Wistia presents

The Brand Affinity Marketing Playbook

As marketers, we know that consumers are loyal to certain brands because of emotion-based attractions. We’ve known this since the early 20th century, but today, because we’re more connected than ever, our brands are required to do even more of the heavy lifting. We rely so much on recommendations for products and services from friends, family, and co-workers, that building a reputable brand consumers can connect with is essential to not only growing sales, but also influencing how people speak about your business to others.

Playbook Overview:

The Problem & Solution

Finding a niche audience

Creating binge-worthy content

Marketing like a media company

Measuring resonance over reach

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The Problem

Digital advertising doesn't make people like you.

Digital advertising is an amazing marketing tool. It can help you get your solution in front of audiences precisely when they're looking for it, and can be used to pique interest about a specific product or service.

But, it doesn't make people like you.

In 2025, when the world’s collective knowledge is available at our finger tips and the web is saturated with ads of all shapes and sizes (text, image, and video), users have become adept at mentally ignoring things they don’t want to see.

It's no longer the case that by exposing them to a compelling tagline or 10-second video upwards of seven times, customers will come to know and trust your company name.

But it's how we tried to build brands.

This is the approach employed by most businesses looking to increase brand affinity—create a few short, creative assets, pay Google and Facebook to provide as many small interactions with as many people as possible, then aim for love at first sight.

Glossary

Brand Affinity: The most enduring and valuable level of a relationship between a business and consumer based on the mutual belief that they share common values.

Of course, there is the exception that proves the rule. Occasionally, a campaign will hugely impact a company's reputation by going viral and achieving PR success, but these cost a fortune, and are one in a million.

The vast majority of advertising campaigns, however, have little genuine impact on the trust and affection people have for a business. To mask this problem, distribution platforms measure success with metrics like impressions, clicks, and views, giving trivial passing interactions the same weight as meaningful engagements. The number of impressions is not the number of people impressed.

Brand affinity is driven by advocacy, rather than awareness.

Almost all brand building activities are centered around increasing awareness, under the false assumption that awareness alone will increase affinity.

Glossary

Brand Awareness: The extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or images of a brand.

Focusing brand-building activities on awareness rarely leads to an audience of advocates or super fans. Think about it this way—awareness means someone knows of your brand, and affinity means someone likes your brand.

Our perceptions of companies are not based on how many times we've interacted with them in passing, but rather the depth of our personal experiences, and the experiences of those we trust.

So we need a new way of building brands.

Your business will generate some brand advocates through a great product and stellar customer support. But word of mouth is not just driven by your most active and delighted customers, it's driven by anyone who has formed a strong opinion about you one way or another.

So to build a lasting brand in the modern world, we need a way to market to the circles of influence for our potential buyers and to positively dispose them to our offerings, turning our wider audiences into brand advocates.

And for individuals to become an advocate for a business, they need to feel connected to its purpose and personality.

The Solution

Brand Affinity Marketing

Building brand affinity has become a necessary strategy for most successful businesses. In the past, brand affinity wasn't a category of marketing—instead, it was a measurement that was associated with retention and the ability to get repeat purchases from customers.

With Brand Affinity Marketing, rather than forcing viewers to interact with the same ad over and over again, businesses invest in the creation and distribution of long-form, binge-worthy content. By nature, this content encourages viewers to spend more time with your brand, giving you the opportunity to make more personal connections with them. Just like with your product, you can only grow demand by delivering unique content to a focused audience that resonates with their core values and identities.

Glossary

Brand Affinity Marketing:: An approach to marketing where businesses create and distribute binge-worthy content with the goal of positively impacting the overall sentiment, perception, and value of its brand.
Binge-worthy:: Entertaining content that is so good consumers can't help but want to watch, listen, or read a lot of it in one sitting.

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Dig deeper into why digital advertising has become less effective over time and why generating affinity is more important than awareness.

Here's how it works.

Businesses should create binge-worthy content that is:

Based on an original concept that only your business could create
Focused on exploring a chosen theme, not your product or service
Intentional and consistent with a release schedule and branding
At least 10-15 minutes long, so that it can explore a topic or tell a story fully

In order to build brand affinity—and therefore create a well-loved, notable brand—businesses should create binge-worthy, long-form content that adds value to viewers' lives and doesn't just push them towards the next stage in the funnel. You can execute a Brand Affinity Marketing strategy with content like podcasts, books, a series of blog posts, and more, but the best way to build affinity is with binge-worthy, long-form video series. This type of content allows you to communicate more personally and engage with viewers through the most compelling medium that exists today—video.

This way of thinking used to be reserved for big brands with huge budgets, but now more than ever it’s critical that businesses start aiming for the goal of increasing brand affinity. For small to medium-sized businesses, investing in Brand Affinity Marketing is the key step in being able to cut through the noise, resonate deeply with your most loyal fans, and spread word of mouth, allowing you to effectively scale and grow an audience (and your business) over time.