that you’ve got to know your brand before you can introduce it to your audience. Consider the building blocks of your narrative:
After listening to the feedback of your audience and your organization, you can begin to craft your brand’s story and invite your audience to become part of that experience using the learnings from your research to connect. When creative campaigns flow out of that atmosphere, they become an extension of your brand identity, offering customers the most direct way to engage – purchasing your goods or services. It’s a win-win, for you and them.
Lunazul’s Success Story: Bottom-Shelf Bottle to Top-Shelf Brand
We witnessed that winning combination firsthand in our work with tequila brand Lunazul. When Lunazul came to us, they had a smooth-drinking tequila languishing on liquor stores’ bottom shelves. Previous marketing efforts had focused on functional attributes, but we immediately knew we had to give the brand some emotional bite, starting with a compelling point of view.
Our journey began with focus groups across the United States to understand Lunazul Tequila’s drinkers. We discovered that their target audience was young consumers hungry for authentic experiences and significantly influenced by social media.
From there, we dug into the brand behind the bottle. We found vitality, a sense of adventure, and roots in its Mexican heritage to be defining attributes of the brand’s repositioning. Inspired by the iconic wolf embossed on every bottle of Lunazul and armed with our audience research, we created an evocative brand mantra that became a stirring call to action: Feed the wolf.
The wolf became a metaphor for the audience’s own hunger for life and adventure, and we developed a comprehensive visual identity tailored to the brand’s values that we applied across a website redesign, digital ads, brand videos, and benchmark-crushing social content. The fresh, relevant brand repositioning drove a strategic “feed the wolf” campaign that prompted Lunazul’s target audience to “ask for the bottle with a wolf on it.”
We leveraged multiple digital targeting methods, a custom landing page, a Discovery network partnership, and a social campaign featuring professional chefs using Lunazul tequila. Effective branding was the key to unlocking upward mobility on the shelf and in the marketplace, and the results showed the wolf pack answered the call with these undeniable returns:
Making Your Brand (matter) More
While many companies are chasing digital KPIs and neglecting their core brand-building activities, we at (matter) know that a strong brand identity can drive effective advertising campaigns and ultimately lead to long-term growth.
By taking the time to research and get to know your audience, you can uncover insights that your competitors may have missed and create an identity that matters more to your customers. As we like to say, “Market less, matter more.”
Our team at (matter) can help you do just that. We’ll help your team devise effective branding strategies and content that drive creative campaigns, amplify brand impact, and foster deeper connections with your audience. Contact (matter) today to learn how we can help connect your brand to business results.
