Over the last two decades, the transformation of the consumer journey from a simple brick-and-mortar experience to a digital-first, multimodal experience brought performance marketing to prominence. As marketers turned towards targeted, data-driven campaigns, it sometimes came at the expense of the brand marketing techniques that made certain brands indelible parts of our culture.
That sort of brand marketing can be expensive— targeting the widest audience with the widest possible message requires developing creative campaigns in costly channels. It can be hard to quantify the ROI on a multi-million dollar television commercial campaign. It’s much easier to determine the ROI on a Google Ads campaign, and then make improvements to increase consumer spend or lower the cost per click.
Chris Paradysz, writing for AdAge, explains how both brand and performance marketing are changing and the impact it’s having on marketers:
Brand marketing and performance marketing are no longer diametrically opposed ideas. They have been replaced by the new paradigm of brand performance. It’s fundamentally changing what’s important to marketers and how it drives their decisions.
Increasingly, what drives brands’ decisions are the haphazard ways that consumers wend their way through the online and offline brand experience. (That’s why we feel it’s important to follow a data orchestration strategy, instead of a campaign orchestration strategy.)
Without the comfort of a linear customer journey, brand and performance marketing have to work in concert to hit the right notes for curious consumers.
From Mass Media to Mass Relevance
As a consumer brand with a strong emotional story and a strong scientific approach to their product, Molekule needed a way to mesh these brand identities in their marketing. Most companies— even the ones that pride themselves on performance marketing— under-leverage both their data and their brand identity, according to Agarwal.
Fully leveraging both of those things would mean getting them to work together. For Molekule, they needed the “right orchestration of the heart and the brain,” since no one would buy solely based on features or based on a good story.
In order to achieve this balance of brand marketing and performance marketing, Molekule turned to a data-driven approach that would help them to deliver the right content to the right person and the right time.
“People want content to be relevant to them,” Agarwal says, “They don’t shop in a linear way. They want to be sold to and inspired at the same time.”
Bringing together mass media branding with personalized marketing was an exercise in mass relevance. How could Molekule efficiently sell to a mom who wants the product as a health device for a sick child at the same time as they sell to an office manager buying to improve the air quality of their workspace?
To go from mass media to mass relevance, Molekule partnered with Tealium to help them execute the three parts of the plan:
- Identify the personas
With such a diverse set of consumers, Molekule needed to know who their buyers were and what motivated them. “This,” Agarwal says, “is where you need a good solution that can stitch identities across the customer journey.”
2. Personalize messaging
Molekule needed to ensure that their customers receive relevant and valuable information at every step of the journey.
3. Cross-channel delivery
Since their customers never made a linear progression through the sales funnel, Molekule needed their solution to work in every marketing channel. “It’s really about trying at each level of the funnel to sprinkle in the right message so you don’t lose your audience or your brand doesn’t come across as either very sales-y or very emotional.”
The complexity of the problem required the ability to confidently collect consumer data in real-time through their Customer Data Platform— in this case, Tealium AudienceSteam— and turn that data into action. With so many different types of customers, Molekule turned the brand pyramid— emotion, function, feature— into a brand matrix to accommodate the diverse needs of their consumer base.
For Agarwal and Molekule, Tealium’s ability to enable cross-channel delivery was an important differentiator for them in the CDP space and allowed them to build a functional brand matrix. “This is one of the most grey areas in the CDP world right now,” Agarwal says. “Everyone promises true cross-channel delivery but that’s not necessarily true. We are very lucky that Tealium has built these capabilities way before CDP used to be a word, and it allows us to truly deliver cross-channel messaging.”
In the presentation, Agarwal breaks down how Molekule is able to identify, personalize, and deliver content for out-of-market and in-market consumer journeys. With a wide variety of cohorts, Molekule intelligently uses the best parts of their brand story and the insights gained from their customer data to build the most relevant content across their brand matrix.
To build a long-lasting, sustainable business that balances the emotion and the data available to marketers, Agarwal suggests that companies
- Leverage their brand and data together
- Identify touch points and build a connection by sprinkling in the right messages at the right touch points
- Create cohort segmentation and automated messaging with a CDP like Tealium AudienceStream
Molekule was able to bring together the emotional appeal of their brand with the data-driven insights of their performance marketing team through their CDP. Get the full story by tuning into Gaurav Agarwal’s presentation from Digital Velocity San Diego, “Using a CDP to Resolve the Brand vs. Performance Wars.”
