I'm not sure that's true. Some people are just working on a different scale.
Brand-building is fine if you're Coke or BMW or McDonald's. You have millions to spend, you can saturate channels, and then people might actually think of you in preference to your competition when they're in the market for a drink or a car or a burger.
On the other hand, if you're a bootstrapped startup and worrying about affording this week's ramen, ttul's "tiny budget and short time horizon" is probably all you've got. To a first approximation, the only thing that matters for online ads in this environment is how many people you can get to take some immediate useful action, even if it's just volunteering an email address that you can use to follow up, or sharing your site with someone else they know who might be interested.
Of course, in the longer term, brand awareness is valuable as well. But branding isn't worth squat if your business won't be around long enough for someone to remember it later.
I don't agree that brand-building is fine just for major brands, where they fight for small % of a saturated, well defined, market share.
Like you said, it's all about scale, and actions of a bootstrapped startup should adjust to it - not to be spending thousands on Youtube campaigns (picking up this post example). If you want some immediate useful action you should focus on media and placements where you have a higher percentage of people that a near to take immediate useful actions - maybe a video platform to consume video content is not the best choice to start with.
Brand building can be as simple as the way you address your customers, how your company looks, how the buying/service experience is, etc - things that change the perception of something random and generic, yet foundational to any brand.
McDonald's was the place to get tasty food without having to wait sitting down for it.
Where would that be for a candy subscription service? I mean, people looking to buy candy probably just want one packet right now, not ten spread somewhere over the next few months.
The most useful thing I noticed some startups do is get involved in their niche community and spent money building brand awareness for a targeted group.
What kind of brand you want, and set it right away from the beginning because it will define your media channel/production investment.
I think that brands who had strong branding advertising are still well positioned in people's minds, and it's indeed an investment that should be made with a massive ROI.
Now, it's a long term game. Doesn't suit the status quo like you well said.
I work with marketers and I am one myself, and the concept of brand-building is as familiar as loops are to software developers.
No doubt you've encountered misguided individuals, but please don't generalize from specifics.
> No doubt you've encountered misguided individuals, but please don't generalize from specifics.
When the community gives visibility to bad examples, specifics gain other dimension. So instead of blaming me for generalization, maybe understand the context.
I'm a marketer as well.
But small companies don't even know how to measure such returns, or can't afford to measure their return beyond sales and analytics data. That's why it will always be a gamble for them, specially like you said, it's not the best place to start.
When I started consulting, I spent some money on marketing, but my big constraint was that if a given channel didn't at least break even on direct conversions, there was only so much money and time I could afford to spend on that channel for conversions down the road by increasing my brand: It's not just total lifetime returns from the advertising that matters, but how the timing of those returns affect cash flow.
If the time it takes to break even is too long, you might be bankrupt first, even if the potential lifetime return is fantastic.
Sometimes it costs a lot to not have the time and budgets to take a longer term view.
My nuanced take is that a brand "exists" in the sense that we are able to understand it, what it represents, etc. What we do not know is if that's the best way to spend resources. All the money that went into Intel Inside -- what if they spent it on something else? No marketer can know that; the question as a marketer: "is this the best thing I can do with my resources?" Nothing about "building a brand" provides objective feedback or testable predictions about the usage of that dollar.
Suggesting that TV advertising can't be a scam because so many people have put so much effort into it is another fallacy. Old school TV advertising was done by people whose jobs dependent on the revenue stream -- even if branding were completely ineffective; if they got paid, I wouldn't consider that irrational.
Brands happen. They can have value, but we can only try to prove that value after the fact.
Direct response, on the other hand, tends to be less full of b.s.
The idea of compound investment into brand building doesn't seem to exist.
I don't know if these guys thought that decades of TV advertising campaigns were made by clueless people, with no education, with no market research, benchmarks, that dumped millions to build reach and frequency to try to fill a small spot in the mind of consumers.