So you did it: You finished the hard work of figuring out who you are and what you stand for, and now you’re ready to launch that identity in the world. Good job! Now comes the fun part: introducing (or reintroducing) yourself with a brand launch campaign.
At VSA, we come at all of our work—whether it’s strategy, design, or advertising—through a brand-first lens. Brand launch campaigns, to us, are not just a culmination of the process to define yourself, but also the beginning of a new dialogue with your target audience, where you stake out a point of view, convey what makes you different, and commit to delivering on it at every touchpoint.
Fortunately, there are some tried-and-true steps you can take to do it effectively so you can build momentum that carries all the way down the funnel.
First and foremost: When developing the advertising itself, align on the boldest, spiciest POV you can find. One that’s true to your brand positioning and value proposition but designed to connect with your audience on something they actually care about.
What do I mean by that? It can be tempting to see a launch campaign as a direct reinterpretation of the brand strategy and a chance to tell the world what you do. But we think that if you do that, you miss the opportunity to make the right kind of impact, earn the best kind of attention, and lay the foundation for an entirely new relationship with your audience.
Here’s why: Imagine being at a party. One person comes up to you and says, “Hi, I’m Kim. I lead a campaign practice for a leading creative agency that’s based in Chicago and works with top brands from all over the country. Want to hear about what makes me awesome?”
Versus another who sees you looking for an outlet to plug in your phone and says, “Hey! It’s impossible to find outlets in this joint—lemme show you the place to go.”
Or even a third, who sees you looking uneasily at the snack table and makes a joke about what the host is going to do with three pounds of leftover hummus.
Who do you want to talk to and engage with? Who do you intuitively like more? The person who talks about themselves or the one who connects with you?
For me, it’s the second, and my philosophy about campaigns flows out of that belief. If you want a two-way relationship, you can’t make it all about you.
Advertising is necessarily a disruption—a way of waving your hands to try to get someone’s attention while they’re doing other things. You need to provide some kind of emotional alignment with your audience to get them to engage, and the best way to do that is to prove your commitment to making something they care about better or providing some kind of value they can’t find anywhere else.
That’s why having a real POV matters. Your POV crystallizes what you believe about the world and your role in it, telling the audience not just what you offer, but more importantly, conveying how you’re going to make things better for them. Consider, for example, the difference in copy on two banners for a hypothetical fintech:
One feels like a generic, expected description of services … because it is. The second is a statement of belief, a point of view on an industry at an inflection point, and an implication of the competitive moat that our clients at FactSet really have.
While the first puts the onus on you to dig deeper to see what sets these folks apart, the second gives you everything you need to know in one confident tagline—and speaks directly to every buy-side professional who’s ever tried and failed to get high-quality work from off-the-shelf AI. (Relatedly, that’s also why our Fluent in Finance campaign not only shattered performance benchmarks—driving a 19-point favorability lift, 16-point familiarity lift, and 12-point consideration lift—but was also called out in FactSet’s Q2 earnings call as a strong driver of top-of-funnel growth.)
Creating a connection is what good advertising does: It pulls the viewer into the world by proving who you are and what you believe, instead of just describing what you do. And that’s what you should strive for when you launch your brand.
But great campaign launches go far beyond advertising. For them to really be effective, you need to give them depth and pay off the promises you make in every part of the brand experience.
If your campaign sets a bold vision, for example, for what financial services should be, then every single brand touchpoint should reinforce it. Your customer service should be elite. Your site should be uniquely easy to navigate. Your product should deliver on the top-of-funnel promise—and then some. By doing that, you turn a brand launch campaign that captures attention into one that generates demand at the top of the funnel and converts it to revenue effectively at the bottom. And that, my friends, is exactly what we want.
A brand launch campaign is your brand’s introduction—or reintroduction—to its audiences. Built around a single, ownable idea, it conveys who you are, what you believe, and what makes you different, setting the stage for the experience buyers will actually have with the brand once they engage with it.
A product launch, in contrast, centers on what a company is specifically selling. A product launch can feel a lot like a brand launch, and also communicates a lot of the brand’s point of view. But the goal of it is to promote a particular product or service, not just a higher-level point of view on the world.
The best way to make a brand launch campaign successful is to use it as an opportunity to share a sharp, differentiating point of view that resonates with your target audience and speaks to something that matters to them.
We think of channel strategy the same way we think about creative: through an audience-first lens. We always start with research into where the audience shows up, how they consume media, and trends in their behavior. Then we evaluate the creative and core KPIs we’re targeting and build from there.
For example, in B2B financial services, we know our audience tends to work in an office filled with television screens, and also consumes finance-focused media during the week. Because of that, we’d be more likely to recommend TV/online video in the buy than we might for a consumer brand whose base is more heavily on social, where an influencer strategy might be our top priority.
Messaging and creative should generally not evolve across launch phases. But they might evolve as the campaign expands to encompass product and service offerings, or as it extends down the funnel. To make sure these extensions are effective, our campaign practice always pressure-tests ideas by exploring how they support product launches and manifest as mid- and lower-funnel assets. That way, we can ensure the campaign not only attracts attention at the top of the funnel, but that it also keeps momentum throughout it.
There are many ways to assess the performance of a brand launch campaign, ranging from traditional metrics, like awareness, familiarity, and favorability, to proprietary methods like VSA’s Promise to Performance® research approach. No matter which method you choose, the key is 1) establishing a pre-launch baseline and 2) tracking against it to look for change.
VSA’s Promise to Performance approach can help you establish a baseline for your brand and enable you to track changes in perception over time. Learn more about it.
The three biggest mistakes companies make when launching a new brand are 1) not having a value proposition and point of view, 2) not aligning the business, and 3) not sticking with it long enough.
Building a sticky, emotionally resonant brand means carving out a space you can own, which requires discipline and consistency, throughout every part of the organization. And it’s much bigger than a logo, viz ID, or clever marketing tagline: Your brand ethos should show up in every aspect of your customer journey and experience, as well as throughout your internal culture, and it should inform both product and policy development.
It’s also important to stick with your creative post-launch. A lot of times, the run-up to launch is so long—with so many meetings, iterations, rounds of testing, and creative reviews—that internal teams start to tire of creative before it’s even had a chance to take hold with their audience. But it’s critical to give work enough time in the market to provide meaningful insights into how the messaging is resonating and where you can strengthen the next flight.
To set yourself up for success, you should build alignment across cross-functional stakeholders long before you launch. The more stakeholders feel they’re involved and invested in the brand, the more likely they are to support and advocate for it.
Launching a brand is the first step in a new relationship with your existing customers and the world. And it’s a singular opportunity to find and hone a POV that sets you apart.
We can help you find the right one. Our services build enduring brands and brand launch campaigns that resonate at every stage of the funnel—from the first impression to the loyalty that follows. Want to learn more? Let’s talk.
