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Money is tight. Bud­gets are squeezed. You sim­ply don’t have the resources to do every­thing. It’s deci­sion time: do you spend what you have on grow­ing the brand or on gen­er­at­ing demand and hit­ting the num­bers? If you are like two-thirds of the atten­dees at one recent B2B event, you’ll have cho­sen brand. If on the other hand you are in the grip of the bean coun­ters, you’ll have opted for demand.

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

In the land of the blind

After all these years, it still amazes me that so many in the indus­try think in these kinds of binary terms. Brand or demand. Strate­gic or tac­ti­cal. Even mar­ket­ing or sales. It’s a recipe for death by silo.

The truth of course, is that the deci­sion is never binary. Every piece of demand activ­ity you pro­duce is an embod­i­ment of your brand. Like­wise every brand com­mu­ni­ca­tion should drive demand.

To focus on demand gen­er­a­tion for a moment – there is a ten­dency in the indus­try to think purely in terms of the num­bers. How many clicks/downloads/sales/whatevers did this com­mu­ni­ca­tion achieve? It often leads to a nail the prob­lem, ham­mer the offer, for­get the brand approach (well, we did fol­low the guide­lines). And you know what? It works. To a degree at least.

The prob­lem is that this tends to focus so heav­ily on what we do it leaves no room for how we do it. The end oblit­er­ates the means.

Demand meet brand, brand meet demand

As soon as we focus on how we gen­er­ate demand and what it means for the brand, some­thing inter­est­ing happens.

For one thing, the cus­tomer comes more sharply into focus. We think more about how we can help them deal with the prob­lems they face and less about sim­ply what car­rot we can dan­gle to get them to do stuff.

We also take a longer term view. Not of the results – we still need to hit the num­bers. But we begin to con­sider the legacy of what we cre­ate. What effect will it have on our rep­u­ta­tion? What will the recip­i­ents say to friends and col­leagues about us? What will they think, the next time they see some­thing from us?

And, while I’ve focused on demand gen­er­a­tion here, the ben­e­fits also extend the other way. By mak­ing more brand-focused com­mu­ni­ca­tion respon­si­ble for grow­ing demand as well as brand, we give it focus. We avoid the upward creep that ends with brands try­ing to cap­ture lofty ideals that are irrel­e­vant to the con­text their cus­tomers find them­selves in (the world peace syndrome).

The result will be a stronger brand, greater demand and increased loy­alty. Now doesn’t that sound like a good decision?

Related posts:

1. Happy Sol­stice
2. IDC’s recipe for sell­ing IT in 2009
3. Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit II (return of the DGS)
4. The Demand Gen­er­a­tion Summit
5. Are you con­vert­ing or killing your leads?