What you need to know:

• SAS pioneered data analytics. But its brand perception had gone stale – it hadn’t done a brand campaign in 20 years, SAS was perceived as “legacy” and it was missing the bulk of growth opportunities by focusing to narrow.
• CMO Jen Chase took on top marketing job a year ago. Previously heavily performance-focused, she had to pitch for a big brand campaign.
• So she swatted up on Binet & Field, Ehrenberg Bass and the B2B Institute’s associated work – and showed the CFO why brand equals future cashflow.
• The results have also helped the firm attract more talent, and actually boosted lead gen.
• With the CFO now a brand convert, Chase is pushing for more brand dollars, with an eye on Binet & Field’s 60:40 ratio.

Brand to demand

SAS is one of the pioneers of data analytics, in the sixties crunching vast reels of tape for US agricultural data analysis, developing what became known as the Statistical Analysis System – hence SAS. Today it has circa 14,000 employees and revenues north of US $3bn.

But by 2021, it hadn’t done a brand campaign in 20 years. “We found that our history in founding this category was being seen as ‘legacy’; we weren’t getting the credit for innovation,” said Chase.

Prior to taking the CMO role she led field marketing and admits to "bias" toward the performance work her team was doing. "But we also had a recognition that our job would be easier if we had stronger brand awareness. We're often mistaken for an airline, a shoe company, an NBA team. We knew if we didn't have to spend time on that kind of education, we could be stronger on our demand-generation efforts: If we did the brand work, it would pull people through to demand. It's not just brand for the sake of brand."

So the newly-converted brand marketer approached the CFO to pitch an emotional, memorable brand campaign – Curiosity – after diving deep into Binet & Field and Ehrenberg-Bass research on how to build brands, memory structures and mental availability, and leaning on its agency McCann.

Chase then had to do a marketing job on marketing to finance – to a sceptical CFO, convincing him that branding is no “arts and craft” project.

She also had to shake off the performance marketer's ingrained habits of placing sales on a pedestal and instead target finance as the internal customer.

“In B2B, marketing is often chided for not being as close to sales as we can. That alignment is critical. But there is a fundamental misalignment between sales and [longer-term] marketing. Sales doesn’t always think that way. Sales is often rewarded on short-term quarterly or annual outcomes. They need to be joined at the hip with performance marketing. But they're not thinking about revenue two, five, ten years out,” said Chase.

“But finance is. Finance is wired to think long-term, about future cash flows, to think about revenue in a broader term than a sales pipeline. So I believe that finance is actually your ideal partner [to build brand].”

Money talks

Prior to taking on the CMO role a year ago, the relationship with finance “wasn’t great”, Chase admitted.

“It wasn't adversarial, but it was most definitely transactional,” said Chase, a former member of “the lower funnel camp … I had all the metrics to sit down and talk with finance and talk with sales about.” That approach and set of metrics set the tone of the conversation.

“So with finance I would get an annual budget. We'd meet quarterly to talk about how I was doing relative to that budget. I’d get audited on large spends, so these were not meetings that I looked forward to with finance.”

Damascene brand conversion

Since launching the campaign, all that has changed. The CFO is now going into bat for marketing to founder and CEO James Goodnight. Chase said “applying the same science, math and rigor that we do to lower funnel to upper funnel” led to the Damascene conversion of finance – and unlocked the cash for execution.

“We’re an analytics company; data is our language. So I started off this process by really introducing the finance team and a lot of my C-suite to the data from the B2B Institute, from Binet & Field, just really getting them familiar with the 95-5 concept, the reasons we can't just narrowly target in our campaigns and why we have to go after that broader market.”

The 95-5 rule is described as ‘Binet & Field on steroids’: That only five per cent of buyers are in market at any one time. So by only focusing on performance, that five per cent, B2B brands miss the broader market, ignoring growth opportunity to build memory links to the 95 per cent not yet in market.

“As the campaign went into market, we were able to apply our own data to prove out that research,” said Chase.

“What we found were some really broad based benefits: We lifted the effectiveness of our performance marketing, we lifted the effectiveness of sales, and we lifted the effectiveness of talent acquisition. People that were exposed to Curiosity Forever were more likely to fill out a lead-gen form. So I could talk about the benefit of the performance branding to performance marketing.

“I could talk about how our sales reps were more effective because they were able to get more contacts in their networks. Then in a time when there is a war on talent, to be able to help our talent acquisition team improve the volume of applicants we have coming into our organisation was a real benefit.”

What she couldn't do was go in and say "we are going to do a brand project and talk about metrics that are really not meaningful to them. I could't talk to them about perception or favourability. Those don't translate in a way that the CEO and CFO need."

"That was my trigger. To say, I can only be so effective in that lower funnel. I need to be more effective in the upper funnel and I need to think about upper funnel like I do lower funnel when it came to measuring the impact."

The pay off

The results made finance complete brand converts, said Chase.

“I have a true partnership with them. They're part of my extended leadership team. I bring them in on early ideas that we're considering. What's more, finance will advocate for marketing when I'm not in the room, and often that's with the CEO. So I have a completely different relationship with him.”

Now Chase is doubling brand investment – though she said it will take a while to get towards the kind of 60:40 long-short ratios Binet and Field suggest are optimal.

“We’re not at 60 per cent [brand] yet. But we’ve definitely grown that [brand proportion]. We needed to move from where we were and I think as we continue to show some of the metrics in a financial way, I’ll begin to grow that even more,” said Chase, adding She adds that the B2B Institute's 95-5 rule was "an aha moment".

The 95:5 rule states that only five percent of customers are in market at any one time, so brands should target the 95 per cent of future buyers to grow.

"That is a very different approach to the traditional performance mindset. Both [performance and brand] are needed," Chase underlines. "But it can be the rising tide that floats all boats.

"It was a shift in thinking for us. Make no mistake it wasn't simple and we are still going through that change management process. But it changed the way we were doing things ... to lift everything that we do... and tie everything together."