Liam Moroney

Co-Founder, Storybook Marketing | Full-service demand generation agency

I lead Storybook Marketing, a consultancy that specializes in brand marketing strategy, to help companies become the brand that buyers think of, using an evidence-based approach to marketing.

We offer customized services, consulting, team workshops and training, to level up marketing programs so they are capturing market share and not just leads.

Founder

I'm launching a new content series, and I'd love to invite you to be part of it.

It's called Understanding Demand - not the tactics we do in demand generation, but rather how demand itself works from the market perspective.

Demand is not created by marketing, but by consumers and the market itself, and when the conditions of the market are different, it impacts the effectiveness of marketing more than anything we do.

My belief, and the culmination of my marketing experience, is that when we better understand the market and how it operates, we can do more effective marketing that reflects it.

This series will strongly be part of the content I produce here on LinkedIn, but I'm expanding it into long-form content across a podcast, video series, newsletter, and blog posts to cover topics in more depth.

If this sounds like something you'd like to be part of, sign-up to the mailing list and I'll share the content and updates directly:

https://lnkd.in/ezYkfPHS

Brand Marketer | Storybook Marketing | MarTech contributor

There's a famous quote from the economist John Maynard Keynes, that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

He was speaking about investing but it has just as much application to marketing, because many a better product has come and gone, failing to change the status quo.

The majority of the market, as it often turns out, will embrace the status quo for a lot longer than the quality of incumbent options would have challenger brands believe.

Change usually happens at the fringe edges of the market, by those risk-tolerant few who are seeking better or segments who are much more underserved than the majority. 

The amount who make up these groups depends a lot on the category, and the current economic conditions surrounding it. But it's here at the fringes of categories that disruption occurs and often where it remains, leaving the center intact.

This is the reality of markets, and it can feel like irrational behavior to those trying to deliver better solutions to real problems.

It's also where marketing is uniquely positioned to help the company succeed. 

Marketing has, sadly, been reduced in its scope across industries, and a major consequence is the inability to develop strategy at a market-level.

We hyper-target for conversion, trusting technology and AI to find the exact people who want to buy a product like ours, but over time have lost the skill to know why many of those same people are unlikely to do so.

Markets are hard to change because most people actively resist risk and change until the cost of doing to becomes higher than the status quo or until a new status quo arrives. 

Budget can easily run out when trying to cause that change through conversion efforts, even when armed with a better product and a strong offer.

The real solution is for marketing to better understand the market - especially about who in it are underserved or unsatisfied and may provide the entry point. And, from there, what needs to happen through brand marketing to prevent a lifetime at the fringe.

That all happens when marketers can gain a bird's eye view of the market in the form of research and understanding, and how to navigate the market dynamics that can feel so very irrational to the non-marketers at the executive table.

There's a very big difference between trying to get someone to start thinking of you and preventing them from forgetting you - and a lot of the brand marketing we talk about is the latter.

Big brand campaigns, the ones that win awards and make waves in the marketing community, usually come from established brands who are trying to create new relevance through playful messaging and exploration of the brand assets.

It's fun to see and discuss, and plenty hard to do well, but it's also the outlier example of what brand marketing usually is.

It has also skewed a lot of how companies think about brand marketing, with it being often thought of as the fun, quirky, and expensive campaigns that rarely if ever talk about the product.

It's no surprise that brand gets neglected in budget talks in favor of more performance marketing when seen only like this.

The truth is that most effective brand marketing is delivering very product-centric messaging, and so it can be easily confused for performance kind - and made ineffective by being pushed to act more like it in the CTA and measurement.

Brand marketing isn't all about trying to make people feel things about you, while performance is about getting them to take action and buy you. 

That's a false choice where one will obviously win out over the other.

Rather, good marketing promotion is about trying to get as many people to know who you are, what you do, and when to think of you, and then performance is all about making sure you don't miss the opportunities that come along as people are ready to act.

That's brand and demand as a cohesive promotional team, working as a combo that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

As opposed to a false set of options you need to choose from, where one is fuzzy and wasteful and the other delivers results efficiently. 

No such reality exists that leads to being a big brand.

President at Vivid Greetings and Vivid Graphics

Creative and innovative presentations are my passion. I am constantly looking for new and interesting ways to reach out through presentations and ecards. An explorer by nature, I am always looking for new ideas and I enjoy engaging with clients to create an above and beyond product.

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The Battle

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Engagements

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