In this week’s SherpaBlog, the brilliant Anne Holland presents the positions of two camps, the Brand Camp vs A/B Camp, and their approaches to beating the recession. “Whichever side you’re on — brand vs A/B — someone else on your team is evangelizing the other direction as the best way to beat the recession,” she writes.

However, with the due respect owed, I question one of her conclusions: “Who’s right and who’s wrong?” she writes. “Hate to say it, especially as a chief proponent of measurement in marketing, but brand should always win.”

Not so, Anne.

Brand is, after all, how your customers see you. It is the responsibility of marketers to help shape the customer’s view through a multiplicity of touch points and media that are all internally consistent (and let me make this clear: brand is not limited to a style sheet!). It is also marketer’s responsibility to monitor the changing needs of the marketplace – especially during a downturn in the economic cycle—and adjust to it.

If you are “A/B Testing” (and by that I hope she means any sort of statistically valid testing, not just A/B), the whole point is to stretch the definition of the brand and yet mitigate the risk of doing so.

If you have a strong brand and it is “soft and cuddly,” for example, and you develop an online promotion (banner ads, email, landing pages, etc) that is inconsistent with that positioning, a well executed testing strategy will reveal this gap: the results will be abysmal, but you will have minimized the risk of the promotion through testing.

On the other hand, if the new positioning speaks to the evolving needs of the marketplace, you will have achieved a tremendous breakthrough, with minimized risk.

In other words,brand should not “always win” – what should win is a properly thought out strategy that balances the defined brand with the changing needs of the marketplace and mitigates risk through measurement and testing.

In the end, however, I do agree with Anne’s last point: “Of course, the gold is having a strong brand with a team that’s able to A/B test, within guidelines, to improve results for it. That’s a company worth investing in.”

Let’s seek that “gold” in all our marketing activities!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 8:54 am and is filed under Anne Holland, best practices, economic downturn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.