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The purpose of brand marketing is to generate sales. Whether we specialize in traditional or digital media - whether our focus is paid advertising or earned publicity - the sole reason for our existence is to get consumers to buy. Yet this idea gives us pause. We tend to associate immediate sales impact with ephemeral price promotions that we know produce short-lived sales bursts and precious little in the way of true brand growth. We know from decades of research that price promotions function essentially as giveaways to existing customers and play a very minor role in the acquisition of new customers. Meanwhile, given the nature of brand marketing, we're rarely able to demonstrate the full impact our efforts have.
The good news is that we know with a high level of certainty that our efforts are effective. As Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science states in his recent book, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know, "40 years of single-source-based analysis has delivered solid empirical evidence that advertising drives sales among those who are exposed to it (and some advertisements are vastly better than others)." This is...