Chicken or egg?
In other videos, we have extolled the virtue of creating lead generation and ROI before investing in less predictable branding campaigns. But sometimes the choice is a marketing promotion vs a branding campaign. Particularly for major, more considered (read expensive) purchases, Jonathan Rolley recommends putting branding first and gives his reasons why a competition/promotion should be the follow-up, not the initial tactic to be used.
Transcript:
If you're a new brand to market, and people aren't familiar with who you are, what you stand for, or your product or service, it's vital that you sell this first before you launch into promotions or competitions.
We've seen a couple of high-involvement products, these can be cars, these can be homes, and we've seen new brands go out to market promoting competitions. These competitions are like, 'Play this game and you could save $500 to $5000 on your next purchase for your car', for example.
This simply won't work.
These are high-involvement decisions for consumers. They're not going to gamble on a product where they're investing $30K, $40K or $50k on it to simply save $500 to $5k.
You must sell your brand and product first, then add further value with a competition or promotion on the back end. Not the other way around.
For high-involvement decisions, sell your brand, sell your product first. Promote this, solve a consumer's problem and they want it. Then the cream is the promotion or the incentive on the back end.