Brand marketing

Why your brand marketing is probably missing the one thing that matters

Sep 30, 2025

Two years ago, I wrote about when the time is right for brand marketing. It’s been one of the historic most important read topics on the substack. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with one of our creative strategists that provoked a rethink of this.

Here's what most people get wrong about brand marketing: they think it's about values, emotions, or creative storytelling. Those are just tools.

Two types of advertising (and only two)

Strip away all the jargon, and there are only two types of advertising:

Advertising that wants you to do something today - Click this. Buy now. Sign up. Visit our store this weekend.
Advertising that wants you to do something eventually - When you're in market six months from now, remember us.

That’s why we do advertising. When someone says “we want to increase brand awareness”, I ask “for what?” Usually they respond “so eventually they go onto buy.” Increased brand awareness is just a proxy for the eventual action.

So these are the two reasons we advertise: to create an action now or in the future.

That’s performance vs brand.

Direct response vs mental availability.

Call it what you want, but this is the fundamental divide.

The confusion comes because people conflate the how with the why. A John Lewis Christmas ad isn’t a piece of brand marketing because it’s emotional and weaves a story together. We’ve got scrappy UGC that does that too. It’s a piece of brand marketing because the desired outcome is – when you’re ready to shop, you remember them. That could be this Christmas or June next year or maybe in five years.

The mental availability game

“Most of the time, most people aren’t in the market to buy something. We know this because you can buy 100,000 impressions and only convert a fraction of a percent of them at any given time.” – Brand marketing: the time is now?

Brand marketing is about being there when that changes. It's about mental availability - ensuring that when someone finally is in market, you're front of mind.

But here's where things get interesting, and where my thinking has evolved since that 2023 post.

The "what" problem

In a recent conversation with our creative strategy lead, we kept circling back to a critical issue: a lot of brands want to be known for everything except the one thing that matters.

Imagine you’re the founder of PRO T, a new protein crisp company. You’ve just launched to market.

One brand desire for that company might be “we want to be associated with people who push themselves for greatness” or “be for the people who join the Sunday morning run club” You might create some organic content that starts playing in this arena. Maybe you shoot some content of people on a trail run before sunrise.

This might make nice content. I’m also certain that it will look beautiful, you can shoot it well, you’ll love the outcome and you’ll feel proud if it.

The problem is that the public don’t care about you. They don’t care about your brand. And people won’t dig deeper than what is being shown them in an immediate moment.

If you’ve really made good content, then maybe someone watching your trail running video remembers the name Pro T.

But as my colleague says, “if the one thing they remember about you is trail running, then the next time they’re in the market for trail running shoes, they might go “Oh isn’t Pro T the brand that does that?””

People’s attention spans are famously short. But we’re also bombarded with thousands of messages a day. Meta serve an ad every 2 or 3 placements. If you spend ten minutes a day on their platform, you could see 100-200 ads. You probably remember five of them. Then you go to work. On buses, you see more. On the tube you see more. Maybe you listen to Capital FM and hear more. Marketing is everywhere.

And people also have a million things going on in their heads. The report that’s late for work. The friend they haven’t replied to on Whatsapp and it’s now been five days. The wedding invite you’ve still not RSVPed to. You’ve not slept because you’ve got a five month old at home. What’s going to happen in the last episode of The Girlfriend? What am I going to eat tonight? Did I leave my hair straighteners on? The fact that your favourite song just came on shuffle and now you almost hop through the street. The glimmer of sunshine that hits the road just as you get to work.

People aren’t waiting to discover new things. No-one wakes up in the morning wanting to find a new brand.

And so if you’re lucky – and I mean really lucky – and you manage to create something that actually lands. Then the single most important thing that can land with them is a single sentence descriptor of the ‘what it is you do.’

In my original post on this, I interviewed Tom Hillman about his prior time at Wise, and he said: "No matter what else people knew about them, 'send money abroad' was the one thing they wanted to be known for."

Why this matters more than ever

The temptation to be everything is stronger than ever. Every brand wants to own a lifestyle, a movement, a cultural moment. But mental real estate is limited. You get one spot in someone's brain, maybe two if you're lucky.

Think about the brands you know well:

Volvo? Safety.
Nike? Athletic achievement.
Patagonia? Outdoor gear with environmental consciousness.

Yes, these brands stand for more. But they earned the right to expand only after owning their core territory so completely that it became synonymous with their name.

The channel confusion

Another evolution in my thinking: channels don't determine intent.

My creative strategist made this point brilliantly: "You can do both buckets on all channels. Some are better suited to one than the other, but you can do both on all channels."

Your Facebook ads can build brand. Your TV spots can drive immediate action.

At the Goodwood Revival - a vintage racing event where every detail transports you to the 1960s - they make all the stalls – Tesco included operate and sell as if its the 1960s. That drives short term sales and long-term brand equity.

The question isn't "what channel?" but "what outcome?" And more importantly: "what's the ONE thing we want them to remember?"

A framework for clarity

So how do you approach this? Here's my updated framework:

Define your singular territory
Not your values. Not your personality. The one functional or emotional job you do that people should remember. For protein crisps maybe that’s “delicious AND healthy crisps for gym goers who need more protein”
Assess your mental availability needs
Are there enough people in-market today that you can capture profitably? If yes, focus there. You can spend millions on advertising until you need to worry about mental availability.
Make every touchpoint reinforce that one thing
This hasn't changed from my previous post: "Every performance marketing ad you run impacts your brand. Every email you send out. Every delivery that gets sent to a customer." These should all reinforce the one thing you want to be known for.

Play one of your ads to someone who doesn't know you. If they can't tell you the one thing you do, you've wasted that impression: whether it was meant to drive immediate action or build long-term memory.
Resist the lifestyle temptation
Your brand can have personality. It can have values. But these should amplify your core message, not replace it. The protein crisps can be on sale at a trail running event, for sure, but only if the primary thing they’re known for is being delicious AND healthy crisps for gym goers who need more protein.

Brand marketing: the time is now

Brand marketing isn't about feelings or values or storytelling techniques. It's about lodging one clear memory that will be there when someone needs it.

Everything else - the emotions, the creativity, the cultural connections - these are tools to make that memory stick. Use them. But never forget what job they're doing.

Because if you don't know the one thing you want to be remembered for, neither will anyone else.

Early Stage Growth • Ballpoint

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