Peter Horst

Robert Duboff

<article-ideainbrief class="article-ideainbrief">
 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">Idea in Brief</h4>
 <div class="ideainbrief-contents">
  <h5>A Classic Tension</h5>
  <p>Marketers have always had to strike a careful balance between brand building and short-term sales promotion. Depend on too much of the latter, and—as Capital One learned—you’ll wind up with a brand name that doesn’t stand for much.</p>
  <h5>Made Worse by Big Data</h5>
  <p>Today that balance is harder to strike than ever because of big data and analytics and the highly targeted promotions they enable. The temptation to neglect brand investments in the pursuit of sure sales is nearly irresistible.</p>
  <h5>The Advice</h5>
  <p>To protect your brand, make every message do double duty. Use insights from data to make the long-term case for brand investments. Don’t pursue sales offers you can’t defend in brand terms. And go to new lengths to ensure productive collaboration between your brand mavens and your data analysts.</p>
 </div>
</article-ideainbrief><p>Deep into the second quarter, the chief marketing officer of a restaurant chain arrives at work to find that the CEO has dropped by. In this business, as in many others, “CMO” means chief revenue officer to the CEO, who’s here to talk sales. “There’s only a month left,” he says, “and I need a boost to compensate for what we lost because of the weather. The data analysts over in IT tell me we get the highest response to burger and apps offers. So, time for some coupons?”</p>

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<p>The credit card giant Capital One is known for its pioneering use of marketing analytics and big data, so it might be surprising to learn about its recent realization: that too much reliance on those tools had left it without a meaningful brand. The authors explain how the number one job of the CMO&#8212;to strike the right balance between promotions that goose revenue in the short term and brand-building campaigns that support healthy margins in the long term&#8212;has become dramatically harder in the age of data-driven targeting. Capital One got its own wake-up call when its CEO, Rich Fairbank, commissioned a brand equity study. The research revealed that the company was overwhelmingly known by consumers for just one attribute: &#8220;They send me lots of mail.&#8221; Efforts to strengthen the brand and give Capital One a stronger foundation for future growth yielded five lessons&#8212;all learned and refined through conversations with other marketing executives, including Tony Pace, of Subway; Mark Addicks, of General Mills; Tariq Shaukat, of Caesars Entertainment; Russell Weiner, of Domino&#8217;s; and Jim Speros, of Fidelity, as they dealt with the same tension in their very different organizations.</p>

Don&rsquo;t Let Big Data Bury Your Brand

The credit card giant Capital One is known for its pioneering use of marketing analytics and big data, so it might be surprising to learn about its recent realization: that too much reliance on those tools had left it without a meaningful brand. The authors explain how the number one job of the CMO—to strike the right balance between promotions that goose revenue in the short term and brand-building campaigns that support healthy margins in the long term—has become dramatically harder in the age of data-driven targeting. Capital One got its own wake-up call when its CEO, Rich Fairbank, commissioned a brand equity study. The research revealed that the company was overwhelmingly known by consumers for just one attribute: “They send me lots of mail.” Efforts to strengthen the brand and give Capital One a stronger foundation for future growth yielded five lessons—all learned and refined through conversations with other marketing executives, including Tony Pace, of Subway; Mark Addicks, of General Mills; Tariq Shaukat, of Caesars Entertainment; Russell Weiner, of Domino’s; and Jim Speros, of Fidelity, as they dealt with the same tension in their very different organizations.

Don’t Let Big Data Bury Your Brand

Summary.

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