Why Brand Strategy Has to Come Before Your Marketing Budget

Don't Bother To get Dressed Until You Know Where Your Going!

By Deb Tillett, Marketing Strategy Partner at TCV Growth Partners

In other words, don’t wear flip-flops and jeans if you are going to a black-tie affair. Your company needs to present the “right look” before you spend money.

Know Your Customer Before You Set a Marketing Budget

A company’s ability to grow and succeed depends on the public holding the correct perception of what it represents and what it is selling.

Even with useful, necessary technology, understanding your customers, and the best way to reach them, is the number one issue. Customer discovery, and solving their problem, lets you build the right product and choose the right method and message to reach them. Why spend thousands of dollars on a message that will fall on “deaf ears”? Money spent on identifying your customer base, and how to bring them to you, lets you minimize spending and maximize your outcome.

Brand Strategy at OT Sports

For example, in the 1990s I launched OT Sports, a start-up computer game company about to release “ABC’s Monday Night Football.” Our number one competitor was John Madden Football, the franchise named for the former NFL coach, which had released its first edition in 1988. Eight years at #1 on the charts, and we were unknown and brand new. What do you do?

OT Sports was a joint venture between MicroProse and ABC in New York. MicroProse was a well-established, top-ten U.S. game company in Hunt Valley, where I had been Director of Marketing. With the backing of both, I was responsible for launching a new product to challenge Madden.

We had to establish a new game company, hire the technical team, find office space, and build the game, all while taking on the #1 title in the market, Madden Football.

As the game came together, I focused all of my time on reaching the right customer with the right message, the WHO and the WHAT. I did not start with how much it would cost or where the resources would come from. My mission was to meet customers where they were and give them what they wanted. After our research and discovery, we determined the answer was to be at the NFL games themselves. The stadiums were always packed, 13 home games a season, so that is where we would reach our gamers, our customers. We also had a timing advantage: we were about to release the first ever multiplayer (up to 16 players) sports video game, because our tech team was building ABC’s Monday Night Football just as Microsoft released Windows ’95. And I had recently seen a large mobile bus on the road marketing itself as a “brand showroom.”

Thanks to our partners at ABC, we had an amazing budget for a start-up. I bought a large Greyhound-sized bus, wrapped it with the ABC NFL sports marketing photos, outfitted the inside of the bus with IBM computers and after the product announcement and release of the “beta”, we drove the fully outfitted bus to CES and launched the product.

OT Sports Bus at an NFL Game

The bus and my staff hit the road and drove to every Monday Night Football game. The bus and crew were in every stadium tailgating and marketing the new game release.

At its CES debut, we had a few key NFL pros join us and pitted them against each other in the game. Among them were Tony Dorsett and Walter Payton, and we made sure they played head to head. It gave us excellent press coverage for the launch.

Brand strategy still came before budget. We knew we had to reach the Madden gamer market, a vast audience of young men with no obvious way to get to them. We knew our message, “the best, first ever multiplayer sports video game.” But what was the best way to deliver it? In person, with the football stars on the bus and a quick way to “taste” the product, just like the Saturday samples at your local grocer.

In conclusion: “know where you are going, and what to wear.” Represent yourself, and your product, the right way. With some research up front, you may need far less and get far more. The marketing budget for OT Sports’ Monday Night Football, even with the bus and travel, came in far below what TV, radio, magazine, and in-store ads would have cost, and the game far outsold expectations. We did outsell Madden that release year. Brand strategy first, marketing budget built on it. Need help creating a branding strategy? Feel free to contact me - Deb@TCV-Growth.Partners