Back in March 2020, a video from a well known brand of stout appeared online: vintage images overlaid with the uplifting sounds of an Irish flute and a voiceover in a lilting brogue. Ahead of St Patrick’s Day, the company wanted to send its customers a message: celebrations might not be the same this year, but remember to stay safe and be good to each other.

“When you raise a pint of Guinness, also remember to raise each other up,” said the narrator, over images of friends and families clinking glasses of the familiar black stuff.

The video is a deft bit of marketing from Guinness, which has an illustrious history of smart, memorable ad campaigns. It communicates both the heritage of the brand (there is mention of the 9,000-year lease on its Dublin brewery) and a message that speaks to the time (staying safe in the pandemic). According to a survey of US viewers by advertising technology company Unruly, 21% said they would share it because “the content defined the spirit and mood of the time”.

It might seem counter to the business’s own interests. St Patrick’s Day is the biggest single day for Guinness sales – a reported 13 million pints are sold globally, compared with a daily average of 5.5 million. Surely a message that explicitly encouraged consumers to drink the product at home might have done more to make up some of the revenue lost due to swathes of Europe and North America being under lockdown. But in the 21st century successful marketing is about more than sales: it’s about the brand. Who are you? What do you stand for? Why should consumers care?

“The received wisdom now is that you have to look for long-term, brand-building activities and at the same time match them with your short-term, sales-driven activities,” says Helen Edwards, a branding consultant and columnist for Marketing Week magazine.

Guinness wasn’t alone. In late March, Tesco launched a new TV advert telling viewers about “little helps for safer shopping”. Meanwhile, Volkswagen and McDonald’s both ran ads featuring their iconic logos redesigned with a gap in the middle, to encourage social distancing. Amid an unprecedented global crisis, marketers were scrambling to let the public know how their company – whether a supermarket, brewery or sportswear brand – fits into life in the new normal.

Deloitte’s Global Marketing Trends Consumer Pulse Survey found that 79% of consumers could cite a time a brand responded positively to the pandemic, and one in five strongly agreed it led to increased brand loyalty on their part. Conversely, two-thirds could cite a time a company had acted in its own financial interests during the pandemic, with a quarter saying it would make them walk away from the brand.

Marketing covers a huge range of activities. Even the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) says the term is as broad and hard to define as ‘management’. Practices range from promotional activities such as advertising and PR to operations such as customer relationship management (see boxout). But, ultimately, they serve to fulfil a simple aim: getting and/or keeping customers.

According to research by McKinsey, 83% of C-suite executives look to marketing as the major driver of growth in their organisation. The consultancy defined modern marketing as “the ability to harness the full capabilities of the business to provide the best experience for the customer and thereby drive growth”.

“Marketing ought to be the people who really understand the customer, what the customer wants, how they operate, and delivering against that,” says Edwards. That principle applies as much to, say, a company selling IT solutions to corporate clients as it does to the likes of Apple and Nike.

Mocky Khan, London chair for the CIM, says that marketing must be a two-way conversation, rather than a business. “You must listen to your customers, non-customers and what the marketplace is doing,” he says. “I suggest that senior directors go onto the front line, look on social media, understand what customers are saying and then adapt.”

But knowing what your customers want isn’t enough to drive growth: businesses must deliver on that too. Figures from a study by the CIM and Arlington Research found that 42% of UK decision-makers do not believe their company has a strategic vision. Meanwhile, 56% of decision-makers believe that board decisions are made without understanding the needs of customers.

“Business owners need to involve marketing in their decision-making to ensure their organisations stay relevant in order to engage customers and drive productivity,” says Khan. “Winning hearts and minds is key. Only when your staff understand the thinking behind the key decisions will they really put their heart and soul into it, making it a success.”

Edwards highlights Tesco during the tenure of recently departed CEO Dave Lewis. “It started with understanding their customers and that’s not easy to do when you’re a mass-market brand,” she says. One notable initiative under Lewis was to reformulate the supermarket’s own brand of food, introducing the ‘farm’ brands that compete on price with discount competitors Aldi and Lidl. “They really understood what was important to their customers and fixed that before going out with a campaign.”

Edwards says that businesses can be guilty of overestimating their competitive advantage. “They tend to focus on their own category and competition within that category, whereas consumers don’t. They see your brand in the context of other brands.” For example, she explains, imagine you’re running an energy company and you have the best customer-service call response time in the energy sector. But your customer is not comparing your customer service calls to other energy companies; they are comparing your response time to that of all the other companies they might call, such as their bank or their broadband provider.

Campaigns like Guinness’s in the early days of the pandemic are increasingly important to businesses in today’s market. Customers don’t just care how good your product is, they also care about what you stand for as a brand.

Research in 2018 by Accenture found that more than half (52%) of global consumers surveyed were more attracted to buy from one brand over others if it stood for something bigger than the products or services it sells, which aligned with their personal values. And it’s more important to younger consumers: according to research by KAM Media, 48% of Gen Z respondents said a brand’s impact on the environment was important to them when making a purchasing decision, and 44% said a brand’s ethical stance was important.

“Purpose is really [about asking]: what do we believe in? What drives us? And making that more known to your customer base,” says Edwards. “I think there has been a rise in attention to purpose, and that comes down to a recognition from businesses that what you’re going to have to do is compete on other dimensions than functional differentiation. If you can stand for something that a consumer connects with, then you’re competing on multiple associations.”

Done well, she adds, it allows both consumers and staff to connect with the business on a deeper level than a purely transactional one. It can be measured through brand equity studies and, hopefully, though increased revenue. In the days following Nike’s 2018 ‘Dream Crazy’ campaign – featuring Colin Kaepernick, the NFL player who led protests against racial injustice in the US by kneeling during the national anthem – the company reportedly saw a 31% uptick in sales.

“It’s not for nothing,” cautions Edwards. “If you declare a purpose, you then have to live by it, otherwise you’ll quickly get found out.”

More recently, Deloitte named ‘purpose’ as one of its seven marketing trends for 2021. “Organisations that know why they exist and who they’re built to serve are uniquely positioned to navigate unprecedented change,” said Deloitte’s 2021 Global Marketing Trends report.

Edwards points to Unilever as a good example of how brand purpose is guiding other activities within the business. “They have a Unilever corporate purpose around sustainability, and then every brand finds its angle on it,” she says. “I think what they’re doing with the Knorr brand is really interesting. They’re reworking it around more sustainable foods and diets for the future. They’ve reformulated the product, they’re reworking the corporate partnerships. I think that’s where Unilever stands apart – they take purpose seriously, and they do it properly.”

Advertising

Perhaps the most obvious example, advertising is still a juggernaut of an industry in its own right. In 2019, global advertising revenue reached $586.95bn. Today, businesses have myriad options when it comes to placing adverts, from billboards, TV, or print media to Google, social networks or even platforms such as Spotify.

PR

Public relations is more about building brand awareness and reputation than advertising. Simply, it’s encouraging the media to feature your product or company, such as by putting senior executives or brand ambassadors forward for interview.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

The higher up your business appears in the results of a Google search, the more people will click through to your website. According to a 2020 study, the first result that isn’t an ad has an average click-through rate of 28.5%; those on the second page have a rate of less than 1%.

Social media marketing

Social media sites serve as a platform for both promotion and brand building. Having a presence on popular sites such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube allows businesses to engage with their customers and push their brand identity. Plus, they’re a popular advertising platform. Facebook made $84.2bn in 2020 from advertising.

Events

Hosting or taking part in events is another tactic for marketers. This could be a presence at a leading trade show for your industry, or hosting discussions on topics that your target customers might be interested in. Either way, events can offer a valuable opportunity to speak to consumers face to face.

Content marketing

Rather than advertising, which pushes a hard sell to products, content marketing is more about strengthening a brand identity. It offers value to customers – content that is interesting or useful – and is aligned with the brand’s interests. The in-flight magazine you read on a plane? That’s content marketing.

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Further reading on marketing and brand purpose is available through the articles below.