How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together

在过去的20年里，绩效营销已经成为企业用来与消费者建立联系的主导方式。绩效营销协会（Performance Marketing Association）将其定义为：为通过邮寄广告提供商、搜索引擎和社交媒体网站等第三方渠道开展的营销活动的成果——比如，销售额、潜在客户或点击量——买单。人们很容易看出这种方式如此引人注目的原因：它让企业能够开展针对性极强、提供显著投资回报率的营销活动，从而解决延续了一个世纪之久的沃纳梅克（Wanamaker）难题。这个难题因这位百货零售商而得名，据称他在谈到广告时表示：“我花的钱有一半被浪费掉了；问题是我不知道是哪一半。”

Over the past 20 years, performance marketing has become the dominant approach companies use to connect with consumers. It is defined by the Performance Marketing Association as paying for results from marketing campaigns—like sales, leads, or clicks—conducted through third-party channels such as direct mail providers, search engines, and social media sites. It’s easy to see why the approach is so compelling: It enables companies to run highly targeted marketing campaigns that deliver measurable ROI, solving the century-old Wanamaker problem, named after the department store retailer who’s credited with saying about advertising, “Half the money I spend is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

然而，许多高管担心，绩效营销正在排挤旨在提升客户对其公司品牌的认识、态度和亲近感的品牌建设活动——比如新颖的包装、新产品、别具一格的服务、创新的分销和创造性的广告。前一阵子，一家企业对消费者（B2C）/企业对企业（B2B）科技公司的CEO向我们中的一人表示：“我们十分擅长绩效营销，但我们的品牌糟糕透顶。”最近，一家全球电子巨头的高管告诉我们，绩效营销已经占据了他们的营销预算，他们已经失去了“品牌叙事”。当我们中的一人在2022年坎城国际创意节（Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity）上就最紧迫的问题对高级营销主管进行调查时，投票选择“管理品牌和绩效营销之间的矛盾”的人数两倍于其他问题，其中包括“未来所需的营销人才”和“元宇宙/Web3.0营销”。

But many executives worry that performance marketing is crowding out brand-building activities—such as novel packaging, new products, distinctive services, innovative distribution, and creative advertising—aimed at enhancing customer awareness of, attitudes toward, and affinity for their companies’ brands. A while ago, the CEO of a B2C/B2B tech company said to one of us, “We are great at performance marketing, but our brand sucks.” More recently, executives at a global electronics giant told us that performance marketing had taken over their marketing budget and that they had lost their “brand narrative.” When one of us surveyed senior marketing executives at the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity about their burning issues, twice as many voted for “managing the tension between brand and performance marketing” as any other issue, including “marketing talent required for the future” and “marketing in the metaverse/Web 3.0.”

这些担忧并不完全是新生的忧虑。即使在互联网让绩效营销无处不在之前，营销人员就已感受到，在标榜某一产品功能特点的细化广告与力图让消费者产生身份认同的更抽象的营销活动——比如，将汽车当作一种生活方式的表达而不是一种交通工具来销售——之间存在矛盾。

These concerns are not entirely new. Even before the internet made performance marketing ubiquitous, marketers experienced a tension between granular advertising that touted the functional features of a product and more-abstract marketing activities that sought to appeal to consumers’ identities—for example, offering cars as an expression of lifestyle rather than as a transportation choice.

传统上，这两者被看作是一种权衡：品牌建设是一种长期投资，而绩效营销则是在此时此地产生收入。诀窍在于“平衡”它们。可是，品牌建设正在丢失越来越多的城池，这在很大程度上是因为人们认为绩效营销与显著的经营成果有着更密切的联系。

Traditionally, the two were seen as a trade-off: Brand building was a long-term investment, and performance marketing was about generating revenue in the here and now. The trick was to “balance” them. But brand building is losing out more and more, in large part because performance marketing is considered to be much more closely linked to measurable business results.

我们认为，让品牌建设和绩效营销为争夺预算和关注度而相互对立，这会损害两者的成效，毫无必要。我们提供了一种不同的方法，它的关键在于制定指标，以便衡量品牌建设投资和绩效营销投资会对品牌价值的北极星指标产生何种影响。然后，这会与具体的财务结果——比如，收入、股东价值和投资回报——进行关联，并被视为两种投资的关键绩效指标。

We believe that pitting brand building and performance marketing against each other in a competition for budget and attention unnecessarily damages the effectiveness of both. We offer a different approach, which hinges on creating metrics that measure the effects of brand-building and performance-marketing investments on a North Star metric for brand equity. That is then linked to specific financial outcomes—such as revenue, shareholder value, and return on investment—and deployed as a key performance indicator for both types of investments.

修订后的品牌指标就绪后，企业就可以在如何投资品牌建设和绩效营销以及投资多少的问题上加大决策力度，以增强二者的财务贡献，并让它们更好地合作共赢。我们会审视三个截然不同的品牌所有者——一家航空公司、一家快餐连锁店和一家葡萄酒酿造商——的经历来说明这一方法。

With revamped brand metrics in place, companies can supercharge decisions about how and how much to invest in brand building and performance marketing in order to fortify the financial contributions of both and get them working better together. We’ll illustrate this approach by examining the experiences of three very different brand owners—an airline, a fast-food chain, and a winemaker.

制定你的品牌指标

Creating Your Brand Metrics

长期以来，品牌建设一直因衡量指标——比如“认知度”和“宣传度”——与财务业绩没有可靠的预测关联或回顾联系而受到影响。由于这个原因，它作为业务促进因素的担责能力——特别是在短期内——通常被认为十分薄弱，从而削弱了它的感知价值。就绩效营销而言，它欠缺一些考虑了其对品牌建设的影响的衡量标准，它的指标只考虑了销售额、潜在客户和点击量之类的短期结果。

Brand building has long suffered from having measures—such as “awareness” and “advocacy”—that have no credible predictive linkage or retrospective connection to financial performance. For that reason, its accountability as a business contributor—especially in the short term—is often considered to be weak, undermining its perceived value. For its part, performance marketing lacks measures that account for its impact on brand building, and its metrics account only for shortterm results, such as sales, leads, and clicks.

如果企业希望获得更多对绩效负责的品牌建设和对品牌负责的绩效营销，需要升级他们的品牌指标。方法如下。

If companies want more performance-accountable brand building and brand-accountable performance marketing, they need to upgrade their brand metrics. Here’s how.

1.制定品牌定位和激活指标并将其联系起来。品牌建设的基础是定位。它决定了一个品牌在市场上的竞争能力。最成功的品牌会自动、即时传达他们所提供的独特利益，向谁提供这些利益，以及这些利益为何重要。如此一来，他们可以占领市场份额，获得定价权，防止商品化，并获得经常性的、可持续的收入增长。

1. Create and connect brand-positioning and activation metrics. The foundation of brand building is positioning. It determines a brand’s ability to compete in the marketplace. The most successful brands automatically and immediately convey the distinctive benefits they offer, to whom they offer them, and why those benefits matter. By doing so, they capture market share, gain pricing power, forestall commodification, and earn recurring, sustainable revenue growth.

你的公司在给某一品牌定位时必须考虑四件事：目的（purpose），或者说利润以外的长期价值（比如，包容性、可持续性、人道主义目标或文化优先事项）；你希望目标消费者一提到你的品牌就联想到的情感属性（emotional attributes）（比如，出色、精妙或酷）；功能性好处（functional benefits），或者说你希望品牌去展现的质量、设计和品种等有形特征；以及体验品质（experiential qualities），或者说你希望品牌在目标市场上体现的无形价值（比如，一贯性、便利性和专业性）。

Your company must consider four things in positioning a brand: purpose, or your long-term commitment to values other than profits (for example, inclusivity, sustainability, humanitarian goals, or cultural priorities); emotional attributes (such as competent, sophisticated, or cool) that you want target consumers to associate with your brand; functional benefits, or the tangible features of quality, design, and variety that you want your brand to project; and experiential qualities, or the intangibles (such as consistency, convenience, and expertise) that you want your brand to represent in your target market.

定位的这些构成要素在营销人员和高管中人尽皆知，大多数公司已经获取了一些数据，以帮助他们衡量客户对其品牌的看法，在多大程度上符合其预期的定位。不过，从管理的角度来看，这些数据本身不是特别有用。你需要把它与我们谓之的激活杠杆指标联系起来。

These constituents of positioning are commonly known among marketers and executives, and most companies already capture some data to help them gauge how well customer perceptions of their brands align with their intended positioning. But from a management perspective, such data is not particularly useful on its own. You need to connect it to measures of what we call activation levers.

激活杠杆是公司实现品牌定位并保持的方式。它们可分为五个熟悉的类别：产品、价格、地点、人员和促销。你需要的指标必须把消费者对所有这些杠杆——而不仅仅是一两个杠杆——的看法进行量化，因为它们是你的目标受众与你的品牌的接触点。这些杠杆以两种方式影响到你的品牌：直接影响（比如，了不起的产品会树立品牌喜爱）和通过品牌定位间接影响（比如，广告、活动和产品特性可以支持选择“酷”作为优先考虑的情感属性）。炫酷的产品让你的品牌变得炫酷，这会在那些想要感觉酷的消费者中建立起对它的喜爱。你需要能够对直接影响和间接影响都进行量化，以便充分体现定位和激活之间丰富的相互依存关系以及它们对你品牌的影响。

Activation levers are the means by which your company realizes and lives by your positioning choices. They fall into five familiar buckets: product, price, place, people, and promotion. You need metrics that quantify consumer perceptions for all these levers—not just for one or two—because they are the touch points your target audience has with your brand. The levers impact your brand in two ways: directly (for example, great products build brand love) and indirectly through brand positioning (for example, advertising, events, and product features can support a choice to prioritize “cool” as an emotional attribute). Cool products make your brand cool, which builds love for it in consumers who want to feel cool. You need to be able to quantify both direct and indirect effects in order to capture the rich interdependencies between positioning and activation and their impact on your brand.

要做到这一点，我们建议运用结构方程模型（structural equations modeling），或称SEM。这是一种用于大数据分析的技术。SEM是一种基础能力，因为它可以让你量化品牌定位和激活对彼此的直接和间接影响，以及对品牌价值四个关键要素的直接和间接影响。接下来我们来看这个问题。

To do so, we recommend applying structural equations modeling, or SEM, a technique used in big data analysis. SEM is a foundational capability, because it allows you to quantify the direct and indirect effects of brand positioning and activation on each other and on brand equity’s four key elements, which we turn to now.

2. 制定品牌价值的综合指标。所有定位选择和激活活动的目标都是增加品牌价值。企业以各种令人眼花缭乱的方式衡量品牌价值，但我们建议综合四个关键要素来衡量它：熟悉度（familiarity），即消费者感觉他们知道和了解某一品牌的程度，而不仅仅是意识到它的存在；尊敬度（regard），即消费者喜欢和尊重某一品牌的程度；意义（meaning），即消费者认为某一品牌与他们的生活具有的相关性；以及独特性（uniqueness），即消费者在某一品牌中看到的差异化。

2. Create a composite metric of brand equity. The goal of all positioning choices and activation activities is to grow brand equity. Companies measure brand equity in a dizzying number of ways, but we recommend measuring it as a composite of four key elements: familiarity, the degree to which consumers feel they know and understand a brand, beyond just being aware of its existence; regard, how much consumers like and respect a brand; meaning, the relevance that consumers perceive a brand has to their lives; and uniqueness, the differentiation that consumers see in a brand.

我们之所以建议这四个要素，是因为它们综合起来会唤起人们对某一品牌的强烈情感，比如喜爱、忠诚和尊重，或者厌恶、不感兴趣和不屑一顾。新兴的神经经济学领域告诉我们，这些情感在消费者决策中的占比超过90%。它们对选择、消费、使用、价格敏感度、重复购买和推荐会产生巨大的影响，并通常通过允许提供新产品或服务以及允许进入新市场来推动品牌对财务增长的贡献。这在B2B市场和专业服务领域也同样如此。在B2B市场，技术的转变模糊了品类，而专业服务领域通常依靠品牌的无形价值竞争。

We recommend these four elements because together, they evoke powerful emotions toward a brand such as love, commitment, and respect, or hate, indifference, and contempt. The emerging field of neuroeconomics tells us that such emotions account for more than 90% of consumer decision-making. They have an enormous impact on choice, consumption, usage, price sensitivity, repeat purchases, and referrals, and drive a brand’s contribution to financial growth, often through permission to offer new products or services and enter new markets. This is equally true in B2B markets where shifts in technology blur categories and in professional services, a sector that often competes on brands’ intangibles.

衡量一个品牌的熟悉度、尊敬度、意义和独特性并非一个新想法。我们方法的不同之处在于，我们将这四个指标（简称FRMU）汇总为品牌价值的一个单一综合指标。这事可以办到。比如，对每个亚指标使用1—7分的李克特量表（Likert scale），然后对每个亚指标取一个简单的未加权平均值。一种更复杂的方法是使用主成分分析，通过对每个指标进行加权来提供准确度更高的预测。

Measuring a brand’s familiarity, regard, meaning, and uniqueness is not a new idea. What’s different about our approach is that we roll up the four FRMU metrics into a single composite measure of brand equity. This can be done using a 1-to-7 Likert scale for each submetric, for example, and then taking a simple, unweighted average of each. A more sophisticated approach is to use principal component analysis, which provides sharper predictive accuracy by weighting each metric.

我们方法的另一个不同之处在于，每个FRMU指标的排名依据的是在精心挑选的品牌范围中所占的百分比。每个品牌都与各种品牌竞争——不仅仅是与最接近的竞争对手——以争夺客户的偏好、心理和钱包。比如，人们不会仅问：“我们今晚应该去麦当劳、Wendy’s还是汉堡王吃晚饭？”通常，他们会问：“我们今晚是去麦当劳，还是通过DoorDash从本地餐厅点外卖，还是用Blue Apron净菜套餐做一顿饭，还是吃冰箱里的斯旺森晚餐（Swanson Dinner）？”就在那一刻，这些品牌之间相互比较后产生的看法会影响当晚晚餐的选择——而这种选择会影响这些品牌的收入。

Another difference of our approach is that each FRMU metric is ranked by percentile against a curated universe of brands. Every brand competes with a wide array of brands—not just with its closest competitors—for the hearts, minds, and wallets of customers. For example, people don’t just ask, “Should we go to McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Burger King for dinner tonight?” Just as often, they ask, “Should we go to McDonald’s, order takeout from a local restaurant through DoorDash, prepare a Blue Apron meal kit, or pull a Swanson Dinner out of the freezer?” In that moment, the perceptions of these brands compared with one another influence the choice of what to do for dinner that night—and that choice affects the revenues of those brands.

第三个区别在于，熟悉度、尊重度、意义和独特性的每一项指标都会按周、按月、按季度更新。对标其他品牌，影响FRMU指标的事情每天都在发生。这些事情可能是外源性事件，包括竞争对手的行动、社会政治事件和新冠疫情（想想科罗纳Corona啤酒和普瑞来Purell洗手液）之类的环境冲击。它们也可能是你公司特有的活动，从新产品或服务的推出到包装、定价、广告、渠道等方面的变化。所有这些因素都会影响品牌价值及其对当前收入和股东价值的贡献。这就是为何如果想要品牌指标可靠地预测财务业绩，企业需要高周期性的原因。

A third difference is that each measure of familiarity, regard, meaning, and uniqueness is refreshed on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. Things happen every day that affect FRMU metrics relative to other brands. These can be exogenous events, including competitors’ moves, sociopolitical events, and environmental shocks like Covid-19 (think Corona beer and Purell hand sanitizer) and the war in Ukraine (Stolichnaya vodka). They can also be events specific to your company, from introducing new products or services to changes in packaging, pricing, advertising, access, and more. All these factors affect brand equity and its contribution to current revenue and shareholder value, which is why you need high periodicity if your brand metrics are to be reliably predictive of financial results.

我们方法的第四个不同之处在于，FRMU的每个要素都是根据客户类型精确衡量的，包括忠诚客户与滥情客户（“反复变卦的客户”）、愿意回来的前客户（“赢回的客户”）与潜在客户、拒绝的客户和“未察觉客户”。如果你只用当前客户来衡量你的品牌，你可能会忽视那些不是客户、但却是高潜力客户身上的机会。你可能也没有考虑到那些在客户购买决策中有发言权的人，尽管他们不是买家。这样的错失会严重损害你的品牌指标，使其无法成为财务指标的主要指示信号。

A fourth difference of our approach is that each element of FRMU is precisely measured by customer type, including loyal versus promiscuous customers (“Switchers”) and former customers who are open to coming back (“Winbacks”) versus prospects, rejecters, and “Unawares.” If you measure your brand with only current customers, you could overlook opportunities with noncustomers who are high-potential prospects. You might also fail to take into account people who have a say in a customer’s buying decision even though they are not the buyer. Misses like these can seriously damage your brand metrics as leading indicators of financial metrics.

最后一点区别是，我们的方法要求品牌数据与人口普查统计匹配。举例而言，这意味着，为衡量人们对你品牌的认知，你调查的人应该与某一国家人口中的性别、种族、收入、年龄、婚姻状况、家庭规模、性取向与性别认同以及地理位置的分布相匹配。否则，你会损害品牌指标的预测能力，也会影响对最具财务增长和回报前景的目标客户的甄别能力。

The final difference is that our approach requires brand data to match census demographics. This means, for example, that the people you survey to measure perceptions of your brand should match the distribution of gender, ethnicity, income, age, marital status, family size, sexual orientation and gender identity, and location in a country’s population. Otherwise, you will compromise the predictive power of your brand metrics and weaken your ability to target audiences that offer the most-promising financial growth and returns.

3. 让品牌价值成为绩效营销人员的关键业绩指标。在太多的企业，绩效营销仅仅关注需求转化，而不考虑其对品牌价值的影响。企业必须定期、频繁地根据其绩效营销计划的转化率来监测品牌价值及其四个组成部分的变化。

3. Make brand equity a KPI for performance marketers. At too many companies, performance marketing is exclusively focused on demand conversion without regard to its impact on brand equity. Companies must regularly and frequently monitor changes in brand equity and its four constituents against the conversion rates from their performance-marketing programs.

如果转化率在上升，但品牌价值指标呈下降趋势，他们应该进行分析，以确定绩效营销组合（比如，邮寄广告、电子邮件和横幅广告）是否对品牌产生了负面影响，或者问题是否与内容有关（比如，构思不周的信息传递）。他们应该进行相应的修改。品牌指标上升但转化率下降的可能性较小，但当绩效营销计划与品牌增长策略脱节时，这种情况有可能发生。

If conversion rates are going up but brand equity metrics are trending down, they should conduct analyses to determine whether the performance-marketing mix (for example, direct mail, email, and banner ads) is negatively impacting the brand or whether the problem is content related (say, poorly conceived messaging). And they should revise either or both accordingly. Rising brand metrics but falling conversion rates is less likely, but it can happen when performance-marketing programs are disconnected from brand-growth strategies.

4. 让你的品牌与收入和股东价值建立联系。你可能相信你的指标已经具有了这种联系，尤其是在你的公司已经长期使用这些指标的情况下。不过，根据我们的经验，品牌指标类似于孩子：我们对别人孩子的爱永远达不到爱自己孩子的程度。有时我们对他们信任过头了。

4. Establish your brand’s link to revenue and shareholder value. You may believe that your metrics already have this linkage, especially if they’ve been used by your company for a long time. But in our experience, brand metrics are akin to children: We never love someone else’s as much as our own. And sometimes we give them too much benefit of the doubt.

我们框架的最后一步是将FRMU指标与财务指标——比如，收入、股东价值和投资回报——联系起来。弹性建模等统计技术让你可以量化在特定品牌定位和绩效营销活动方面进行特定投资可能产生的财务影响。

The final step in our framework is to link FRMU metrics to financial metrics—such as revenue, shareholder value, and return on investment. Statistical techniques like elasticity modeling allow you to quantify the likely financial impact of a given investment in particular brand-positioning and performance-marketing activities.

对于你投资组合中的每个品牌，这个过程应该重复：没有两个品牌是相似的，因此品牌定位、激活、品牌价值和财务指标之间的联系会因品牌而异。在理想状态下，你应该让这些联系得到独立验证，比如，由财务咨询机构和营销组合建模专家进行验证。

This process should be repeated for every brand in your portfolio: No two brands are alike, and thus the linkage between brand positioning, activation, brand equity, and financial metrics will be different for each one. Ideally, you should get these links independently verified, for example, by a financial consultancy and marketing-mix modeling expert.

让品牌建设对绩效负责

Making Brand Building Performance-Accountable

在我们的同事、BERA首席数据科学家迈克尔·雷（Michael Reh）的帮助下，我们在过去三年中与三家品牌企业——航空公司、快餐公司和葡萄酒酿造商——合作制定健全的品牌指标，增添了新的指标，并对其他与财务指标无法建立因果关系的指标进行了降级或重新调整。最终结果是，对多个品牌和多个国家的品牌衡量系统进行简化和标准化，并放弃那些跟踪成本高、但并未明显改善财务业绩的指标，以此来降低成本。这三家公司都能够准确衡量品牌价值的特定百分比增长对其年收入和股东价值增长的影响——并计算出需要多少投资才能实现增长。（参见表格“品牌价值的财务影响”。）

With the help of our colleague Michael Reh, the chief data scientist at BERA, we worked with the three brand companies—the airline, the fast-food company, and the winemaker—over the past three years to create robust brand metrics, adding new measures and deprioritizing or repurposing others whose causal linkage to financial metrics could not be established. The net effect was to streamline and standardize their brand measurement systems across multiple brands and countries, and to reduce costs by discarding metrics that were expensive to track but didn’t demonstrably improve financial performance. All three companies were able to precisely measure the impact of a given percentage increase in brand equity on their annual revenue and shareholder-value growth—and calculate how much investment would be needed in order to deliver that increase.

每家公司都利用了所学的东西来制定品牌增长战略，通过具体的营销和其他品牌建设投资来与目标客户群建立联系，以实现可量化的财务目标。

Each of the companies used what it learned to create a brand-growth strategy for reaching a targeted customer segment through specific marketing and other brand-building investments in order to achieve quantifiable financial goals.

航空公司。这个品牌在行业盈利能力中位居前列，部分原因是其营销预算比最接近的竞争对手少三分之一。可是，它的品牌遇到了与百威淡啤（Bud Light）和通用汽车等一些知名大品牌相同的命运：它有坚实的品牌价值——但原因只是它在广大民众中的熟悉度和尊敬度排名靠前。然而，当论及意义和独特性时，该航空公司的指标却急剧下滑。换句话说，更多的人知道并尊重这个品牌，而不是认为它很特别。

The airline. This brand was in the top quartile of industry profitability, partly because its marketing budget was about a third less than those of its closest competitors. But its brand had met the same fate as some big, well-known brands such as Bud Light and GM: It had solid brand equity—but only because it ranked high on familiarity and regard with the broad population. When it came to meaning and uniqueness, however, the airline’s metrics had fallen off precipitously. In other words, many more people knew and respected the brand than thought it special.

由于有了新的品牌价值衡量系统，该航空公司能够更精确地投放其营销资金，以便在不增加总体花费的情况下提高意义和独特性。该航空公司每个区域市场的品牌经理都确定了目标受众，为财务增长提供最大的可能性：比如，巴尔的摩的回头客（“忠诚客户”），圣地亚哥的风险客户（“反复变卦的客户”），坦帕愿意回归的前客户（“赢回的客户”），以及檀香山愿意成为客户的非客户（“潜在客户”）。

Thanks to its new brand-equity measurement system, the airline was able to more precisely target its marketing dollars in order to improve meaning and uniqueness without increasing its overall spend. The brand managers for each of the airline’s geographic markets identified the target audience that offered the greatest potential for financial growth: for example, repeat customers (“Loyals”) in Baltimore, at-risk customers (“Switchers”) in San Diego, former customers open to returning (“Winbacks”) in Tampa, and noncustomers open to becoming customers (“Prospects”) in Honolulu.

然后，品牌经理们为品牌价值及其四个亚指标的改进设定了三年的目标，都是根据他们的具体市场量身定制的。在檀香山，目标是让这家航空公司在潜在顾客中的品牌价值每年增加6%。在坦帕，目标是在“赢回的客户”中每年增加4.5%，这反映出在重新吸引以前客户方面面临的挑战更加严峻。

The brand managers then set three-year goals for improvements in brand equity and its four submetrics, tailored to their specific markets. In Honolulu, the goal was to increase the airline’s brand equity among Prospects by 6% a year. In Tampa, the goal was an annual increase of 4.5% among Winbacks, reflecting the tougher challenge in reengaging former customers.

在公司层面上，该航空公司将其营销投资导向那些品牌价值增长会产生最高财务回报的市场。在品牌价值最高的城市地区，它调低了折扣（这转化为最大的定价权），而在品牌价值相对低的地区，它制定了更具竞争力的价格（直到它的本地品牌增长策略扭转这一局面）。

At the corporate level, the airline directed its marketing investments to markets where growing brand equity would generate the highest financial returns. It dialed back on discounting in metro areas with the highest brand equity (which translated into the most pricing power), and it has set prices more competitively in areas where its brand equity was relatively low (until its local brand-growth strategies turn this around).

这种自上而下/自下而上的品牌建设方法让一个停滞不前的品牌恢复了生机，使其成为所有航空公司中实力最强的品牌之一。更重要的是，尽管在营销方面大大超支，但该航空公司的品牌在保持其一流盈利能力的同时，获得了1.6%的相对市场份额。而且，这尚在早期阶段。

This top-down/bottom-up approach to brand building revitalized a stagnating brand, making it one of the strongest among all the air carriers. More important, despite being significantly outspent in marketing, the airline’s brand gained 1.6 percentage points of relative market share while maintaining its top-quartile profitability. And it’s still early days.

快餐连锁店。这家公司的核心细分客户群是X世代的男性。他们绝对喜欢这个品牌。在这个细分群体中，该连锁店与Bose和金霸王（Duracell）等品牌处于同一阵营，其品牌价值在全球最重要的品牌中排名前10%。可是，这家快餐连锁店在X世代男性中的成功，没有留下多少进一步在这一群体中渗透的空间。

The fast-food chain. This company’s core customer segment is Gen X males. They absolutely love the brand. Among this segment, the chain is in the same league with brands such as Bose and Duracell, boasting a brand equity that ranks in the top 10 percent of the world’s most important brands. But the fast-food chain’s success with Gen X males left little headroom for growth through further penetration of that group.

看起来，显而易见的解决方案是将目标对准女性，但C级领导们担心，扩大受众范围会削弱品牌对其核心受众的吸引力。公司修订后的品牌指标显示，定位品牌时在令人愉快、令人心动和可靠三种情感上双倍押注会引起有家庭的女性的共鸣，并会增强该品牌在X世代男性中的价值，这时情况发生了改变。此外，源自新细分群体的预期股东价值增长会超过所需的投资。

The seemingly obvious solution was to target women, but C-suite leaders were concerned that expanding the audience would dilute the brand’s appeal to its core audience. That changed when the company’s revamped brand metrics revealed that positioning the brand to double down on three emotional attributes—cheerful, exciting, and reliable—would resonate with women who have families and would reinforce the brand’s equity with Gen X males. Moreover, the shareholder-value growth expected from the new segment would more than cover the investment required.

该公司将有家庭的女性纳入目标受众，使用可衡量的目标来指导该品牌在其新的“令人愉快”“令人心动”和“可靠”定位上的投资，以此树立了发展该品牌的商业案例。自这个计划启动以来，该公司已成功地从一个男性主导品牌转变为家庭品牌，并将其与收入相关的关键业绩指标提高了8%。

The company made a business case for growing the brand by including women with families in the target audience, using measurable goals for the brand’s investment in its new “cheerful,” “exciting,” and “reliable” positioning. Since the initiative kicked off, the company has successfully transitioned from a male-dominated brand to a family brand and increased its revenue-related KPI by 8%.

葡萄酒酿造商。这个品牌在35至48岁年龄段喜欢饮葡萄酒的上层人群中是最畅销的。就像Yeti（冷却器公司）和抖音（社交媒体应用程序）一样，相对于更大、基础更广泛的品牌而言，该品牌的熟悉度较低，但由于在该年龄组中的意义和独特性突出，其品牌价值看涨。

The winemaker. This label was a top seller among a very select group of wine drinkers in the 35-to-48-year-old age group. Like Yeti (the cooler company) and TikTok (the social media app), the brand had low familiarity relative to much bigger, broad-based brands but strong brand equity thanks to high meaning and uniqueness with that age group.

该公司的领导们希望将其客户群扩大到35至48岁以外的人群，但如何办到？根据其新的品牌指标数据，该葡萄酒品牌了解到，在25至34岁的人群中，品牌建设的潜在股东价值回报是49岁以上年龄组的4倍。该公司还发现，强化其品牌定位的三个属性——真实、勤奋和包容——将在年轻群体中对品牌价值产生最大影响，并增强其对核心客户的吸引力。

The company’s leaders wanted to expand its customer base beyond the 35- to 48-year-olds, but how? Based on data from its new brand metrics, the wine label learned that the potential shareholder-value return on brand building among 25- to 34-year-olds was four times greater than for the 49+ age group. The company also found that fortifying three attributes of its brand positioning—authentic, hardworking, and inclusive—would have the biggest impact on brand equity in the younger age group and enhance its appeal to its core customers.

为了激活这三个属性，该品牌依靠了两个杠杆：产品（包装创新，比如可以传达真实性和包容性的新瓶形和标签）和地点（渠道创新，比如是否可以通过网站、酒店、酒吧、餐馆和零售店购得，年轻群体会去这些地方买葡萄酒）。因此，它实现了葡萄酒品牌中罕见的业绩，即从一个小众产品转变为一个主流品牌，又不失其独特性。

To activate those three attributes, it relied on two levers: product (packaging innovation, such as a new bottle shape and label that communicate authenticity and inclusiveness) and place (channel innovation, such as availability through the online sites, hotels, bars, restaurants, and retail outlets where the younger cohort goes to buy wine). As a result, it achieved the rare feat among wine labels of transitioning from a niche offering to a mainstream brand without losing its distinctiveness.

对于这三家企业来说，品牌增长策略现在都是根据其预期的投资回报率来选择的。（参见表格“品牌价值增长的三种策略”。）为品牌定位、激活和价值设定可量化的目标是新常态，品牌经理们要对他们用品牌策略来保证的财务业绩负责。这就是实施对绩效负责的品牌建设的意义所在。现在让我们来看看绩效营销人员如何才能成为品牌建设的合作伙伴而不是对手。

For all three companies, brand-growth strategies are now selected based on their expected ROI. (See the exhibit “Three Brand-Equity Growth Strategies.”) Setting quantifiable goals for brand positioning, activation, and equity is the new normal, and brand managers are held accountable for the financial results they promise with their brand strategies. This is what it means to implement performance-accountable brand building. Let’s now look at how performance marketers can become brand-building partners rather than rivals.

让绩效营销对品牌负责

Making Performance Marketing Brand-Accountable

我们知道，绩效营销可以对某一品牌产生深远的影响——无论是积极的还是消极的。我们的三个品牌所有者已经采取了措施，以确保其影响是积极的。他们是通过以下方式做到这一点的：

We know that performance marketing can have a profound impact—positive or negative—on a brand. Our three brand owners have taken steps to ensure that the effect is positive. They did this by:

让绩效营销与品牌增长战略协调一致。现在，我们的每一个品牌拥有者都要求他们的绩效营销人员与他们的品牌建设团队合作，以确保双方均为同一目标受众追求相同的增长重点。这包括预先测试每个绩效营销活动对公司品牌增长战略的影响，然后再进行事后评估。

Aligning performance marketing with the brand-growth strategy. Each of our brand owners now asks their performance marketers to work with their brand-building teams to ensure that both are pursuing the same growth priorities for the same target audience. This involves testing every performance-marketing campaign for its impact on the company’s brand-growth strategy a priori and then evaluating it ex post.

让我们看看那家航空公司在坦帕的目标受众“赢回的客户”，该品牌对他们来说已经失去了意义和独特性。航空公司想出了一个策略，即绩效营销人员首先对“赢回的客户”的测试受众进行上市前的A/B测试，以确定哪些活动设计对恢复意义和独特性会产生最大影响。根据测试结果，他们选择了胜出的活动进行市场内的A/B测试，并定期监测其影响，询问诸如此类的问题：“这些活动是否在合适的细分群体（坦帕市的‘赢回的客户’，而不仅仅是‘忠诚客户’）中提升了品牌价值？他们是否是以正确的方式增加品牌资产（提升意义和独特性，而不仅仅是熟悉度或尊敬度）？”

Consider the airline’s Tampa target audience of Winbacks, with whom the brand had lost its meaning and uniqueness. The airline came up with a strategy in which performance marketers first did premarket A/B testing with a beta audience of Winbacks to determine which campaign designs had the most impact on revitalizing meaning and uniqueness. Based on the results, they chose the winning campaigns for in-market A/B testing and regularly monitored their impact, asking questions such as “Are the campaigns increasing brand equity with the right segment (Winbacks in Tampa, not just Loyals)? And are they increasing it in the right way (improving meaning and uniqueness, not just familiarity or regard)?”

在所有三家公司，绩效营销人员开始了解自己公司的品牌增长策略如何才能帮助他们产生量更大、更可持续的销售。他们还可以看到自己的活动是如何对公司的长期前景做出贡献的。同样重要的是，绩效营销人员开始积极与品牌营销人员接洽，从而为这一过程带来新的见解。

At all three companies, performance marketers began to understand how their companies’ brand-growth strategies could help them generate greater and more-sustainable sales. They could also see how their activity contributed to the company’s long-term prospects. As important, performance marketers began to actively engage with brand marketers, thereby bringing new insights into the process.

衡量总的投资回报率。绩效营销指标通常不考虑活动对品牌价值和长期价值增长的影响。这会产生严重的副作用，即，产生误判。比如，价格点的绩效营销活动可能会提高点击率——但其受众不对，而且其方式不利于正确受众中的品牌发展（由公司的品牌发展战略定义）。仅仅依据高点击率来衡量投资回报率会表明，尽管该活动对品牌战略产生了负面影响，回报却是积极的，这对长期价值会产生影响。

Measuring total ROI. Performance-marketing metrics don’t typically account for the impact campaigns have on brand equity and long-term value growth. That has the nasty side effect of generating false positives. For example, price-point performance-marketing campaigns may be increasing click-through rates—but with the wrong audience and in ways that work against brand growth with the right audience (as defined by the company’s brand-growth strategy). Measuring ROI based just on high click-through rates suggests that the return is positive, even though the campaign is having a negative impact on the brand strategy, which has consequences for long-term value.

我们的三个品牌拥有者现在使用我们推荐的品牌衡量方法来记录每个绩效营销活动对品牌价值、收入和股东价值回报的影响。他们已经看到，对品牌有利的绩效营销实际上产生的回报远高于营销投资回报率的传统指标所显示的回报。他们还了解到，当绩效营销不利于品牌价值时，无论是否有意为之，企业都会付出极大代价。

Our three brand owners now use the brand measurement approach we recommend to capture the effects of every performance-marketing campaign on brand equity and revenue and shareholder-value returns. They have seen that brand-friendly performance marketing actually produces much higher returns than traditional measures of marketing ROI indicate. They’ve also learned just how costly performance marketing is when, however inadvertently, it works against brand equity rather than for it.

三点启示

Three Takeaways

我们提供三点启示，可以帮助你让品牌建设和绩效营销更好地合作共赢：

We offer three takeaways that will help you make brand building and performance marketing work better together:

首先，将绩效营销和品牌建设看作短期/长期的权衡是非常危险的错误。之所以是错误的，是因为绩效营销和品牌建设都会影响当前收入和长期价值。这十分危险，因为它要求CEO们少接受一些好东西（比如说，来自绩效营销的需求转换）来为另一个好东西（来自品牌建设的长期价值增长）腾出更多空间。这就是“平衡”的真正意义所在，而它只会让二者陷入不健康的预算争夺中，从而加剧它们之间的矛盾。

First, treating performance marketing and brand building as a short-term/long-term trade-off is dangerously wrong. It’s wrong because both performance marketing and brand building impact current revenue and long-term value. It’s dangerous because it asks CEOs to accept less of a good thing (say, demand conversion from performance marketing) to make room for more of another good thing (long-term value growth from brand building). This is what “balance” really means, and it only exacerbates the tension between the two by trapping them in an unhealthy competition for budget.

第二点启示：品牌建设和绩效营销一样，都可以通过财务衡量。在许多企业，否认这一点的看法致使品牌建设与绩效营销相比显得黯然失色。如果你认为你无法衡量品牌建设的预期财务业绩和实际财务业绩，那么你就会得出相应的结论，即，你无法让任何人对改进品牌建设负责，也无从知道什么东西管用，什么东西不管用。但正如我们所见，情况并非如此。像其他任何业务流程一样，品牌建设可以有它自己的关键业绩指标，它们可以在很长的周期内与财务业绩密切关联，而品牌建设决策者可以担此重任并得到相应的犒赏。

Here’s a second takeaway: Brand building is as financially measurable as performance marketing. The perception that this isn’t so has allowed brand building to be eclipsed by performance marketing at so many companies. If you think you can’t measure the expected and realized financial results of brand building, you’d be right to conclude that you can’t hold anyone accountable for improving it and that you have no way of knowing what works and what doesn’t. But as we’ve seen, that’s not the case. Like any other business process, brand building can have its own KPIs, they can be closely linked to financial performance with high periodicity, and the people responsible for brand-building decisions can be held accountable for them—and rewarded accordingly.

反过来说，也是我们的最后一点启示，你目前的绩效营销可能并不像你想象的那样可以衡量。正如我们已指出的，最常见的指标无一例外地低估了那些支持品牌价值增长的绩效营销的回报，同时高估了那些侵蚀了品牌价值（无论多么无意而为之）的绩效营销活动的回报。我们所描述的品牌衡量方法解决了这一问题，它让品牌建设和绩效营销都受单一的品牌价值北极星指标的指导，而品牌价值能够与当前和长期的财务指标关联。

Conversely, and our final takeaway, your current performance marketing may not be as measurable as you think. As we’ve pointed out, the most common metrics uniformly understate the return on performance marketing that supports brand-equity growth, while overestimating the return on performance-marketing campaigns that, however unintentionally, erode brand equity. The brand measurement approach we’ve described solves this by enabling both brand building and performance marketing to be guided by a single North Star metric for brand equity that can be linked to both current and long-term financial metrics.

认识到这三个事实将帮助你和你的公司解决CEO和营销专业人士如今面临的最大问题之一。

Realizing these three truths will help you and your company solve one of the biggest problems that CEOs and marketing professionals face today.

吉姆·斯滕格尔是宝洁公司前全球营销官，吉姆-斯滕格尔公司CEO，BERA品牌管理公司董事会成员。凯特·兰伯顿是沃顿商学院营销学阿尔贝托·杜兰总裁杰出教授（Alberto I. Duran President’s Distinguished Professor）。肯·法瓦罗是马拉康咨询公司（Marakon Associates）前CEO，BERA品牌管理公司首席战略官，斯坦福大学商学院客座讲师。

吉姆·斯滕格尔（Jim Stengel）

凯特·兰伯顿（Cait Lamberton）

肯·法瓦罗（Ken Favaro）| 文

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