Brand Demand. Expand. The new B2B growth model on the block.

Ulta Beauty’s marketing operations team tracks, reports, prioritizes and redeploys resources to create more agility and importantly, to maintain focus on customer and business needs. The company sought to recalibrate its marketing model and shift from product and category-focused operations to a more integrated approach, keeping customers at the center. Ulta Beauty, the leading U.S. beauty retailer, is an example of how significant the impact is when creating a more collaborative marketing function. To meld brand and demand in this new and future-focused way, there are four action steps marketers can take now.

Like an EKG machine measuring our heartbeat, the Brand Value Index provides a key measure of a brand's health and future impact on downstream demand metrics, such as sales and stock price. To effectively build a brand, Kevin Keller's Brand Value Stages offer valuable insights into how marketing tactics influence brand value creation. Today, the way to win is not doing one or the other, or even both simultaneously.

An emerging and effective channel used to reach key decision-makers in early-stage accounts is Connected TV (TV). Understanding your audience holistically helps you decide which content best resonates with them to personalize their experience. When it comes to brand-building, data is key to not only understanding which accounts are moving in-market for a solution, but also identifying the buying committee members within these accounts who will research and engage with relevant content and messaging. You need demand generation to create a sense of urgency to solve their problem and to motivate them to choose you to fix it. Research shows that 1 in 3 marketers state that 33% of budget holders are skeptical of brand marketing driving growth, so they increase focus on the KPIs that demand touches and leave brand-building to chance. And while many marketers recognize the benefits of strong brand-building efforts, demand generation still dominates.

What True Demand Generation Actually Involves

Indeed, as our research shows, in the most successful companies, these relationships are blossoming into a brand-demand love story. Senior marketing leaders say the scope and speed of changes they confront each day make decisions more difficult. Change has always been a constant in marketing, but today’s industry feels different. Brand marketing and demand generation teams—faced with growing complexity of spending decisions—are working together more often and marketing executives are eager to have a more holistic conversation about them. Place any 3 orders (samples or customer orders) within 30 days of signup. CatKissFish is a newer company, and some features are still developing.

We’ve seen firsthand how this can unlock greater impact and influence, both internally and externally. It’s about breaking down the traditional silos between brand marketing and demand marketing teams and fostering a culture of collaboration. The most successful marketers we’ve worked with have taken a disciplined approach to this, setting clear goals and making hard tradeoffs to optimize their resources. It’s about ensuring that every marketing dollar you spend is contributing to both brand awareness and demand generation. This is where brand marketing and demand marketing need to come together and work towards common objectives.

• Too often, brand initiatives are seen as intangible or hard to quantify.
• American Apparel and Benetton, for instance, have invested heavily in provocative advertising that raised their brands’ profiles.
• In conclusion, effective brand to demand marketing is all about harnessing the power of content to build trust, qualify prospects, and create a cohesive customer experience.
• For this client, the key objective was to generate awareness for their brand and UVP by educating prospects through a comprehensive, educational content hub.

Connect Your Brand to Demand With These Insightful Resources

Combining brand and demand strategies improves marketing ROI by aligning messaging that builds trust and drives engagement. By blending brand awareness with demand generation, integrated measurement illuminates the significant impact of combined brand awareness and demand generation initiatives, paving the way for lead nurturing or direct sales follow-up. Today, B2B marketers must shift to a "branded demand" strategy to succeed in achieving their pipeline goals. INFUSE launched a highly precise demand generation campaign to re-engage key buyers, as well as expand the pipeline with qualified prospects. By converging brand awareness with demand generation, marketers can create more cohesive, high-impact programs that both engage the market and deliver measurable results. It integrates seamlessly with your branded demand strategy, amplifying awareness and engagement without requiring your team to take on new tasks.

For example, by speaking to pain branded demand points earlier in the marketing funnel, B2B brands could figure out where and when speaking to a particular pain point is most resonant with their audiences. This marketing approach combines elements of brand marketing with the more precise targeting and messaging of demand gen marketing to reach the right audience earlier and more effectively. Brand content builds mental awareness among audience members, which helps ensure that when the audience is in-market, they’ll remember the brand and seek it out. For out-of-market audiences, brand marketing content tends to be more effective than other forms of marketing.

Finding the right balance between brand and demand starts with assessing your overall brand health and maturity. Startups may need to focus more on performance marketing to drive immediate growth, while established brands can afford to shift their investment toward long-term equity. As our white paper explores, the right mix depends on your company’s maturity, market position, and objectives. The strongest brands—Apple, Nike, and Microsoft—weren’t built overnight. As highlighted in our latest white paper, Balancing Brand Marketing and Demand Generation, demand marketing focuses on driving immediate action—whether through paid search, lead nurture campaigns, or direct response ads.

If only 5% of your prospects are in market at any given time, does that mean you should only focus on that 5%? Commercial metrics matter here, with shorter sales cycles and increased sales price both raised by participants in the roundtable, but so do some ‘less commercial’ metrics, such as high search rankings and increased website visitors. Marketers may understand the value of a strong brand, but that’s not to say those in sales or finance do. Speaking to B2B marketing leaders, it’s clear that a seamless journey from brand to demand, with sales and marketing effortlessly slaloming in and out of customer conversations still isn’t happening. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the gap between brand and demand. Learn how companies like Netflix and Adobe transformed their industries—and how you can redefine your market boundaries too.

Frameworks like this, every week.

When consumers delegate shopping to AI, brands must win the algorithm or disappear from consideration. As algorithms influence more of the customer journey, sports and experience-led sponsorships are emerging as the ultimate engines for customer engagement, loyalty, and growth. A series of acquisitions had led to integration of several brands under the unified TroutNet brand, but the company was serving many market segments that were not familiar with the brand. An information services company that we will call TroutNet used discrete choice analysis as a guide to which initiatives it should pursue to tap new streams of revenue.

This involves telling a cohesive story that not only informs audiences about what a company sells, but also who the company is, what it stands for, and why it matters. The ‘brand to demand’ approach is fast gaining traction, as it presents a more holistic, integrated, and strategic approach to marketing that aligns with the changing dynamics of the customer journey. At GrowthMode, we encourage our clients to test various strategies, learn from the outcomes, and continuously refine their approach.

Ensure that brand and demand have shared business goals and incentives. The most successful brands find a balance between brand storytelling and demand generation. Strong brands aren’t just companies; they’re communities. Start refining your narrative today and see the impact unfold. Over time, investing in thought leadership, community engagement, and data-driven evolution ensures a brand remains relevant, trusted, and a key driver of sustained demand.

Let the brand and demand teams’ shared passion for customers help guide decisions on what is important. Unleashing the full power of brand and demand is about more than how you spend your marketing dollars. Our report offers six ways to help marketers swipe right on stronger relationships—because great connections lead to growth.

This is often more effective in capturing niche audiences than large-scale advertising. However, brands need to establish multiple category entry points (CEPs), including emotional and occasional associations. On the other hand, focusing on sub-categories enhances brands’ competitiveness in specific sectors. If a brand truly has a set of core beliefs and knows how to bring them to life — in a way that is authentic and true to your DNA — that’s when it becomes a powerful brand strategy.

This means building trust and connecting with your customer, ensuring brand and demand work hand-in-hand, and measuring meaningful metrics to fine-tune your approach. Navigating today’s new reality requires shifting gears toward a more strategic, full-funnel Branded Demand approach. This has led to longer sales cycles and increased competition for securing qualified leads. Today, buyers have access to an endless amount of information and are more empowered than ever before in the decision-making process.