#221: How to Measure Brand Marketing in B2B (Without Guessing) - Matt Maynard from Asana

(soft music) Get A U Beautiful B2B marketers before we get into the episode, a quick one for the in-house marketers listening. If you want 2026 to be the year that your marketing actually drives revenue in the business forward, and it's not just activity responding to random requests, well, December is your window to do it. We're running the B2B incubator and express version starting the 8th of December. It's our compressed six week version of the program designed for very busy teams who want a real demand and engine in place before next year ramps up. You're gonna learn the strategy, the templates, and the tools and join three live Q&As to keep you accountable. We start in December, we pause for Christmas, and we pick it back up in January, and you keep on-demand access the whole time. Over 305 marketers have been through it, CMOs, marketing managers, demand-gen leads, and some now generate up to 70 to 80% of their company's pipeline using the system they built inside the program. So if you're tired of all the chaos that comes with being in the house marketer, and you wanna plan that you're actually gonna use in 2026, make the most of this December break. When you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2BIncubator.com and apply there. Applications close at 28th of November, and there are only 10 spots available. All right, let's get into the episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome to the B2B Playbook. We help B2B teams punch above their way. - Where you host Kevin and George, each week we break down how modern B2B companies build demand, win deals, and grow revenue using our five B's framework. - So if you work in marketing, sales, or customer success, and you wanna make a bigger impact in your business, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. - And remember, revenue grows, starts with people not quite forms. - All right, all right ladies and gentlemen, if you're just joining us, welcome to full circle season two. This is our two day zero fluff conference for smaller than one person B2B marketing teams who are trying to build a brand in the age of AI Slop. We've already kicked off Track One brand, does not equal fluff, where we're going deep into how to treat brand like an actual business lever, not just a decorative logo that really kind of vibes. And if we haven't met yet, I'm George Kuten-Nyris and I'm from the B2B Playbook. And we're rolling right along in Track One with our second session of the day. You just heard from Kira class before. And now we get into the existential struggle of every marketer who's ever tried to defend brand work in a room full of performance, maximalist leadership who just don't get it. And if you've ever been asked, can we tie this brand campaign directly to revenue? Well, Matt Nain, it might just be your guy. Matt is the VP of brand advertising and communications at Asana. He spent his career breaking the gap between marketing signs and real world decision making inside high growth organizations. And today he's going to talk through how to connect brand activity to outcomes that leadership really cares about. Metrics that make brand performance visible and defensible and how to reframe brand conversations for credibility and buy in. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. The floor is yours. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Just as a way of introduction yet again, my name is Matt Maynard. I lead brand advertising and comms at Asana. We are the work management platform for human and AI collaboration. We help organizations of all sizes just like yours to plan, track and to deliver work all in one place. But before Asana, I worked across brand roles in both B2B and B2C, probably like many of you. Always inside performance driven companies, always with real revenue pressure attached to them. So the tension between brand and performance it is not theoretical for me. It is the environment that I operate in every day and have been. And I want to start by being very clear on what the session will be. This is not a love letter to brand. It is not a therapy session about how hard it is to be creative in a performance culture. This is going to be a practical session about three things in particular. The first is what brand marketing is actually responsible for in a performance driven company, not in theory in the way real businesses run. The second is how to manage the job honestly, without pretending you own all the revenue and without hiding behind long term as a blanket excuse. And then the third thing is how to operate brand as a performance engine for a future demand, even when you are a small team with a small budget, sitting next to a very loud performance dashboard. Everything we cover will ladder back up to these three outcomes today. So hopefully you're ready and we will jump right in. So let's start here. Inside most companies, the word brand triggers the same set of associations. I'm sure you have all heard this. People think of the campaign, the creative. I always hear the look in the field, the story, in some cases, it's the vibe, right? When the brief says we need brand, everyone imagines a big brand campaign or some kind of visual reset. Now I want you to compare that with how growth or performance marketing gets talked about. Performance is framed often as inputs, outputs, and outcomes. If you spend here, you get this many signups at this cost. One side feels like a feeling, the other side sounds like a system. And if you sit in finance or if you're in the CEO chair and you are trying to hit a plan in a really tough quarter, which many of us have seen that, what are you going to fund first? The thing that sounds like a system, obviously. So this is not really soft versus hard. It is vibes versus some kind of mechanism. And that framing alone explains a lot of why brand keeps losing budget conversations, not because brand is wrong, not because it's not important, because it keeps showing up as if it's something outside the performance system. And part of this, if you think about it, is really on us. Over time, brand teams have taught the business to see brand as decoration, what George talked about. We showed up at the peaks, the big rebrand, the new visual identity, the flagship campaign, the glossy launch film. Everyone gets excited, they got excited, there were slack emojis flying. And then for a lot of people, brand disappeared again until really that next big moment. And if you think about it from the outside, that looks like theater. It does not look like infrastructure. And if brand is only visible at those key ends of the process, once the real work is done, leaders are going to treat it as decoration. It is nice to have, it is fun when there is budget, it is optimal when there-- but it's really optional when there is pressure, or when there are hard times. And if we present our self as decoration, we won't be funded. We will be treated and funded like decoration. And that's not executives being against brand. That is them reacting rationally to how the function actually behaves. Now, let's move into the finance side of the house, because this is really important. We're talking a lot about funding. Finance is not wired to fund vibes, as we often put out. It's wired to fund mechanisms. And mechanisms are things that reliably change business conditions, whether that be more demand, more efficiency, more margin, less risk. When brand walks into some kind of budget conversation with a deck full of, here's our mood film, here's our tag line, here's some layouts and a great ad, or here's some great campaign ideas. That is a problem. But it's never quite connecting to those what conditions in the market will change and how that change increases the odds of future revenue. Finance has no choice in that case, except to classify that spend as discretionary, not because they are against brand, again, because they cannot see the mechanism that we are shooting for. And the irony in this is that there is plenty of evidence that effective brand advertising does grow future cash flows. You see it in higher customer acquisition, better pricing power, lower churn for stronger brands. And that is exactly the language that finance and the board already live in. But none of that matters if we walk into the room looking like we are pitching some kind of art project. And we're not pitching mechanisms that actually shape future cash flows. And now I want you to compare that to, on the other side, again, growth and performance. Performance they walk in, they say, if we spend this amount, we expect this many trials, this many demos, this many leads. Here's the model. And you can argue with that model, you can debate the assumptions, but there is at least a visible mechanism to fund. Brand is losing because it sells outputs, instead of actually clearly explaining mechanisms that change demand and the conditions for demand and ways that show up in future cash flows. And there's something important underneath this whole conversation. We are not guessing about how brands grow anymore. We have the benefit of decades of empirical work from places like Aaron Bergbas Institute, one of my favorites, researchers like the amazing Byron Sharp, Jenny Ramonionik, John Dolls, just some of my favorites. They have studied how brands grow across categories and markets. And that work consistently shows up and shows us a few things. Number one, brands grow mainly by adding buyers, especially light and infrequent buyers. And they grow by being easy to think of in more buying situations and by being easy to buy once they are remembered. And if we put that in simple terms, growth is driven by memory and by access, not by persuasion alone, no matter what you're doing. you learned in your experience or in marketing courses. The challenge, if you think about it though, is not that this evidence doesn't exist. The challenge is that most organizations never receive it in some form of usable form. It lives in academic language, it lives in conference decks, it lives in PDS in some cases that no one is operationalizing. And look, I get it, real companies are messy. Data is incomplete, there is real and our real politics that exist in organizations. And the quarterly pressures of getting all this is real as well. So the point of this session today is not to turn anyone into a marketing scientist. I am not one myself. I will not claim to be that as I go through this. I don't write the research, I learn it. And the goal of today is to show you how you can take what evidence already exists and what it tells us and turn that into metrics. You can turn that into decision rules. You can turn that into dashboards. You can turn that into investment logic. And all of those things can actually work and how you can fit those inside a performance to a given organization. This is about making that science usable, not treating it like theory. So before we go any further, I think it's really important that we have a shared language. When I say brand, I'm sure many of you get triggered by this as well. I do not mean branding. I do not mean a brand ad campaign. Brand is what the market remembers about you when no one from your company is in the room to explain. When a team is overwhelmed or maybe there's a launch and it's going sideways and someone asks, who can help us with this? That is what brand is. Whatever comes to mind in that moment is the brand at work. Brand marketing is part of the marketing machine that deliberately builds that memory with future buyers before they are actively shopping. Where on the other hand, growth or demand or performance marketing is the part of marketing that captures demand that already exists, that comes into market this quarter or maybe this month. It's the same growth engine, but they are different time horizons. And if we skip these definitions, the rest of the conversations never actually hold together. So from here on, brand in this conversation and every conversation moving forward is memory. And brand marketing builds that memory with future buyers, whereas performance marketing harvest demand that memory actually help to create. So let's actually translate one of the core findings from Aaron Bergbas and Plain Language. To grow, brands need these two conditions. First, you need to be easy to remember when a relevant situation shows up. And the second is you need to be easy to buy once that memory actually gets triggered. In the academic language, that is what they call mental availability and physical availability. You don't have to use those terms every day. I don't either, but you do need to understand the idea behind them. Easy to remember means this. When a specific business problem appears, your brand is one of the first that comes to mind as a possible solution. Whereas easy to buy means that once someone thinks of you, it is straightforward to find you, to understand you, to compare you, and to actually take action. What the evidence shows, and it shows this very clearly, is that big brands are both easier to remember, and they are easier to buy more so than smaller brands. And that combination explains a lot of things that people oftentimes misunderstand. First is this idea of brand love. And I'm sure that you have maybe paraded this. You've heard other people in organizations parat this. Yes, bigger brands usually score slightly higher on brand attitudes. People say that they like them a bit more. But those differences are actually small. And they tend to follow brand size rather than cause it. In other words, brands are not big because they are loved. They are loved a bit more because they are big. They are familiar. And they are easy to think of and to choose. If you're an in-house B2B marketer, and you want 2026 to be the year that your marketing actually drives the business forward and drives revenue, well, December is your moment. It's one of the few times of year you get a bit of breathing room. And it's the perfect window to build your demand generation engine you'd be meeting to get to all year so you can hit 2026 running. That's exactly what we do inside the B2B incubator express, starting 8th of December. It's our compressed six week version of the program designed for busy in-house teams. You get the strategy, the templates, the tools, and three live Q&A sessions to keep you on track. We run for two weeks, pause over Christmas, and then continue in January. And you keep full on demand access the whole way through. Over 305 marketers have now been through the program, including CMOs, marketing managers, demand-gen leads, content leads, and even full growth teams. And we're very proud to say it is the top rated B2B demand-gen course available. Some of them are now generating 70 to 80% of their company's pipeline using the demand engine they built inside the incubator. And across the board, marketers tell us the same thing that they finally feel in control of their plan instead of reacting to everyone else's. So if you're tired of the activity hamster wheel and you want to become the marketer who actually moves the business, head to the B2BIncubator.com and apply now. There are only 10 spots in each group and applications close the 28th of November. All right, back to the show. One follows the other. I think we often forget that. The second that I hear especially in small brands is this idea of word of mouth. The reality is larger brands get more word of mouth mostly because more buyers buy them. They see them and they encounter them in the world. It is not a scale effect. It is not some kind of secret referral hack that you haven't figured out. It is because more people buy them and therefore it is correlated to more people refer them. And then the third is this idea of loyalty. This is prevalent in many organizations of all sizes. Yes, bigger brands do have slightly higher repeat buying. They retain customers a bit better. But again, this pattern is extremely consistent. They are not big because they have extreme loyalty. They have slightly higher loyalty because they are bigger. They are more familiar and they are easy to buy. The same pattern shows up again and again across brands and pretty much every single category. And small brands don't just have fewer buyers. They also tend to have slightly lower repeat rates. Not because they are worse, not because the product is not good but because familiarity itself reinforces repeat behavior. And here is the growth implication that really matters from all of this. You do not grow primarily by squeezing more loyalty out of the smallest base of current customers. You grow mainly by adding more buyers over time, especially light and infrequent buyers. And as your buyer base expands, loyalty improves gradually as a consequence of that, not as the original case. So when you put all of this together, you get a really clear pattern to understand as we go and talk about brand itself. Big brands, what we are shooting to be, we're a small brand today, but becoming a big brand requires us that we are easy to remember. We are easier to buy. We are bought by more people. We are slightly more loves. We are slightly more talked about and slightly more often repurchased. And those last three things, love to talk about being repurchased, those feel emotional, but the first two things are really the growth levers. So everything else that we're going to talk about today sits on top of those two jobs, being easy to remember and easier to buy. So the real question becomes this, remembered for what? And remembered in which moments? Most marketers, including of all of us, we sit in category language all day. We talk about our category, the CRM category or maybe it's the customer data platform category. But the reality is most buyers, including us when we are buyers almost never think like that. They think in situations. Maybe they're thinking, you know, our pipeline is a real mess right now. Or maybe they're thinking, you know, leads or falling through the cracks. Or maybe we have an idea, or we have no idea what's actually going on with renewals. And we need to figure out what's going on. That's what we call category entry points, a term that was coined by Jenny Romaniac. And that's when the category shows up in their mind. These are situations, these are contexts, these are triggers that cause people to think, you know, I might need some kind of solution for something like this. And you can think of CEPs as the real doorway into the category. If you want your brand to grow, you don't want people to recognize your logo. You want them to think of you and as many relevant category entry points as possible. It is not just logo. You have to have them think of you in the situation. So when a launch is chaotic, your name should be coming to mind. Or maybe, you know, when you're reporting as a mess and you sell some kind of solution, you want your brand name to come to mind. Or maybe when a leader is really tired of status meetings, and they would love a better solution, and your brand solves that, you want your brand to come to mind. So the job is not just to drive awareness, which is oftentimes what people talk about with brand. It is that we need to attach our brand to specific category entry points in the memories of our future buyers. Now, here's where a lot of brands, especially in B2B get stuck. They in fall in love with one buying situation. sometimes they'll be talking about a use case. Maybe it's one primary. category entry point, this one moment that they want to own. Maybe that's where they started. Maybe that's where they found early revenue. Or maybe that's where the strongest case study for them actually sits. And there is nothing wrong with having a strong home-based entry point. The problem is when you confuse that one entry point with your entire growth strategy. The evidence actually shows us that big brands are not just a little more famous. They are linked to more of those category entry points and those links are actually stronger. They are remembered in more situations by more people. Whereas small brands, on the other hand, they often over-concentrate on a single narrow entry point. They can start the business with that. But unfortunately, it rarely scales just to own one thing. So the strategic shift that you have to make is this. You need to stop asking yourself, what one situation do we want to own? I hear that all the time when people talk about brain campaigns. What is the one idea, the one message we want to own? You need to stop asking. Instead, you need to start asking yourself and how many real buying situations do we want to be remembered? You still need focus. You can come up with some idea to inspire what you're working toward, but you have to have many situations. And you can't cover all of those moments at once, but growth will come deliberately by expanding your category entry point coverage over time, not from trying to perfect one moment forever. Now, let's talk about what all of this means. If you are operating specifically a small and a mid-size brand as many of you are, because this is where I see a lot of teams silently beating themselves up. If growth feels harder than it should be, the instinct is often to assume our strategy must be wrong. Our maybe our creative must not be good enough. Or maybe it's our message must be broken. But what actually the evidence shows is that something is far less personal and maybe even far less structural. Small brands grow more slowly because they start oftentimes with less distribution, less baseline memory in the market, fewer chances to be encountered, and less spontaneous word of mouth. Those are not execution failures. That is not on you. Those are the starting conditions in which you are where you're starting. And here's why that matters. When you misinterpret structural disadvantage as a failure on your part, you oftentimes could re-- or you could overcorrect. That might lead to rebranding too early or at all. It might mean you are pivoting your messaging consistently and constantly. It might mean that you are chasing novelty instead of being consistent. Or it might mean that you are over optimizing that tiny group of people who actually already know you. And all this feels like you might be doing something in the wake of like you're not seeing the growth that you want. But most of it is actually quietly erasing the memory that you have built. The one thing that brand should really be focused on. Whereas the actual right response is not to panic and not to reinvent. The right response is to design for the reality that you are playing the same growth game as the big brands. You're just playing from farther back on the field. And your job is not to outsmart the laws of growth. Your job is to do a few things. To steadily increase how many people buy you. To steadily increase how many situations you're remembered in. And to be consistent long enough for familiarity to start growing in your favor instead of against you. That is how small brands actually escape the gravity well, not with cleverness, not with some great novel idea, but ultimately with discipline. Now, we move into measurement, one of my favorite topics. And I want to be very precise here, because this is where brand teams often lose credibility in both directions. Brand marketing absolutely contributes to short term revenue. If we didn't, none of us would be sitting here with jobs. We know that brand shapes what people click on. It improves response rates. It makes performance messages more believable. And we know what that also helps to reduce friction in the funnel. So yes, brand affects in-quarter outcomes. And we should show that. Now, where I find most teams, though, get in trouble is by trying to make brand the sole owner of revenue. Sales only-- sales owns deals, performance influences in-quarter pipeline, product determines whether revenue sticks and expands, where brand marketing's core commercial responsibility is, is to shape demand conditions now and into the future. And demand conditions are things like do prospects recognize us at all? Do they associate us with at least one relevant category entry point? Do those prospects link us to multiple category entry points or just a one-near-a-situation? How many non-customers in the category carry any memory of us at all? These are all not soft questions. They are all very important. And they are about probability. They determine how likely revenue is going to happen. And here's the balance that actually earns trust. If you claim that every deal is brand's revenue, or you try to build a system to show how you are driving revenue across the board, you're going to lose credibility. But equally, if you refuse to connect brand to any short-term outcomes, you also lose credibility. So we really sit in this middle position. Brand supports short-term performance through responsible reach and responsible lift. And Brand expands that future buyer pool through long-term memory building. Both of these things are real. Both of these things matter. You have to show both. They just move on different clocks. And that brings us to the first place. Brand measurement usually goes wrong. Most brand trackers still ask the same version of this question that I see all the time, which brand would you consider? Or maybe how likely are you to consider X brand in the future? It sounds like a really logical question. It looks predictive. And it looks like it would give you one clean line for the executive deck, right? The problem is that this question does not match how memory or buying actually works, like what we've already talked about. People do not walk around with one fixed stable list of brands that they're always considering. What they retrieve from memory depends completely on the situation that they're in. The brands that come to mind when a team is overwhelmed are not the same brands that come to mind during a strategic platform review. So when we ask a question to people to make a really generic context-free prediction about future consideration, we are forcing them to invent an answer. And there's actually a lot of evidence that buyers are better at telling you what they did than predicting what they might do in some hypothetical situation or some hypothetical future. When you force them into vague how likely are you to questions, you're mostly measuring noise or maybe you're measuring mood, not real buying behavior. And if you don't believe that, ask me what I will be doing next week. I will be sitting on a yacht because that's what I hope. It's probably not what I will be doing. And those things feel precise, but it is not grounded in how decisions actually happen. And that is why this number jumps around. If you think about it, or when you look at your measurement, when you see this number, it often jumps around without anything meaningful changing in the business. And it's also why one blended consideration score is actually hiding the truth. Overall, consideration can go up while you are actually losing relevance inside some kind of critical buying situation. Overall, consideration could stay flat while you're actually quietly winning inside a high-value CEP. So if you're tracker and you're tracking work is not telling you where consideration is forming or maybe it's where it's decaying by each real buying situation. It is not steering the wheel. And all of this is not a screen saver. We have to make sure that we have real insight into what is going on. And that is why we anchor consideration to our category entry points. Because that is how memory is structured. And that is how decisions actually get triggered. Okay, so instead of one vague consideration score, we actually need a way to manage all of this. And there is good news. We do not need to introduce an entirely new concept to the business. In fact, I would tell you that is the wrong thing. Many teams already know this word consideration. Like what we've talked about. Many teams report on this. They're measuring it in some way. They already track it. They already care about it. It is a word that is in our vernacular. What they usually do not see though is that consideration is not one thing as we just talked about. It actually has structure. So here is how we translate everything that we discussed into something that leadership already recognizes and that you can actually manage. We break consideration down into three specific parts. All three focus areas are on memory among our prospects, not just their sentiment and not looking at the full pool. I really focus on prospects. The first is brand consideration. And this is really as what the researchers call mental penetration. This is the percentage of prospects who associate our brand with at least one category entry point. We deliberately exclude, like I said, current customers here. And the reason is because future growth does not come from people who already choose you. It comes from people who have not chosen anyone just yet. We still look at and we can cut by current customers as well. But I'm really focused on growing the pool of future buyers. We also don't ask a really-- vague would you consider us someday like I talked about we anchor the question in real buying situations. When you face problems like X or maybe Y or Z, which brands come to your mind as possible solutions. And if our brand appears then at least one of those, that is mental penetration, that is what we call in this case brand consideration. The second is we put a measurement underneath the brand consideration that we call brand consideration depth. What is the average number of category entry points that are linked to your brand per prospect or per prospect? Do they only think of us for one thing or do they remember us for several different situations? And as we talked about the more situations that we are remembered in, the more entry points that we have into future deals. And then the third is this idea of brand consideration, competitive share. Here we look at things like of all the brand plus consider category entry point associations that exist across competitors. So if there are 10,000 total problem solution memories in the category, how many of those actually belong to us. And that tells us how much mental real estate we actually occupy. Think about it as share of search for our brand. And together these three metrics tell us a few things. How many people remember us at all? Or how many people would think of us at all? How broadly they actually remember us? And how strong we are relative to our competitors or to the alternatives? That is a performance legitimate view of consideration. And this is why consideration is so useful. It is familiar to the business. But now it actually means something. So once people actually see that framework, the very next question is always the same. And I'm sure you were thinking this. Matt, what if we don't actually have the budget for a massive always on brand tracker? That sounds great. You can do that in American airlines. You can do that with the sauna. You can do that at McKesson. We can't. And the answer is you can still use this model. You just approximate it. And you use more directional things to get you closer. So for mental penetration or this idea of brand consideration, the ideas are reoccurring survey focused on non customers. The small team version of that is to run a lighter version maybe once or twice a year. And you can still anchor the questions in real category entry points. You can filter out your current customers and you can track directional movement over time. The second part is for brand consideration depth. The ideal is that, you know, it's the same survey. You're counting as many category entry points that each prospect is linking to you. The small team version of that is that you can come from it can come from all of your own data, right? You can add a simple problem trigger field in your CRM. And then you can use AI to summarize all the call transcripts and maybe tag what situations you're being mentioned for. And I think what you'll find over time is that you'll see whether your brand is stuck in one narrow use case or whether it's expanding into more of them. And then for competitive share, the ideal here is that it is the same full category coverage, but there's still a small category version of this or a small team version of this. And it's that you want to at least include the main competitors that you face most often. And the point of all of this is not perfection. The point is to move from, hey, you know, brand feels good. This is the out these are the outputs. This is what we make to hear as how our demand conditions are changing over time with the tools we actually have. To instead, we are moving to this place that people actually see that we are an organization that has a view of what's going on and we are reporting on it. And that shift alone changes how brand is treated internally within your organization. Now, let's actually tie this to the idea of reach and budget, which are the ways that we make these things. We make a dent in actually moving memory. There's a great scientist. His name is John Dolls. And there's others at Aaronburg Bast. John popularized this really useful heuristic that I'm sure that many of you have heard. It's the 95 rule. Basically, the premise is that roughly 5% of buyers in a category are in the market at a given period. Whereas 95% of them are not actively buying right now. So that means no matter how hard you try, you're only going to be able to activate 5% of people out right now. And the exact percentages may vary by category, but the pattern holds most of your future revenue is going to come from people who are out of market today. Performance marketing, growth marketing, demand, and whatever you want to call it, it lives mostly in that 5%. So I want you to think about that as your checking account. You need it. It pays the bills. But brand marketing has to live in that 95% as well as supporting the 5% just to be clear. And what I want you to think about that 95% in what brand marketing is doing. This is your 401k. So in a performance culture, you absolutely should have brand and hold brand to performance standards. But the relevant standard is not incremental, you know, row as in the quarters conversions. The standard that we are shooting for is this idea of what I call responsible reach. Are we reaching enough of the future category buyers? Often enough, in the right category entry points, are we steadily increasing mental penetration, depth, competitive share among our non-customers? And in parallel, are we contributing to short-term outcomes like signups or trials or leads, whatever yours is? And a way that represents what, in a way that is consistent with that longer term job. It is responsible driving short-term outcomes and reach driving future memory. That is how you talk about brand as a performance engine without pretending that it is just another channel and some kind of last-click dashboard. Now, a fair question that leaders often ask is how do we know that any of this is working before the long-term metrics move? I have a tracker. I have to wait a year or maybe things are just moving really slowly. I like to separate outcomes into both long-term and short-term for brand. So long-term outcomes are things like brand consideration that we talked about, the depth, the competitive share among prospects by each of those category entry points. These things, as I mentioned, they move really slowly. They show you whether you are building real demand conditions and they are slow. Around those core metrics, you often see second-order things like more organic search, more direct traffic, more positive attitudes, and more inbound from people who already know who you are. And there is also a retention angle here. When more real-world situations or category entry points are linked to your brand and someone's memory, their probability of defecting drops a bit for each extra link as well. And that your odds of being chosen again in that next situation, they often over time they switch when suppliers go up. So, CEP linked consideration is not just an acquisition story. It is a churn story and a reselection story as well. Now, on top of that, stronger brands tend to show a portfolio of commercial effects that you can't get from short-term activation alone. Those things are things that we talked about, better pricing power, lower churn. In some cases, easier hiring or even more resilience when our competitors start to attack us. Equally, short-term, there are things that you can do and things you can look at. And I like to put them in two main types of signals. The first is campaign-level brand lift. And many of you have heard this, you probably heard of brand lift studies. But I like to think of it as a very specific thing. If you are running a major brand campaign, you can measure whether more people exposed to that campaign, link your brand to specific category entry points versus a control group. That is a cleaner story than what oftentimes gets asked, which is, did you like this ad? Did you feel a response? Those things are not important. Don't spend your time there. It is about, did someone link that message to your brand? And the second thing you can look at is how brand is showing up in the performance metrics that you already care about. Do more signups actually mention the problems that you were trying to own. Do when loss notes or calls show that buyers are recalling you in more situations. Or maybe even are assisted conversions increasing in channels where your brand activity is heavier. You never say all of that revenue is because of brand. Obviously, you say these short-term signals line up with the longer-term demand conditions that we are building. And together, they make this investment feel responsible, not speculative. And once brand has actually started to be measured in that way, the next question becomes operational. And it looks like this. This is where we actually put this fake word of bed that I have heard for so many times, which is brand and performance are at odds. When in reality, brand and performance, growth, demand, whatever you want to call it, are not two separate worlds. They are not fighting over one budget and one is going to win. They are two gears inside the same demand engine. As we talked about, brand marketing builds future demand conditions among mostly out of market buyers, whereas performance marketing captures that demand among the in-market buyers right now. If you're only running performance, you look efficient for a while. And then your growth engine stalls because you stopped feeding and bringing in that 95% of the people. Whereas on the other hand, if you only run brain You may build nice memory, but you starve the business of real cash flow. So inside some, you know, these performance obsessed companies that we work in, the move is not to argue that brand is different or it is the only thing that we need. The move is that we need to define which gear that you own, how you are going to measure it, and how it works with the other gear instead of against it. All right, now that the fast, you know, with all of that behind us, the fastest way to really make that real inside an organization is through what you choose to report on. When you, when you only report on things, which I see oftentimes with brand teams is, you know, our number of assets shipped, the number of creative things that we got out in the market. Maybe it's the number of impressions or our view through rates are in some cases, I see this a lot too. The number of awards that we've won you are training the organization to see you not as, you know, a strategic function, but instead as a service desk as a studio, a production function, give them a brief and they will make you something. Instead, if you look at it the other way, when you're reporting on things like how many prospects associate us with at least one category entry point or how many category entry points on average each prospect. And that's prospect links us to or maybe even what share of problem solution associations you own versus your competitors. Or maybe even one more on top of that how your campaign shift those numbers over time. You are training the organization to see you as infrastructure as strategic the function that shapes future demand conditions. And if you only have one slide each quarter that shows are you are more of the right prospects aware of us in more situations across a slightly wider future buyer pool that repeated reporting will slowly rewire how leadership thinks about what brand is for reporting is not an admin responsibility. It is not something that is meaningless reporting is ultimately the position of how we grow respect in our organizations. Excuse me and this is where the role of brand of a brand leader is just like you and the talent shifted over time it is no longer enough to be the person with taste. It is no longer the person who is story or just can come in and talk about awareness. You have to be a translator and you translate the evidence from people like Byron Sharp and Ramon unique and dolls into the metrics that makes sense for your business. You are translating those category entry points into stories that sales can actually use. So when a rep rep asks where does brand help me you can point them to specific situations where buyers are more likely to know you and to understand you. You are translating future demand into investment logic for stakeholders like finance if we increase our mental penetration or our brand consideration among these segments from X to Y and deep in our category entry point links in these areas here is how that changes the odds of revenue two or three years from now. And you are not just the voice of brand you are the person who plugs that brand system into how the business actually runs that is how you are in belief within you know belief within your organization without asking for blind faith. And when you do that consistently something else starts to change to not just how the market sees you but how the company actually starts to make decisions about brand. And we usually talk about brand impact typically in external terms awareness consideration in some cases preference and those things matter. But some of the strongest brand systems that I have seen also create a different kind of impact as well they stabilize internal decision making leaders feel clear about what is what they need to protect what they need to invest in. And what are some of the non negotiables they are chasing fewer random ideas it leads to rebranding less often and they stop asking for a new story every single quarter brand can also become a risk reduction system not just a communications layer. So when your category entry point strategy is clear when your assets are consistent and your metrics show steady progress it becomes much easier for executives to say we are staying the course here. And that means a lot and then the performance culture that kind of decision confidence is one of the most valuable things that brand can provide to an organization. Now if you forget everything else from the session I want you to remember three jobs the first is you should build memory I want you to show up for real category entry points with real future buyers often enough that your brand is easy to remember when those situations hit. Not just for reach for reach sake reach in the situations that actually trigger demand that is how future pipeline how future demand gets seated. The second thing so important to me is I want you to do everything you can in your role to protect consistency. And this is where all of the unglamour stuff lives this is your logo the colors the character the sonic logo the design elements that everyone is always tempted to refresh because they are new and they want to put their mark on the brand. Use the same distinctive assets over and over not because it looks neat and a brand book but because this is how recognition compounds the more consistently that you are reusing your assets the fewer impressions that you need in the future to be noticed to remember and to be chosen that is real financial value not creative preference. Tell a cohesive story across your category entry points so that the same brand shows up whether that someone me to at a launch maybe during a status crisis or even in a portfolio review. And I want you to resist unnecessary resets and stunts that resist memory more than they actually build it. What I find is that most rebrands and big brand moments for small brands are really expensive ways to go right back to square one. And we don't want that. And then the third thing and the final thing is to translate growth I want you to turn all of this into demand condition metrics short term performance signals and investment logic that finance that your sales team and that the product team in your boss can actually use. So when you do these three things consistently brand stops being the team that makes the decks look better and it starts becoming a discipline function that actually happens to run on a longer time horizon. So let me close where we started brand is not just what you launch it is not just what your website says and it is not just how you look brand is what the market remembers when no one from your company is in the room to explain it. It is what comes to mind when teams are overwhelmed when systems break or maybe even when a launch for a customer feels like chaos if your brand does not show up in those situations nothing else we talked about really matters. And here's the good news for you brand is not doomed in this performance culture that we live in today. It is it is just being asked to grow up to be more discipline to be more accountable and to be more powerful than ever because as we know memory is a real asset and consistency is a real advantage and translating our impact into business terms is how we are going to earn our seat at that table. So with that that is the end of my presentation I'd love to hear from you if you have any questions George if you want to come back in. Well that was absolutely outstanding that honestly that was one of the most practical frameworks I've seen when it comes to brand and from the chatter in the chat I can tell people absolutely loving that too. One good question that we had from Alan Thomas that we have just up on stage here as well now what do you think the mechanism system is that branch should be selling I'm at a small company with small budgets I have no way of quantifying brand recall or its relation to inbound leads and Alan works in a niche fintech SaaS product you touched on this a little bit earlier Matt but I think it's really worth reiterating how you would respond to this. Yeah I think a few things one Alan I know it's a hard situation to be in and I think even within big brands we often think that you know this is something that is so easy I love to sit in front of you I've worked for fortune seven companies or an affortion seven company where it's one of the biggest and this is still a challenge no matter the size of the company is getting people to buy in and believe in brand of course we have more tools but it is still hard and I want you to think about it as a journey. And I think the first part of your journey in a small company is you need to make the case of 955 you need people to understand and to agree that the full market today is not ready to buy and if you start there with common sense you can then move your way to saying how are we going to reach and to make memory with these future buyers to bring them in. And usually what that looks like is let's invest a little and reaching people that aren't ready to buy today and what that looks like is let's go a little broader than just the signals that somebody is ready to do something right now and it doesn't have to be huge it doesn't have to be in every market but there needs to be some kind of investment and reaching future buyers and then I think you baby step into some of the things that I talked about today which is how do you use the tools that are in your disposal how do you think about you know I'm going to brand, can I even run a small survey among a small population in any way of some future buyer, some current customers to get a signal of how many people actually think about this for the buying situations? One question I get all the time is like, well, I don't have money to do category entry point research, so I don't know what my buying situations are. You have this great tool called AI. AI is a really fantastic tool that, directionally, it's not going to be perfect, but you can think about, ask it, what are some of the key reasons that people come into category and take your best stab, thinking about it objectively, not for your brand, not why they purchase your brand, but why are people coming into category? And if you have a little more budget, there's really great companies now that can also like Evadenza, they run synthetic research where they can do it really fast and turn it where they can tell you some of your key category entry points, understand those category entry points, do some surveying, and then ask people when they come in, what are the reasons and you have kind of a flywheel and ecosystem of getting information back? The bottom line is see the journey of what I've talked about today as a incremental journey every day that you're working toward, a slight investment showing the outcomes that you're driving the short and the long term, and then working your way to measuring in some capacity that usually looks small and anecdotal of are we connecting our brand to more reasons to enter the category, and you know that will drive growth, and then you can make your system more sophisticated over time. Well, fantastic answer, and Matt again we've got people commenting just what a phenomenal presentation this has been, and as absolutely been one of my favourite, we are unfortunately going to have to conclude this session and I know people would have had far more questions, but please make sure you reach out to Matt Maynard, follow him on LinkedIn, he's a really, really good person to make sure you stay in touch with as he translates the academia of brand into the practical realities, big teams and small. Thank you so much Matt, really appreciate it. Thank you George, and thank you to all of you. See you soon. Before you go, head to the www.b2bplaybook.com and subscribe to our newsletter for more resources and insights on all things beta b marketing, sales and customer success. And make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any future episodes, and remember, revenue growth starts with people not platforms. [Music]