The Power of Data-Driven Brand Storytelling

A recent ANA podcast title caught my eye: Have Ad Agencies and Other Creatives Become Too Reliant on Data Analytics? 

No, I initially thought; we in the creative and marketing fields cannot possibly be too reliant on data. It’s our job to uncover customer insights that fuel creative, messaging and channel strategies. It’s our job to optimize organic and paid channels based on their performance metrics. It’s our job to test and learn. 

These things may be true, but in the podcast Peter Prodromou (founder and president of marketing and PR agency Boathouse) stresses the importance of the essence of our work. The marketing and creative profession is about making a human connection with consumers, and this can only be achieved through powerful brand storytelling. 

Insider Intelligence recently reported that 36% of marketers plan to increase their investment in brand marketing this year, up from 31% in 2023 and 23% in 2022. 

This is welcome news to my ears. I wrote in a recent blog article about the struggles I’ve faced throughout my career securing “upper-funnel” media dollars to invest in brand-building, awareness-driving tactics. It’s a long-term strategy, as it can be difficult to identify the immediate impact of brand spending and the impact might only be apparent when examining multiple different factors in aggregate (e.g. SEO, brand awareness and sentiment, customer loyalty, customer lifetime value, etc.). 

I’ve also found that pulling back on brand spending is sometimes a knee-jerk reaction to immediate economic and/or business performance factors. For example, a company that misses its Q3 subscriber acquisition goal may decide that they need to pivot Q4 brand dollars into lower-funnel performance media to “get back on track.” 

Going back to Prodromou’s advice, how can we as marketers double down on brand storytelling in a way that is accountable to business performance outcomes? I think we must dig deep in the data, but remain mindful of the power of long-term brand building when crafting the insights that will guide our strategies.

Another article from Insider Intelligence, Rethinking lower-funnel tactics for brand marketing, is particularly relevant here. It provides some very straightforward ways to keep storytelling at the heart of our marketing tactics, while still leveraging powerful insights from the data. 

The Mercedes-Benz SEO case study is an excellent example. Mercedes-Benz wanted to increase their search relevance against the phrase “pre-owned luxury car,” despite the data (search volume) telling them to prioritize “used luxury car.” For Mercedes-Benz, the long-term gain of evolving customers’ thinking around the brand–that customers not associate Mercedes-Benz with “used” cars–was way more valuable than the short-term benefit of capturing traffic. To drive customer awareness and association of the brand with the term “pre-owned luxury,” the car company invested in upper-funnel tactics, such as event sponsorships.

Carefully considering the data while still prioritizing the long-term value of brand storytelling was key in this case. 

The way we as marketers access and leverage data is constantly evolving. AI tools will undoubtedly expand the volume of data we have access to and the speed at which we can access it. Other changes, like the deprecation of third-party cookies, may challenge us to look beyond the metrics we’re used to. Data is a beautiful thing, but there’s an art to crafting powerful insights that blend science with storytelling in order to build long-term, meaningful relationships with customers.