vs. Earnest
SoFi
Membership that turns borrowers into cross-buyers
- What it did
- Events, job help, unemployment forbearance (2014-17)
- Earnest
- One refinance product plus personal loans, dropped in 2020
Brand Marketing
What is Brand Marketing?
The company invests in broad brand advertising (TV, Super Bowl, national campaigns, mass digital brand work) as a main route to demand, not only performance ads.
How Brand Marketing works
Broad brand campaigns make the company the name buyers already know when they start looking, reducing the cost of each later acquisition.
How companies won with Brand Marketing
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. Trulia
Zillow
Outspend on brand, then buy the #2 audience
- What it did
- Ad spend $40M to $65M (2013-14); 46.0M vs 27.4M uniques (June 2014)
- Trulia
- $45M 2014 budget; Flint: 'it became a marketing battle' and supply was multi-homed, so scale mattered
vs. Ro · 2017–25
Hims & Hers
Mass lifestyle brand that normalizes the condition
- What it did
- Design-agency brand, humor and cactus subway ads (2017-18)
- Ro
- Brand built on Reitano's own ED story (2017); first Super Bowl ad in Feb 2026, a year after Hims's
Also tagged: Airbnb · Kayak · Squarespace · Wayfair
The question to ask of a company
How much did the company spend on brand, and what did it do for demand?
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Helmer | The long road to Branding |
| Weinberg & Mares + | Offline ads |
Note. Near miss: A search-ad budget. Does not count: Performance ads (search, social) alone; podcast reads (Podcast Advertising).