It’s the end of the calendar year, and many marketers are well on their way to finalizing, or have finalized 2020 planning. I have one quick thought as you rush out for the holidays and then into the New Year.

If you’re focused only on efficiency and performance, you’ll eventually lose.

Return on investment, performance metrics and sales are all massively important and great marketers all invest in the time and technology for the best performance possible. But that should never be your only job, (and in my opinion ANY marketing professionals only job).

Your brand is what will determine whether your company leads, lasts or languishes. Without building core values, a story, purpose or brand soul, you’re just executing. And a universal truth of business is that someone will always figure out a way to execute better, faster and more cheaply, especially if there’s a growing market with fat margins. So ultimately, you’re always vulnerable to someone quickly catching up unless you have a strong brand.

But the investment in a brand doesn’t require massive resources that hijack your entire marketing plan. In fact it only needs five things:

Strategy

Everyone thinks they have a brand strategy, but can you describe what your brand is about in one or two sentences of simple English? Could you throw out three to five core values or attributes your built on and are infused in all your communications? Can you describe (and prove) why a consumer buys or even better loves, your product?

If you can answer all three of these questions,, great. If not, spend time defining these, developing the basics of a brand strategy, get alignment on it and share it across your company ASAP.

Creative Voice

Look at all your communications (internal and external) and ask yourself, what is the takeaway from this piece and what does it do for my brand? Does it give someone a non-transactional reason to be loyal?

Performance and brand aren’t mutually exclusive, so if you can’t define how your brand is present in communication, it’s time to rethink that piece or campaign. At this point, you need to be honest and judge what communications are good and what needs to be redone in the new year in a way that contributes to your brand.

Investment

There are two things a marketer wants more of: time and money. Take a look at your finished plan and evaluate whether you’ve invested the money to create strong brand-first communication and also where you’ll invest time to focus on and evaluate your brand. This could be 10 minutes a day or 10 hours a month, but time to evaluate and focus on things outside a sales or traffic scorecard can only benefit your brand in the long term.

An investment in a brand/marketing off-site, when structured well, will break down cross-agency barriers and also help guide a plan that grows a brand and performance… which brings me to:

A Tight Team

If you’re the marketing lead, you should be investing some personal time in the brand, as I mention above. But also, build a tight team.

Making the entire marketing department responsible for the brand will elevate every single piece of communication.

Charging agency partners with defining the voice of the brand will tighten the working relationship and help guide their work. It also helps to be transparent with them about your business, as some of the best creative solutions aren’t ads, but brand-focused creative business ideas.

Business Goals

The best way to ensure investment is to tie it to a business goal. Use your loyalty programs as a metric for brand success, create a quarterly brand survey or, if funds allow, create a brand tracker. Metrics are your friend, especially when you want a healthy brand.

It’s an exciting time to be in the marketing and advertising business. We have more access to customers than ever before, more tools to help us do our jobs and fewer barriers to success. This also makes business more competitive than ever before, and your brand will be what makes all the difference.