Great marketing usually comes down to one simple thing: get your brand right, then tell people about it.
Obviously, there’s a lot that sits underneath that. Research, positioning, audience insight, messaging, creative development, media planning, measurement, all the useful grown-up stuff. But as a basic principle, it stands up.
Before you start thinking about media plans, TV ads, billboards, social campaigns or anything else, you need to be clear on who you are, what you stand for, why people should care and what you actually want them to remember.
Because before a brand becomes a billboard, it has to become a clear idea. And by “brand”, I don’t just mean a logo, a colour palette or a nice line on a presentation slide. Those things matter, but they are not the whole brand. They are the visible parts of it.
A brand is the thing people come to understand, feel and remember about you. It is your reputation, your role in people’s lives, your point of difference and the promise you keep making, whether you mean to or not.
Building a brand starts with a few simple but important questions: Who are we? Who are we for? What do we stand for? Why should people choose us? What should we be known for? And how do we want people to recognise us every time they come across us?
Once that is clear, everything else has something to work from. The identity makes the brand recognisable. The tone gives it personality. The message gives it clarity. The campaign gives it reach.
That is the job of brand building: to create a clear thread from what you stand for to how people experience you.
The trouble is a lot of brands lose that thread. They either get stuck in strategy, endlessly refining the thinking until it becomes a polished deck that never properly leaves the boardroom, or they jump straight to execution before the bigger brand idea has really been nailed.
That’s when the work starts to feel disconnected, because the most important bit is often the journey in the middle: turning the brand strategy into identity, messaging and communications that people can actually see, hear and remember.
A good brand strategy should create a clear path for everything that follows. It should define the core idea, shape the identity, sharpen the message and guide how the brand behaves across creative, media, channels and the customer journey.
The order matters, because if you start with the channel, the work often becomes about filling space: We need an outdoor campaign. We need a TV ad. We need something for social. We need a banner ad.
But without a joined-up idea behind it, that activity can quickly become random. Different messages, different executions and different bits of budget all pulling in different directions.
That doesn’t just make the campaign weaker. It makes it harder for people to understand what you actually want them to remember.
That’s where one clear idea becomes so important.
And that’s the difference between a genuinely integrated campaign and a media plan with matching assets. I noticed a really good example of this recently with the 7UP Pink Lemonade activity I spotted in Manchester, which felt like a really smart bit of joined-up brand activity.
On the bus into work, the free paper had a front-page wrap. Then across town, the digital and static out-of-home screens were full of that distinctive pink, with simple messaging around refreshment and mood-boosting. As I walked through the city, there were samples being handed out, bits of experiential activity and merch giveaways. Then when I opened my phone, I was served digital banner ads.
None of it felt complicated. But it all made sense and felt connected. That was the point.
It was pink. It was refreshing. It was everywhere. And it all felt like part of the same moment.
That’s what happens when clear brand thinking meets good channel thinking. It doesn’t just repeat the same advert in different sizes. It builds a world around the idea, and a quick burst of activity can suddenly feel much bigger than the media spend because people experience it in different places, in different ways, across the same day.
A paper wrap gives it visibility. Out-of-home gives it scale. Sampling puts the product in your hand.
Experiential makes it feel active. Digital picks it back up when you’re on your phone.
Each channel has a job. But brand holds it together.
In my opinion, that’s why out-of-home, TV and even print still have such an important role, especially in a digital-first world. They are not competing with digital. They complement it.
In a world of endless scroll, anything physical or public can have disproportionate impact. A billboard interrupts differently to a banner ad. A TV spot lands differently to a paid social post. A print wrap feels more deliberate than another thing disappearing up a feed. Experiential can turn the idea into something people actually touch, taste or do.
That doesn’t make one channel better than the other. It just means they do different things. The mistake is expecting every channel to do the same job.
The better way to think is to ask: what role does this channel play in the journey?
Because people don’t experience brands in neat media plan columns. They don’t think, “That was my awareness touchpoint, now I’m entering consideration”. They just notice things. Remember things. Click things. Talk about things. Walk past things. Try things.
So, the job is to make those moments feel connected.
That’s where brand strategy earns its keep. Not by making everything more complicated, but by making it easier to understand what every piece of activity is there to do.
If your brand is clear, your message gets sharper. If your message is sharper, your creative gets stronger. If your creative is stronger, your media works harder. And if your media works harder, your campaign has a much better chance of being remembered.
This is also why the basic building blocks matter. The proposition. The positioning. The message. The tone of voice. The logo. The line. The colours. The visual world.
Some of those are strategic. Some are verbal. Some are visual. But together, they create a system people can recognise. They help people join the dots quickly. They make the brand easier to spot, easier to understand and easier to recall.
In the 7UP example, the pink did a lot of the heavy lifting. You didn’t need to stand there decoding the campaign. You just got it. The colour, the message, the product and the media all worked together.
That’s the sweet spot: simple enough to recognise, strong enough to stretch and distinctive enough to remember.
Because the billboard is not the brand or the strategy, nor is the TV ad or the social post. They are where it becomes visible.
So yes, get your brand right, then tell people about it. But don’t skip the bit in between: defining what the brand is, building the system around it, turning that strategy into a clear message, and then creating a connected set of moments that work together across channels.
That’s when “telling people about it” becomes more than buying media space. It becomes something people actually notice. Or better still, something they actually remember.
GO BIG
OR go home
