Vanda CMO Kim Wijkstrom: Building Brand and Demand Beyond “Silver Bullets”
To Kim Wijkstrom, brand-building has to start with the story, the big idea, rather than the digital tools so popular with marketers today. “Silver bullet solutions” like CRM are just tactical mechanics.
“The other things are just modes of capturing demand. It’s the tail wagging the dog. ... But the demand begins with brand.”
Kim Wijkstrom has helped build brands on both sides of the client/agency equation and across products from Apple to Absolut. He spoke candidly with The Continuum about the challenges inherent in building brands today, clarifying performance marketing even as he is learning to “speak science” in his current role as CMO of Vanda Pharmaceuticals.
Where do you fall in the debate about brand vs performance marketing?
Ever since 2008, everyone's just been so focused on what I call ‘silver bullet solutions’ -- CRM platforms or digital tools. They really are tactical mechanics as opposed to the big idea. And to me it has to start with what's the big idea, what's the story you're telling. The other things are just channels or extensions or modes of capturing demand. It’s the tail wagging the dog. That's the way it’s been for several years. But the demand begins with brand.
Is there a struggle to balance brand and demand strategies?
The idea is if can there be greater fluidity and it all depends on where you're coming from in this argument. But the way that we're looking at it is rather than brand versus demand, it’s more about where you are on the entire spectrum and when you dial up the branding versus the demand portion of it.
With such a great need to demonstrate impact, some argue that all marketing is performance marketing. Do you agree?
A lot of these things are bandied around and misconstrued in some ways. Performance marketing is a great example of that. There is a performance marketing association and their definition is basically pay-per-click: You pay for performance. So, if you get a customer to your website you'd pay for that customer. That's performance marketing at its most technical. I think people use the term for a lot of things that get business. In many cases, the metric is probably traffic. You're watching the marketing and how it performs. Further from that, people extrapolate all sorts of things -- whatever they want to measure and know it had a huge impact. So it's performance marketing. To me, it's muddying the waters. A, what are we talking about when we're talking about performance marketing? And B, isn't the point of all marketing to perform?
So what does performance mean to you?
It can mean many things: to get me performance in the sense of building awareness; you can perform in the sense of bringing business to your store or your website. But ultimately the whole point of marketing is to communicate something about your product, your brand, your company, that actually creates interest, and then the whole classical awareness consideration. When people say that performance marketing is now sitting at the big table, when did performance not matter? It’s the obsession with data; we always want to know whether things work or how they work.
But what about the areas that aren’t so easily measured?
What you're not going to be able to see right off the bat is literally how a brand commercial is working. It takes time. Geico was a direct mail business until 2001 when they launched a commercial, and now they spend how many billion dollars a year on television? There’s a reason why they've gone that way. It actually helps the direct. Geico wouldn't be doing that if it didn't work.
Do you think there is too much emphasis placed on data?
Yes, there's been an obsession, I think, in a lot of ways brought by private equity when, post the 2008 crisis, they all started buying up Kraft-Heinz and every other packaged goods company, or in my case, a financial services company. And private equity loves nothing more than just extreme data and direct. This is the point, unfortunately, as a lot of brand building tends to be awareness building, not necessarily explicitly selling. An enormous amount of companies have found that to be very beneficial to the bottom line, even if they can't correlate the exact ad with a particular result, they know overall it's working.
“Everyone's trying to figure out how to become the next Spanx. How to create that business model quickly, sell it, pick up a hundred billion dollars, be sold. If you look at the big picture, some of the most successful companies or businesses are those who actually did figure out what their brand was and made it work.”
What kind of long-term impact will the pandemic and recession have on those dynamics and how marketers determine their investment channels?
Of course, short term, a lot of businesses are suffering. I don't think that digital per se needs to end up the answer. You can do great branding in digital. There are a lot of brands that do that—your Nikes, your Apples—and still remain very tactical. You can do both. You have to start with some kind of premise of what the business stands for and what your objectives are. And if your objectives are only sales, not creating some kind of sustainable demand or margins, then, of course, you can just go tactical all day. But if you want to have some kind of margins built into your business and be able to protect those margins, usually it makes sense to have something that people actually desire. And that’s brand.
Will marketers swing back to greater investment in brand marketing?
I hope so, because I think when you look net net, ever since the dot-com boom and bust and boom again, everyone's trying to figure out how to become the next Spanx. How to create that business model quickly, sell it, pick up a hundred billion dollars, have your NetJets membership and move on with life and be sold to some private equity group or whatever. So, I think there's a lot of that and I think that will remain because of the commercial incentive to it, which is not bad. It's good for competition.
But I hope sincerely that if you look at the big picture, some of the most successful companies or businesses are those who actually did figure out what their brand was and made it work. Again, Amazon didn't do any advertising for the first 25 years and then they started doing it, and they of course had already expanded beyond books, but they've just grown by leaps and bounds. And there were performance marketing aspects of that too, of course, like Amazon Prime. It's a great performance marketing tool, but again, they work in unison.
How are you approaching brand-building at Vanda?
I've only been there a year, so at this point it's been block and tackle and learning the industry, learning how to speak science. … To me, marketing is about the bigger picture of understanding and identifying the brand, figuring out the objective, then building a strategy to achieve that objective. That, to me, is brand and marketing, regardless of whether it's Perry Ellis suits, or cars, or Absolut.
December 1, 2020
