How much “brand” and how much “performance” is right for your marketing budget? Most brands run two separate tracks of work, with different agencies and resources going against each, and little strategic connectivity across the two.

We took a different approach with JOLLY TIME. We quickly built out two tracks of separate yet complementary workstreams – one “Brand” tied to an Awareness Lift KPI and one “Performance” tied to a sales velocity KPI. Unified in a laser focus on attracting new buyers to the brand and growing Household Penetration.

On the performance side, we jumped right into harder-working conversion investments like iBotta, Instacart and priority retailer sponsored search. In the brand track, we set up a series of quantitative surveys and social media tests to inform an updated brand positioning, and later translated that to a new creative campaign.

We could walk and munch on warm popcorn at the same time.

While it feels obvious in hindsight, putting working dollars to work right away on the immediate daily sales numbers created much more confidence in the overall marketing investment – including agency talent, consumer research and the resulting campaign output – than had we focused on a lengthy “brand” exercise to start.

The impact on sales from “performance” investments was immediate and obvious at priority retailers (like Walmart) and more broadly. Marketing was working!

And meanwhile, we found a blue ocean for JOLLY TIME to grow into for the long haul, and launched the first campaign to start to test into that bigger opportunity as well.

Short term sales growth + long term brand building has everyone at JOLLY TIME and Haberman feeling pretty jolly.