What does your brand actually do for customers — and why that matters more than you think?

Greg Silverman (00:02) And the greatest result for performance marketing is when brand improve, right? Because the performance marketing gets better because the brand is carrying more weight. And so it's not like we're saying, I'm saying, abandon performance marketing. I'm saying, let's true it up, let's balance it. Ben Ard (00:43) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Greg. Greg, welcome to the show. Greg Silverman (00:49) Great to be here, Ben. Two content junkies. Ben Ard (00:51) It's gonna be fun nerding out about a subject we desperately love and are passionate about. Greg though, before we dive into the subject for the day, let's get to know you, background, all that kind of fun stuff. Let's the audience get to know who Greg is and then we'll dive into the subject if you don't mind. Greg Silverman (01:05) Yeah, Ben, thanks for that. I currently work at Interbrand and I'm the global director of our brand economics practice. But I've had lots of different experiences, whether it retail, franchising, software company, that was my own. And over the decades, I've realized how important content is, why it makes a difference, and I'm happy to share some points of view today that hopefully people will find valuable. Ben Ard (01:28) love it. And the audience is going to love this. This is something I'm also really fascinating, Greg, and learning from your experience. So we'll dive into it. The subject for today, I'm going to read this off because it's a little bit longer, but how brands can use real purchase driver insight to shape content that matches the role they play for customers, and why outdated measurement models keep blocking that progress. Now there's a lot to digest with that and I'm excited and I wanted to read that because it hits on some really good points. But Greg, to kick things off, why do so many brands skip purchase driver research when building content strategies? Like why, why not include this step? Greg Silverman (02:06) Yeah, I think there's probably two or three things to think about there. One is time and cost, right? There's just so much demand on the tempo of the business, certainly on content to get things out, to react. And driver research takes a little more time, and you've got to get some cost to it. We at Interbrand track what we call Rollerbrand and you have this debate between performance and brand marketing and performance is winning. No matter what anyone says about the importance of brand performance is winning. So not a lot of incentives inside the company to develop brand measures in the same way, because people are now used to looking at clicks and return on investment and it's on a very narrow percentage of the activity that creates a brand, but that's where the incentives are and your CFO doesn't want you to spend too much. They just want results. And I think the last thing is a lot of people really haven't been trained on driver research, right? It's not, was very fashionable for a long time. It was very explicit, a lot of statistical models and understanding. And it was kind of where I grew up in marketing, but today, you're tracking the results and you saw this match his work. You do some A B testing and while you're getting more engagement, maybe even conversion at what to brand equity, right? What price to the long term? And so because there's like the incentives aren't there and people aren't trained on it, it kind of just slips through the cracks. Ben Ard (03:35) Yeah, 100%. And it's interesting you talked about this dichotomy between, you know, the brand and the demand or the revenue side of things. I was actually at a tech company and at the time my boss was really developed with brand and believed in brand development and things like that. But the company, like you said, 100 % all in on demand generation. What can we generate now? And they parted ways with that individual because the focus was demand generation and not brand. But I think that there is this little bit of a resurgence of people saying, well, wait a minute, the brand plays a role. So how do we figure out how the brand does play a role, especially like on this, like kind of range of like the, the feel good brand side to like the revenue generating side of what a brand can do for a business. Greg Silverman (04:26) No, that's probably the core of what we do and what I've spent a couple decades really studying is how do you extract what the brand is contributing and the context. And we tend to think of it as like a continuum of branding, like an affinity brand, you could call it Hermes or Gucci or any of those brands, just as examples. But on the other end, you have enabling brands like Apple. Well, you might have a lot of affinity for Apple, but they really try and enable people to get to something else through their technology. So the technique that I think any research group could have or any brand team could have is what we call discrete choice modeling. It's a form of research. And basically what you're doing is recreating choices in these research environments between your brand and the other brands, putting in some of the pricing and specifics to see what role the brand plays and qualify. people buying us so they can get from here to there? Or are they getting there because we're delivering some intangible experience that makes a big difference? So if people are looking to figure out what role their brand is playing, find someone who can do some good discrete choice modeling for you. It's been proven, it's got Nobel prizes, there's a guy named Daniel McFadden in Berkeley, if you want to get his white papers. So there's a lot of evidence to support it. Ben Ard (05:47) I love that. So when we start to get this research, right, we've invested, we understand the validity, we've listened to this podcast and understand how important that is. What changes with content planning when you have that research and you understand the true role that you play in a customer's world? How does that affect content itself? Greg Silverman (06:08) Yeah, I think what the discrete choice and the research generally provides is a hierarchy of things that are important. Right. And oftentimes we're looking when we're looking at response rates on this AB tested ad we just ran over like that one did better. And yet it might be doing better on a lower funnel or a specific product feature that might be important that day. But it's often at the expense of some of these more human truths, unresolved things that our company is delivering for people. And so what changes I think first is what do you track? What do you look at? And I think you have to have like Sometimes we used to call battle cards and scorecards against the competition. You have to have a sensibility about what am I changing on my perceptions relative to my competition? And the greatest result for performance marketing is when brand improve, right? Because the performance marketing gets better because the brand is carrying more weight. And so it's not like we're saying, I'm saying, abandon performance marketing. I'm saying, let's true it up, let's balance it. And once you start seeing the hierarchy, where you are against competition, you can target components of the decision process where you might be underperforming or maybe you're overperforming and it's such an important thing you want to expand on it. But you can be much more intent or strategic about what you message to overcome the choice set that the client or customer is looking at. And I think that's really a more creative thing. People say, you have these constraints of research, but once you're inside the constraints. The creativity can be much more targeted and you can prove the business case by showing how the perceptions are changing over time and how that's leading to better conversions, more clicks, higher sales, repeat business, whatever it may be along those SAS funnel metrics that people are looking at that we need to improve. Ben Ard (08:02) No, love that. I love the insights there that it's getting you so you can plan your content. And I love how you talked about it. Some of those areas where you may not be performing as well, but play pivotal roles in the buying journey and the customer's world, things like that. So when it comes to like actual content performance, you know, you found a gap. You're creating content that you hope fills a gap. How do you know that content's working? I guess like, are there specific metrics? You mentioned clicks and a couple of those things, but Are there specific metrics that you look at to say, yes, this content is working or it needs to be refreshed or it needs to be wiped out of there. Anything that you're doing there to say, okay, specific content, how is it doing in the process? Greg Silverman (08:41) Yeah, it's funny because one of the times when we were doing research when I was running my own company, we found like one of the purchase drivers for our customers, little seat license for a little forecasting tool, was it helps me with my career. Ben Ard (08:56) Mmm. Greg Silverman (08:56) And so we started to say things like, well, you know, we give you better forecast. We give you more accuracy. And then one day I said, is it really that it's the company's success and their career there or their success? So we started writing things like, well, here's how you can be make better presentations as with your forecast. Here's the soft skill of the month. And so I think it's oftentimes you get a foothold and then you have to like dig qualitatively. like what does that mean to that person? Not what we're capable of, but what are their needs? And their needs are forever evolving. Content never has an end stop, right? There's no end state to content because if I solve your presentation skills as an analytics person, well then the next thing is, well, how do I make a board presentation? Or how do I talk to my CEO? So there's this like objective part where you say the clicks are better, the conversions are better, I'm getting more demos. My ARR is going up, my size of my first sale is bigger. But then there always has to be this notion of discovering intangibles from a human point of view of who you're talking to. You're not really talking to another company, talking to another person. And so if you can call them up, you get some qualitative feedback. However you get there, it's like they're always leaving breadcrumbs to how their system or their ecosystem is evolving and how they have to adapt to it. And I think that's this combination of, yeah, I got to adapt. dashboard like these numbers are working good, but that's going to fade because every time you solve that problem, it's no longer a problem, right? There's a new one. You got to figure it out. Ben Ard (10:28) Yeah. And I love the story because you're talking about understanding so fundamentally, what does the individual reading my contact and interacting with my brand actually need? And you almost expanded what you're offering into this whole new space of, you want to progress your career. Great. Everything we provide as a company that you're going to pay for, we can help with that, but We can do more. Like we can help you be a better presenter. We can help you move your career forward. We can help you with understanding how to, you know, not just have data models and figures in a forecast. How do you talk about it? How do you actually explain this? How do you become the rock star in the room that everyone relies on? And I love it. It's like you, you talked about the affinity. It's almost like the care points. And I wish it's something we could measure really easily, but Greg Silverman (11:06) Yeah. Ben Ard (11:19) The idea of saying, awesome, how much does this brand care about me? And clearly like you stepped outside the normal box. And I feel like that rewarded you so well because you actually cared about individuals and the clicks and things like that kind of showed it. So I love that. And I love the focus there. great. I'm sorry. Dive in. Yeah. Greg Silverman (11:36) Yeah, don't tell anyone. Yeah, my background's in human resources. So I do care about people. But I found that you're not going to get organizational change until you solve their problem. And it's not their organization's problem, their problem. And we had hired somebody to do some graphics for us in these presentations. They're like, I wish I could present like that. I was like, well, there you go. That's a need. Ben Ard (11:58) Yeah. Yeah. Well, and a hundred percent, like if you're in a business that sells to businesses, which a lot of our listeners are, everyone knows at the end of the day, there is going to be an individual at the business who loves and respects your brand enough that they push it through the nightmare of a process of getting everyone else on board, arguing for your business, allocating budget. I mean, there's a gauntlet. They're going to come out of this bloody and bruised. And if there isn't this strong affinity towards wanting to work with your business outside of just the product itself, but the fact that they know you care, there's no way they're going to go through that to get to the end of that journey and ultimately have you be a part of that business. So I love this factor. think it's so important. So Greg, I have a question though, cause we're getting towards the end and I would be remiss if I didn't ask something like this because it's a huge subject for people. How does AI play a role in everything we talked about today when it comes to the research, when it comes to understanding the individual, when it comes to content creation, how are you using AI in the right ways and how does that, you know, maybe not just production, but understanding your consumer or whatever it may be, how is AI playing a role in this whole process? Greg Silverman (13:12) Yeah, for us, and kind of on the consulting side, we are using, you know, we're part of Omnicom, so there's a big library of tools we have. I would say it's been a long time since I've written a report, but I edit one every day. And instead of editing one every day, I probably edit 10 a day now, right? Because you can set up templates of, you know, how you're going to go out and... put the prompts in and I'll put some data in and you've got a fact base that's pretty good and it's just gonna speed up the way we prepare content. Everyone has to get used to that. Doesn't mean it's into your job, it just means you're gonna have more jobs to do on the day that you do it, right? And the people who adapt to that are gonna win fastest. On the research side, there are great prospects for pre-existing data. and building these agentic people, in a sense, you can talk to and say, OK, what about this? Is this good content? Does this resonate? And I think that's really to be explored of how well that can be calibrated and true. There's a lot of promise there, but even we're kind of struggling. But we're getting some early things on very small components, but that's probably three or five years away. Ben Ard (14:10) you Greg Silverman (14:19) But I don't think AI will ever replace a personal relationship. So I'll tell you a story. My dad was a furniture salesman. I was a 10-year-old kid, and the summary took me out for two weeks. And went into a store, and a guy said to him, hey, Marvin, you know, I got a big order for you today. And he said, and my watch is broken. And he took his watch off, and handed it to my dad. And I'm like, little kid, said, daddy, why are you fixing that man's watch? He said, well, if I don't do it, I don't get the order. Now this was, you know, in the 70s, so no one would do that today. What he taught me was, you always got to find out what the guy's broken watch is. And AI will never do that. And you've got that caring you call it about, the individual, what their needs are. You've to listen for the broken watch and fix it. So he will go do all the things you're talking about, fighting the battle, being socialized, go through the socialization. And I don't think ultimately brands will ever get away from that, especially in a B2B sales environment. Ben Ard (15:17) love that. And I'm never going to look at a watch the same way ever again. I love that story. What a cool way to learn those principles early on. love, mean, so many things about this story, not only the fact like your dad did business right, but the fact that he brought you along to learn those lessons is incredible. So I love that. Greg, thank you for the time. Thank you for the insights. We have run out of time today. We're trying hard to keep these episodes at a length where people can get back to their daily grind and get everything done. Greg Silverman (15:20) You Ben Ard (15:44) But for anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online and learn more, or even just kind of pick your brain on stuff, how and where can they find you? Greg Silverman (15:51) Yeah, I'm greg.silverman at omc.com and I'm part of Inner Brand and we do a top 100 brands report. They just type that in and find us and happy to help with content and ideas around branding. And Ben, thanks so much for the time and opportunity to be on the show. Ben Ard (16:07) Love it. And Greg's contact information will be in the show notes below. So anyone listening, scroll down, click on the links and connect with Greg. Greg, thank you so much. Really do appreciate it today. Greg Silverman (16:17) Thank you.