AMA: Momentive Director of Product Marketing, Global Insights Solutions, Morgan Molnar on Brand Category

I agree: measuring the impact of brand marketing efforts can be challenging. Below is a summary of the approach we've taken at Momentive to measure our progress against both the Momentive & SurveyMonkey brands. 1) Establish brand KPIs. Are you trying to grow overall awareness? Consideration vs competition? Specific brand attributes/associations? Are these KPIs against a broad audience or specific buyer segment? Get alignment on what your goals are. 2) Create a marketing plan to achieve your goals. This is typically a cross-functional effort and can also include agencies you're partnering with. 3) Test campaign creative to make sure you're conveying the right associations. We use our own Ad Testing solution for this. 4) Establish a baseline for your brand health KPIs, and track over time. We use our own Brand Tracking solution for this. We also consider metrics like brand search query volume lift as leading indicators of brand health. 5) Test and iterate to find what works.

When business is humming along and you're planning out your roadmap for product enhancements or new features, the brand story won't play a huge role in the product roadmap. Of course, you'll want to make sure features continue to reinforce your key value props, but that can all be spun as part of the launch messaging. Here are a few examples of when brand changes can dramatically impact your product roadmap: - A brand refresh: where you'll need to scope visual UI changes to your product to align with new brand guidelines - A new brand launch: where you may need to update not just the UI but other elements like logo, navigation, login experience, etc. We had to consider this for a few of our solutions when SurveyMonkey announced a new company name, Momentive, and a few of our solutions were getting rebranded. - Integration of an acquisition: Similar to the two above, you may need to plan for product updates depending on how the new acquitision will fit into your brand architecture.

It's been a while since we've had an integrated marketing function at Momentive, but here's how I'd envision this working: Product marketing owns: - Buyer persona research, development, and enablement - Product messaging/positioning - Go-to-market strategy (e.g. by persona, industry) - Product/feature launches - Bottom-of-the-funnel product content/collateral - Competitive intelligence - Analyst relations Customer marketing owns: - Customer advocacy: customer stories, customer participation in thought leadership, review site management, communities, advisory boards - Customer marketing: scaled customer onboarding & engagement programs, cross-sell and up-sell customer campaigns - could include email nurtures, customer webinars, etc. Brand marketing owns: - Brand messaging and narrative, as well as brand guidelines - The visual manifestation of the brand (logo, colors, fonts, imagery/animation style, iconography, etc.) - Content strategy, and Top-of-the-funnel thought leadership content - Creative production for full-funnel campaigns (ads, - Brand health measurement & tracking Once the company scales to where there is a) a full portfolio of products and/or brands and b) there is significant investment in full-funnel campaigns across those products/brands, then integrated marketing becomes a necessary function. Integrated marketing owns: - Full-funnel marketing strategy & execution management for large-scale campaigns (these could be brand campaigns or Tier 1 launches).

Category creation (or making the decision to join an existing category) should be a joint effort between brand and product marketing leadership (and sometimes comms leadership), with an ultimate approver in the C-suite, either the CMO or CEO. Here are some of the things that brand and product marketing would own as part of the category evaluation process: Product Marketing: - Competitive intelligence: how are competitors referring to themselves? - Research/advice from industry analysts. Where do analysts see our company fitting in best? Any new up-and-coming category names being adopted that we should consider? - Category name testing - both quantitative and qualitative research with your target buyers. - How the brand messaging house or brand narrative connects to product messaging. For example, product marketing would be involved in defining brand value propositions that are both important to buyers, differentiated, and ownable/connected to concrete product value. Brand marketing: - High level brand messaging house which would include the vision/mission/values, category, and brand narrative. - Brand guidelines for using the category name (in written & visual form). For example, we made the decision not to create a logo lockup for "Momentive: an experience management company". But we did create brand guidelines for how to use the term "experience management" in content. - Category/brand awareness campaigns. If you're creating a new category, brand marketing must think about how to invest in not only driving awareness of the brand, but also the category itself. Sometimes it may benefit you to join an existing category that already has significant usage/awareness. Comms: - Company boilerplate (the "About [Company]" section used in press releases) At my time at SurveyMonkey, now Momentive, I've seen us attempt to create our own category ("people powered data") as well as join an existing category ("experience management"). I'll reiterate that starting a new category can be exciting as it signals disruption and innovation, but it requires significant investment to get it to stick. We didn't invest in "people powered data" and it eventually fizzled and was retired.

At Momentive, Brand and Product Marketing are closely aligned, and collaborate on many initiatives. Here are some examples: * Brand<>Product messaging: For brand messaging, PMM will consult on things like the category, brand-level value propositions, and connecting the brand narrative to product messaging. For product messaging, the brand team (specifically content strategy) will consult on elements like short descriptions, headlines, etc. to make sure any documented customer-facing messaging reflects the brand voice/tone. * Product naming: as part of any product/feature naming process, you need to ensure brand fit. For example, at Momentive, we use very descriptive names for our solutions, like "Ad Testing" and "Brand Tracking", so if product marketing were to suggest a new heavily branded product name like "Satisfacto Plus" (making this up), we'd quickly realize it doesn't fit with the brand & naming hierarchy already established. * Product visuals: PMM and brand collaborate on how we design product imagery across marketing assets (web, email, collateral, etc). For example: do we abstract the product or show actual screenshots? Show it in a desktop/mobile frame? Bold color borders? etc. In this case, visual consistency is key to convey the brand look/feel with bottom-of-the-funnel product assets. * Thought leadership: PMM gets heavily involved in thought leadership across channels, whether it's partnering with demand gen on events/webinars or content strategy on guides/resources. Ultimately, thought leadership at the top of the funnel exists to build credibility for the brand, so should be reinforcing brand messaging. As you move through the funnel, thought leadership starts to lean more product-focused, but brand voice/tone are still critical for a consistent brand experience. * ALL content/collateral: PMM needs to consider brand guidelines for any content they own outright. This goes for collateral, one-pagers, pitch decks, etc. One thing we did at Momentive to streamline this was work with Brand to create templates in Google Slides for things like collateral, white papers, customer-facing decks, etc. So all we had to do was start with the branded template - no need for brand approval or custom design work for every asset!

There are 3 main areas where I've seen product marketing get involved in brand strategy: 1) Brand category definition: (see my other answer on how PMM & Brand would collaborate on category creation/evaluation) 2) Brand/product architecture: When you have a portfolio of offerings and multiple brands, the need will arise to revisit/simplify the brand architecture. We have experienced this when we've built new solutions, acquired companies, etc. Product marketing can bridge the gap between brand experience and product experience, making recommednations for where a product should live in the brand ecosystem based on how the product is built/integrated into other products in your portfolio or even overlap in buyer personas. 3) Brand value messaging: PMM can contribute to the creation of brand-level value propositions as they ultimately need to tie back to concrete product value.