A holistic approach to brand building and management
11.06.2024
The market is crowded. Packed. Competition is everywhere. Simply building great websites or online stores is no longer enough. Many companies struggle with declining returns and marketing strategies that no longer cut through the noise. To grow, maximize your digital potential, and capture market share, you need innovative, intelligent solutions. AI-powered performance branding provides that solution.
In 2020, McKinsey introduced the term “performance branding,” describing the integration of performance marketing and branding, with an emphasis on a full-funnel approach. In today’s marketing world, too many e-commerce managers are overly focused on the bottom of the funnel — performance marketing — where everything revolves around conversions. As a result, the upper funnel, dedicated to brand building, is neglected.
Although McKinsey highlighted it early, the term “performance branding” didn’t immediately gain traction. More recently, LinkedIn brought it back into the spotlight. And when a performance marketing giant like LinkedIn signals that change is happening, it’s time to take notice. Companies that ignore it risk falling behind — especially now that AI has entered the equation and is fundamentally changing how performance branding works.
Traditional lead generation captures existing demand but does not create new demand. It does not grow market share. By building mental availability and brand preference — and combining it with performance marketing — performance branding reaches both current and future buyers. AI amplifies this by detecting emerging needs before they’re expressed, predicting the most effective moments to build brand salience, and continuously optimizing message delivery. Businesses that limit themselves to Google’s traditional funnel thinking and short-term results miss the opportunity to scale their brand and revenue exponentially.
Performance branding can be deployed in five strategic steps that together form a holistic, AI-powered approach to brand building and management. Here’s how each step works when enhanced by AI:
It’s essential to reach a broad audience across the entire product category — not just current buyers, but also potential future customers who have never interacted with your brand. AI enables hyper-accurate audience modeling, predicting which untapped segments are most likely to convert in the future and adapting creative assets in real time to resonate with each one.
Generate conversation and ensure your brand becomes a talking point through AI-enhanced storytelling. Identify and communicate around the various Category Entry Points (CEPs) — the moments when consumers could think of your brand. AI tools can analyze large-scale social, search, and behavioral data to detect which CEPs are growing in importance, then create dynamic content variations for each, keeping your brand top-of-mind in diverse buying situations.
Ensure your brand is present and consistent across every interaction and touchpoint. AI-powered creative automation can adapt branding elements for different channels while maintaining 100% brand consistency. Every consumer touchpoint — from ads to automated emails to landing pages — reflects your brand identity, increasing recognition and trust at scale.
What gets measured, gets managed. With AI-driven analytics, every marketing activity can be monitored, analyzed, and refined in real time. Predictive models highlight which campaigns are most likely to generate future demand, while advanced attribution models reveal the true impact of branding across the funnel. AI turns your dashboard from a reporting tool into a proactive growth engine.
Differentiate your brand from competitors by being unique and instantly recognizable — and make it as easy as possible for consumers to choose you. AI can test thousands of creative variations to identify the most distinctive brand cues, and can streamline the customer journey by removing friction at every stage, from first impression to checkout.
In a digital and data-centric world, our approach gives marketers the tools to assess and optimize the effectiveness of their efforts on both branding and performance marketing by bringing it together in one integrated dashboard. With aligned variables.
With AI, this dashboard doesn’t just tell you what happened — it predicts what’s likely to happen next and guides you toward the highest-impact actions for sustainable growth.
Lukas can tell you all the ins- and outs. He will make sure to surprise you!
Linkedin says so. Harvard business review and McKinsey too. Performance branding is the future. The winning combination of branding with performance marketing.
