Scenario 6: Boss Wants Brand, You Need Sales — Balancing Long & Short Term

1. The Situation

• Role: Digital Marketing Director.
• Status: Your Performance Team is crushing it. CPA is low ($30). But the ads are very “salesy” and “cheap.”
• Variable: The Boss returned from Cannes Lions festival. He feels the company is too “low-end.” He demands you allocate 30% of the budget to “Brand Building”: a 3-minute cinematic film with NO sales link.

2. Constraints

1. Zero-Sum Game: No extra budget. That 30% comes out of your “Sales” budget.
2. KPI Inertia: Finance won’t lower your revenue target just because you are “doing branding.”
3. Lag Effect: Brand ads pay off in 90 days. But your report is due in 30 days.

3. Strategy Design

You face a career trap:

• Option A: Fight back. Say branding is useless. Result: Labeled as “short-sighted” and marginalized.
• Option B: Blindly obey. Burn cash on artsy videos. Result: ROI crashes in 3 months, and you get fired for performance failure.

The Correct Strategy: “Brand-Formance” & Step-Harvesting

You execute Option B (Modified), based on “Pre-selling Logic”:

1. Redefine the Asset: Convince the boss that abstract art is suicide. You will make a “High-End Product Film”: aesthetic, but solving a deep trust issue.
2. Funnel Separation:
   • Brand Group (The Warm-up): The 30% budget only targets Broad audiences for “Video Views.” Goal: Get 1 million people to know us.
   • Harvest Group (The Close): The remaining 70% budget targets only those who watched >50% of the video (Retargeting).
3. Metrics Compromise: Demand a 3-month “Data Grace Period,” using Search Lift as the interim KPI.

4. Simulation

Month 1: The Dark Age

• Phenomenon: Brand film is live. People love it. But orders are flat. Total ROI drops from 3.0 to 1.8.
• Pressure: Finance questions your competence.
• Decision Point: Hold the Line. Do NOT add a “$9.99 Promo” button to the brand film. Check Google Trends: Is brand search volume rising? If yes, the seed is planted.

Month 3: The Harvest

• Action: You start retargeting the 1 million viewers with “Pro-level” conversion ads.
• Surprise: The conversion rate of this group is 4x higher than cold traffic. Returns are almost zero.
• Result: Total CPA drops back to $30, but Brand Search volume is up 40%.

5. Debrief

1. Brand is not a Feeling; it’s a “Delayed Asset”: Brand ads deposit trust into the user’s mind. Performance ads withdraw it later.
2. Don’t let Brand be a Slogan: If you can’t technically retarget the viewers, your brand ad is waste.
3. The Truth of Brand-Formance: Not doing both in one ad (which usually fails), but doing both in one System.

The Cold Reality: Many bosses want brand just for vanity. If your product has no long-term value, branding just accelerates your “expensive death.” Before building the second floor (Brand), check if the first floor (Product) has cracks.