Brand Awareness vs. Lead Generation

In general, the world of marketing is dominated by two disciplines: brand awareness marketing and lead-generation marketing. These two disciplines are the “big brothers of marketing,” and they have a kind of yin/yang relationship with each other. (There are other equally important forms of marketing, of course, such as product marketing. But these other forms have only a casual relationship to lead-generation marketing, so I won’t focus on them in this book.)

Brand awareness marketing (commonly known as brand marketing) is all about making people aware of your product and/or your company. It’s about creating an impression of what your brand stands for in people’s minds, and repeating that impression until they have an explicit or implicit awareness of your brand. Coca-Cola spends billions of dollars a year for just this purpose. They plaster their brand and pictures of their soft drink across billboards, posters, print ads, TV commercials, online ads, and many other places so that, when you’re thirsty and looking for something to drink, you automatically think of Coke. Or if a Coca-Cola bottle is sitting next to a Pepsi bottle, you’ve already formed your opinion of Coca-Cola’s product in your mind, and you can make your choice.

For decades, brand awareness marketing has been considered the sexy part of marketing. The hit TV show Mad Men is built around the lives of advertisers in a top New York ad agency in the 1960s. During this time, ad marketers were perfecting the concepts of art and copywriting, and the concepts of advertising aimed at building awareness of a brand (Chevrolet Oldsmobiles, Lucky Strike cigarettes, etc.) in the public mind, and then invoking an implicit desire to buy the product.

Lead-generation marketing has long been considered the underbelly of marketing. Lead-generation marketers ask this question: Once you have established an awareness of your brand and/or product in the marketplace, how do you get the customer to move from considering your product to actually buying it? It’s one thing to make your customers aware that you offer the newest, most innovative smartphone; it’s another thing to convince them to spend $479.99 to buy it. That is the art of lead-generation marketing.