Marketing in the Ecosystem Era
Performance Branding and the Community Flywheel
Performance Branding
Over the past decade, the marketing and advertising industry has witnessed a profound shift propelled by the emergence of performance marketing. The rise of internet-based marketing technology has granted marketers unprecedented access to consumer data, enabling hyper-targeted campaigns that drive conversions. The ability to leverage precise analytics and metrics has revolutionized how companies are engaging with their audiences, allowing for more effective strategies and personalized interactions. Amidst this evolution, a new trend is emerging: the pivot towards performance branding—an approach to branding built upon the foundation of performance marketing that extends to brand-level strategies.
It's vital for marketers to know what performance branding is to understand how it allows modern brands to build successful, long-lasting relationships with their audiences. Performance branding is a strategic approach to brand building that integrates the precision and data-driven conversions of performance marketing with the emotional ethos of branding. It emphasizes measurable and trackable outcomes to elevate brand growth and establish enduring connections with consumers. Unlike traditional branding efforts that often focus on broader brand awareness and perception, performance branding prioritizes measurable results and tangible metrics in building and nurturing brand equity. Performance Branding companies like Morning Walk are innovating in this new space and developing strategies to best help brands take advantage of all that performance branding has to offer. As more and more companies begin to navigate performance branding, one question rises above the others: How will brands innovate to create more profound and meaningful connections with their consumer bases?
The Ecosystem Era
Today, we are in the ecosystem era, and that means that companies need performance branding to realize their growth potential. A brand ecosystem serves as the dynamic nexus where a brand's purpose converges with its audience's aspirations. It encompasses every touchpoint, interaction, and communication that shapes how individuals perceive, engage with, and ultimately advocate for a brand. This interconnected network isn't merely about logos or products; it's about the values, emotions, and experiences a brand instills in its community. It's the narrative woven through purpose-driven initiatives, the seamless customer journey that evokes emotion, and the consistent delivery of value that defines a brand's ecosystem.
Brand ecosystems must have balance in order to deliver growth. At Morning Walk, we believe that brand ecosystems revolve around purpose, experience and performance. When there is a balance of these three values, brands can optimize their success and longevity. If that balance is interrupted, then brands may lose touch with their identities, and in turn, their audiences.
To properly build and develop brands, it takes the right moment, and the right behavior at that moment, which is why Morning Walk has developed its own brand-building framework called Performance Branding Ecosystems. Our framework takes the powerful insight that performance branding delivers and combines it with the emotional and experiential drivers that the brand ecosystem model makes visible. We believe that performance branding ecosystems begin with purpose—having a brand purpose, a product purpose and a people purpose that is not only commercially viable, but deeply connected to product efficacy and human trust. Purpose comes to life through the brand experience—the interactions that occur between the brand and the people the brand serves. A fusion of brand purpose and experience facilitates healthy relationships, which link back to trust. Relationships are nurtured through continued positive experience, and result in performance—measurable data that can be leveraged to achieve optimal brand growth. At Morning Walk, we believe that all brands are ecosystem brands, and we work with each of our clients to find the right balance of brand purpose, experience and performance to foster healthy ecosystems that in turn lead to business growth.
The Flywheel Model
So how do the Amazons and Googles of the world relate to their consumer bases through an ecosystem framework? The answer is the Community Flywheel, a new model for performance branding that major companies have adopted to build community, sell more products and recommend new ones to their expansive audiences.
The Community Flywheel operates on the principle that engaged and satisfied customers contribute to the growth and sustainability of the brand. For instance, Amazon has established a robust ecosystem by not only offering a wide array of products but also by fostering an engaged community through initiatives like customer reviews, forums, and memberships such as Amazon Prime.
Similarly, Google has woven its ecosystem through various interconnected services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, among others. This interconnectedness enables users to seamlessly navigate through different platforms while providing data that helps personalize user experiences. By leveraging this data intelligently, Google enhances its services, providing tailored recommendations and personalized content, further deepening user engagement and loyalty.
The beauty of the flywheel model is that it can be tailored to the brand. At Morning Walk, that’s exactly what we are doing. We create bespoke flywheels for each of our clients that help target their consumer bases with meaningful products and services, while capturing data with greater accuracy. Looking at all brands as ecosystem brands, we’ve found that through developing and fine-tuning a few core brand necessities, combining those with efficient technology and workflows, and tailoring them to the brand’s purpose and experience through the Community Flywheel, we can deliver effective brand growth while forming genuine relationships with the businesses and people we serve.
The following model of the Community Flywheel comes from a McKinsey article published in September of 2022. We believe that their understanding of key brand pillars and infrastructure resonates well with the approach companies and marketers alike should seek when creating effective flywheels of their own.
McKinsey Community Flywheel Model
What brands must have to create a Community Flywheel:
1. Community Focus:
Brands shift from targeting segments to engaging specific communities with shared interests. Analyzing community insights, like reasons for participation, unmet needs, and communication preferences, helps brands create emotional connections.
2. Hero Products:
Brands focus on flagship products to attract attention in the cluttered online market. Strategies involve saturating channels, experiential interactions, influencer collaborations, and interactive tools. Hero products often contribute over 30% of sales. 1
3. Talkable & Credible Brand Story:
Brands communicate values aligned with community language and ideals. Consistent storytelling resonates within communities.
4. Engaged & Active Community:
Brands fuel conversations, create engaging content, gather feedback, and organize offline events for ongoing engagement.
5. Effortless Transactions:
Brands ensure smooth online experiences, optimizing speed, simplifying pages, and exploring new channels like social commerce. The ability to adapt to emerging spaces like the metaverse becomes crucial.
How they set the flywheel in motion:
A. Agile Acceleration:
To maintain the momentum of the Community Flywheel, companies need to be adaptable in their operations and investments. At the start, there is an investment phase that gradually decreases as the community expands. Agile methodologies play a crucial role in propelling the flywheel without undertaking substantial initial risks. A cross- functional team begins the process, and agile squads, consisting of various departments like product, marketing, and sales, work together to generate, test, and introduce products based on frequent community feedback. As the operation expands, implementing agile methodologies and promoting adaptive learning becomes pivotal for scaling the operation and enhancing the team’s skills.
B. Core Technology:
Scaling community-focused marketing requires a robust marketing technology (martech) stack. This toolset tracks and maximizes marketing ROI, engages specific communities, and tailors customer experiences. Four key elements drive efficient marketing for the Community Flywheel.
• Data Management: Centralized customer data offers a comprehensive view. Advanced setups, like customer-data platforms (CDPs), merge online/offline CRM, sales data, and social analytics for empowered customer engagement.
• Decision Making: Centralized engines guide personalized offerings using real- time community trends for improved engagement opportunities.
• Distribution: Connecting marketing channels with data and decision-making enables tailored experiences across digital platforms. Innovation in emerging platforms identifies those resonating most with the core community.
• Measurement: Automated dashboards track personalization impact and community-led efforts, closing the feedback loop with agile squads.
Takeaways
Understanding the evolving landscape of marketing is paramount in today’s digitally driven world. The rise of performance branding signals a significant transformation in the marketing and advertising world—It’s not simply about brand awareness anymore; it’s about fostering enduring connections with consumers through measurable outcomes and tangible metrics.
Performance branding is essential for modern marketers as it enables the creation of profound and meaningful connections between brands and their consumer bases. By integrating data-driven strategies with brand-level initiatives, companies can establish lasting relationships while prioritizing measurable results to nurture brand equity.
In this ecosystem era, brands must comprehend the pivotal role of brand ecosystems in realizing their growth potential. These ecosystems serve as the foundation for brand success, where balanced brand values are crucial in defining a brand’s identity and ability to resonate with its audience. Trust is key.
Morning Walk stands at the forefront of this evolution by pioneering the development of Performance Branding Ecosystems. With partners across a diverse range of industries from travel to CPG to automotive, these frameworks enable the creation of bespoke flywheels, tailored to each client’s specific needs. These flywheels not only facilitate product sales and data capture but also drive consistent and effective brand growth by harmonizing brand purpose, experience, and performance.
To set this flywheel in motion, agile acceleration and core technology play pivotal roles. Agile methodologies ensure continuous adaptation and learning, while a robust martech stack, encompassing data management, decision-making engines, distribution, and measurement tools, empowers brands to engage specific communities and tailor customer experiences effectively.
In essence, understanding and implementing performance branding and brand ecosystems is imperative for modern marketers looking to stay at the forefront of the industry. The Community Flywheel model is one way to make the most of Performance Branding Ecosystems, but that does not mean there won’t be new and exciting methodologies in the near future. Performance branding companies like Morning Walk exist on this frontier, constantly searching for and developing innovative frameworks and tailored approaches that drive sustained brand growth and build enduring connections with consumers in today’s dynamic marketing landscape.
From the Author
Hi. First and foremost, thank you for reading up until this point. I hope you have gained something valuable from this short piece. My name is Breck Keller, and I am a copywriter here at Morning Walk. I began my journey here as an intern two summers ago, when our agency was still Jacobson Rost. I graduated from Colorado College this past May, where I majored in English literature and took advantage of the plethora of other educational opportunities the revered liberal arts school had to offer. Beyond my education, I am a student of nature. I grew up in the outdoors, and while I currently reside in Chicago, I often find myself daydreaming of lost trails, glacial streams full of hungry trout and the spine-tingling excitement of looking down into an untracked chute from the top of a mountain on a blue-bird powder day.
When I joined Morning Walk, I became quickly aware of what a unique situation I had gotten myself into. Unlike larger agencies, my role as a copywriter wasn’t constrained to simply coming up with headlines and body copy for mass emails and social media posts. The fact alone that I was asked to write this blog article is a reflection of the trust that the people around here, from upper management to interns, have for each other—and if you read the article above, you’ll know that at Morning Walk, trust is paramount. When I first started as an intern, our leadership was already engaged in discussions about performance branding and Performance Branding Ecosystems. To be here more than a year later, having watched that idea come to life in the form of a full agency rebrand is special, and being tasked with this blog post gave me an opportunity to reflect on all that I’ve learned throughout this journey. Apart from the industry trends and insight elaborated upon above, what I’ve taken away from this entire process is this: Ecosystems exist in every aspect of life and society, and balance is fundamental to the collective prosperity of everything and everyone. Now, this isn’t supposed to be some Earth-shattering revelation—if you look at how ecosystems work, it makes sense that their fundamental framework permeates many areas of life. But, my time here at Morning Walk has given me the ability to view things through an ecosystem lens—primarily the way community, ideas and experience coexist at a company level. When I observe the work environment here, the titles and distinctions immediately fall away. We are an engaged community of unique thinkers and makers, and whether you’re a copywriter like me, a media strategist or a shareholding partner, there exists a synergy between all of us that transcends hierarchy. This synergy is built upon balance—no one person or team commands too much space in the ecosystem, which allows ideas and experiences from across the company space to have real, tangible impacts on the work we do and the community we cultivate. Account executives have had some of the greatest creative ideas we’ve ever seen, while interns and first-year employees like me have had a chance to take large roles on some of our biggest brand strategy and development initiatives. At the end of the day, our outward-facing purpose is to help the companies and brands we serve grow and expand their business, but at our roots lies a balance, and a level of trust that we have for one another that makes this place different from the rest. I am so fortunate to be a part of this ecosystem, to be able to flex my creativity beyond the role of a copywriter, to know such an inspiring and tightly knit group of people, and to play an influential role in an idea and experience that is pushing the frontier of marketing and advertising as we know it.
About Breck Keller
Breck Keller is a copywriter at Morning Walk. He began his journey with us as a summer intern in 2022 before starting full-time at our Chicago office this past March. In his short time here, he’s established himself as a strong leader and communicator, excelling at identifying, drawing out, and championing compelling brand narratives.
While he was getting started with us, he was also finishing up a senior thesis on Moby Dick and the connections between America’s historic whaling industry and its current relationship with fossil fuels. He graduated from Colorado College in May of 2023 with a Bachelor of Arts and a degree in English literature.
Hailing from Wisconsin but a global traveller, Breck is an avid outdoorsman. Whether he’s bow hunting in the fall, skiing powder in the winter, or trekking along rivers with his fly rod in the spring and summer, Breck rarely sits still.