For the last decade, the capital-C Creator economy has boomed to over $250 billion, and we have watched as Creators parlay their success online into tangible political, cultural and financial influence. Being a capital-C, professional Creator has become the new American Dream.  

Brands have noticed how valuable Creators are, too. Insurgent brands like Glossier, Hello Fresh and Dunkin’ spend millions to secure top-shelf Creator partnerships, hoping to capitalize on the star power of Creators to drive even more demand for their products. The problem is: the space is overcrowded, working with top-tier Creators is increasingly expensive—and given how fragmented the ecosystem has become—it’s harder to guarantee a return on the investment.   

In the background, there’s another group of content creators quietly taking hold of the brand narrative.  We call them “lower-case c creators”. This growing group of digital natives, work across a repertoire of platforms in an unpaid capacity. They’re also largely untapped by brands.  

Tapping the Infinite Scalability of Everyday Creators 

While marketers often chase the same pool of top-tier influencers, millions of users are quietly influencing brand perception—without media kits, professional distribution deals or even commercial intent. They’re Airbnb hosts writing thoughtful listings, Strava athletes logging runs and Reddit users giving niche advice. Last year, YouTube released a study that showed over 65% of Gen Z already see themselves as some form of creators. Lower-case ‘c.’ 

These lower-case ‘c’ creators are leaving a digital paper-trail that contributes dramatically to brand narratives—all through their authentic experience with it.  

The beauty of digital creation among everyday creators? It scales the brand. As AI becomes more integral to product discovery, these digital signals—comments, reviews, playlists—become key inputs into how consumers choose brands: 

• Content is more discoverable—casual Reddit posts are feeding ChatGPT responses. 
• Organic behaviors are training the models—every user action informs the next. 
• Authenticity is outperforming polish—genuine beats glossy. 

We’ve moved from brand-to-audience to a creator-to-creator model. Brand content is created, consumed and annotated by all lower-case c creators. But this creates new questions: How do you enable and guide these everyday creators? How do you help these creators – who are your customers and employees – reflect your brand values? 

What We’ve Learned (and How to Apply It) 

Our research with pro Creators shows two big motivators: authenticity and rewards. Their top challenges? Time, burnout, feeling isolated and not knowing how to succeed.  

These insights apply to everyday creators, too. Here’s how smart brands are responding: 

• Redefine creation as contribution: Creating isn’t random, it’s a meaningful act. Logging a route, sharing a playlist, writing a review—demonstrate its impact on the community. 
• Recognize and reward effort: Recognition matters—as does having something to aspire to. Highlight top contributors, feature them and give creators increasing access to the brand. The more they contribute, the more they matter. 
• Foster community: People are looking for genuine online communities. Connect creators directly and show how their input helps others. 
• Encourage remixing and brand co-ownership: Make it easy for users to echo and build on each other’s content—and show how their content is a critical part of the brand narrative. 
• Center users in their stories: Creators don’t just talk about brands—smart brands, talk about creators and make them the center of their own stories. 

Whether the economy is heading toward a recession (or already in one), chief marketing officers know their budgets are under intense scrutiny. Our work with CMOs around the world reveals that the most successful marketing execs aren’t just defending budgets. They’re also meeting this moment with new ways of making marketing more effective, translating their efforts into terms and metrics better understood throughout the organization. They’re integrating marketing into more functions. And they’re adapting new languages to drive uncommon growth and business impact through the economic fog. 

In recent conversations with CMOs, we found some common threads on how they are having conversations with their executive teams and driving impact for their organizations. Here are three trends we expect to see more of, especially as the prospect of economic uncertainty means more scrutiny on every marketing investment.  

CMO’s Are Learning One Another’s Love Language 

Okay, it’s not the love languages from those internet quizzes. There are no acts of service, quality time or physical touch. But marketers are finding ways to balance their demand and brand marketing efforts while applying it to business outcomes. The most successful marketing organizations have turned brand and demand, often an antagonistic relationship, into the ultimate power couple.  

Prophet’s recent report shows how they’ve overcome residual antagonism. They are building novel bridges between brand, to drive awareness and build equity and demand or performance marketing, to drive immediate conversion. And in doing so, they’re tapping new growth opportunities. 

Our research finds that the most successful marketers map their brand and demand marketing objectives against shared business outcomes. They integrate planning cycles and share capabilities across brand and demand to maximize marketing budgets over the entire customer journey. They don’t pick between brand or demand. They ensure the two approaches work in concert to deliver shared outcomes. 

Integrating brand campaigns more tightly into the demand function is a good way for marketers to have their cake and eat it too. Aligning brand with demand allows marketers to demonstrate ROI to the C-Suite while also delivering against both functions. 

For those from the brand side, a different vocabulary is required, as marketing is increasingly seen as a revenue driver–not a cost center. Successful marketers are learning the language of the boardroom. They’ve got to replace words like funnels, impressions or brand value with the language of ROI. And it means using proof of impact that meets the C-suite acid test for business impact: Did it increase revenue or not? 

Saying “No” Will Become More Powerful in the Next Planning Cycle 

The current inflationary pressure means marketers have to say “no” more often.  

But rather than feeling discouraged by having to do so, many say they are learning to enjoy that little word more than they expected. It’s empowering them to mothball tactics without proven ROI. And it’s giving them more authority to demand results from their teams and channel partners. By turning thumbs down on the many small investments brands typically make just to “have a presence” or “keep an oar in,” they tell us they’re focusing on the most proven channels. They’re not abandoning the small strategic bets needed to keep their test-and-learn culture thriving, but they are becoming more disciplined about how they are funded. 

CMO’s Are Becoming Integrators Across Many Functional Areas 

Just as they are coming together to integrate their brand and demand functions to unite around a unified business objective, CMOs are emerging as integrators across different functions. That could mean working closely with human resources and developing an employee value proposition for recruiting or it means recognizing that marketing can–and should–take a leadership role in integrations to build organizational culture. 

Breaking down silos is hard work and requires an integrated marketer to lead the charge. The individual filling this role should be a more seasoned marketing professional with the ability to work cross-functionally. And they must be willing to roll up their sleeves and get into the nooks and crannies of the business, immersing themselves in the customer journey in new and different ways. Marketing leaders should be looking to build proactive connections with their colleagues across human resources, product, sales and IT to deliver cross-functional business impact. This integrator mindset will allow them to not only work in lockstep with other business units but if done well, help to uncover untapped pockets of demand.  

Integrating multiple brands and teams requires a cross-functional marketing technology stack, of course. But genuine integration requires a deeper commitment. Many companies have charged people throughout the marketing organization with specific responsibilities to make sure plans are holistic and well-integrated. Others rely on integrative processes, constantly organizing new pods and tiger teams to solve challenges. 

Putting Your New Love Language Into Practice 

For many, the annual planning season is either underway or right around the corner. This is a great reminder to be mindful and refine the language you are using as a marketing leader.  In a recent blog, we wrote about how to modernize the marketing planning cycle. Some questions to consider as you reimagine your approach to your annual marketing plans:   

• What are the business objectives for your next planning cycle?  
• Is it clear how marketing directly contributes to those objectives?  

• Does your organization have an aligned taxonomy around objectives and activities?  
• How are you measuring success for brand and marketing initiatives investments?  
• Are those metrics understood across brand and demand teams? Or are those metrics creating siloes between them?  
• Are those metrics enabling marketing to have a “seat at the table”? Or are those metrics creating distance with other executives/board? 

Download this worksheet to begin mapping your plan to business outcomes. 

Today’s marketing organizations are experiencing tension between brand marketing and demand generation – a tension that undercuts growth and harms performance.  

But it’s time for brand and demand teams to stop thinking in silos and instead, work together in harmony on a shared agenda.  

To learn how the most effective organizations balance brand and demand we interviewed 10 senior marketing executives and surveyed 500+ global marketing and advertising leaders for our report: Brand and Demand Marketing: A Love Story.  

Key Takeaways

In our research, we uncovered the factors influencing investment decisions and operating model setup. We also looked for ways the best marketers measure the success of brand and demand. 

We found that the most effective marketers follow four common principles:  

• Anchor Marketing Investment in Business Objectives 
• Experiment to Win 
• Build a Modern Marketing Organization 
• Put the Customer at the Center

Interested in our Brand and Demand research? Get our latest report with fresh insights from the world’s top CMOs. Download today!

The second post of a series about integrating brand and demand marketing capabilities to win in a complex and dynamic landscape, based on our conversations with CMOs across industries.

As we highlighted in the first post in our Brand-Demand Love series, we think it’s time for a more integrated and complementary relationship between brand and demand-gen marketing. Why? Because the current separation isn’t aligned to the dynamic purchase behaviors of consumers across an increasingly complex landscape. As Karla Davis, VP of Marketing at Ulta Beauty, told us:

“What is brand, and what is demand? That’s a little gray now.”

Karla Davis, VP of Marketing at Ulta Beauty

When accomplished senior marketers question the validity and usefulness of the traditional brand-demand paradigm – and many do – then surely, it’s time for a new model. After all, the effective coordination of brand and demand-gen activation strategies represents an integrated and agile marketing capability – the gold standard amongst marketing pros.

Feeling the Brand-Demand Love Across the Marketing Lifecycle

Brand and demand-gen activation cannot be viewed as separate or competing functions, but rather as interdependent and mutually reinforcing capabilities that comprise the core of the overall customer experience.

Each set of tactics has a significant role in attracting buyers and strengthening relationships at every step of the customer journey and across the entire lifecycle. But, taking the perspective of marketers, it’s easy to see why the brand-demand balance is fluid. When considering marketing activation investments, companies might adjust their orientation as:

• Brand-led
• Demand-led
• Balanced

As business objectives evolve and companies navigate distinct phases of maturity, the optimal marketing approach will vary. For instance, a brand needing to differentiate from a competitive pack may need to be brand-led to generate awareness and consideration, while a business undergoing a portfolio launch, expansion or refresh may have more balanced brand-demand priorities.

For businesses focused on customer acquisition or market share gains, demand-led models will serve their immediate priorities in tandem with brand campaigns. Many direct-to-consumer brands, unique in their offerings, initially focused on acquisition only to shift towards brand marketing as their category became crowded. Mature organizations that find themselves at a point of market saturation and businesses without fully defined offers will both rely on brand-led marketing efforts to develop, sustain and enhance customer relationships.

Learning from Airbnb

Airbnb’s decision to cease all demand generation activities coming out of the pandemic suggests just how much the brand-demand pendulum can swing. When the pandemic shut down all travel, the company eliminated its marketing activation spend, which totaled $1.62 billion in 2019. As lockdown restrictions eased, Airbnb saw most of its traffic return to pre-pandemic levels, prior to re-investing in marketing activation campaigns.

“I don’t anticipate doing a lot of incentives because we have a huge amount of demand for the service already,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told CNBC. “We are never going to spend the amount of money on [demand] marketing as a percentage of revenue as we did before the pandemic [because] our brand’s incredibly strong.”

Not every brand is Airbnb, of course, and it’s far more common for brand marketing spending to get in the crosshairs of budget cutters. The brand-demand mix is fluid for large and small marketing organizations. Other companies will find they need a different balance at different moments within their growth curves and maturity cycles.

External factors also play a role in defining the right balance at the right time. Social issues, including diversity and inclusion and climate change, are leading some companies to deploy brand spending to align with important causes.  Ashley Laporte, director at the communications firm RALLY explained her company’s approach as “Less about cause marketing, and more about helping companies take part in driving systemic change.” Taking positions that consumers support may lead to some increase in demand, but it will be hard to attribute sales directly to, say, thought leadership regarding a company’s commitment to net-zero admissions.

Another CMO in the manufacturing industry said she wanted “credit from business leaders, the board and institutional investors” for effectively positioning the brand relative to these issues, especially since it made the business more attractive to rising generations of workers.  An industry analyst told us, “Brands are being tortured with the cultural and societal unrest that’s out there,” and not just because investments related to these tricky issues are extraordinarily hard to measure.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Mastering the brand-demand mix means being flexible and committing to making necessary adjustments over time, like those that take place across the course of loving relationships. One partner’s needs may take precedence during a certain phase of life, but afterward, things rebalance as conditions change. It’s never exactly 50-50 (or 60-40 as in the famous Binet & Field model for budget allocation, which we’ll explore in more detail in a future post). Such a rigid formula may cause opportunities to be missed and doesn’t match the real world, where marketers must continuously adjust based on changing market conditions and business needs.

The new research report, “Brand and Demand: A Love Story” is here! Learn how today’s Brand and Demand Generation leaders are bringing their functions together to drive greater impact.
Download today!