Marketing Leaders: what’s the secret to shifting from brand recognition to instant recall?

Marketing Leaders: what’s the secret to shifting from brand recognition to instant recall? There are very few brands in the world that are instantly recognisable – whether it’s Nike, McDonalds, Mercedes or Microsoft, decades of consistent branding and immersive marketing campaigns have created an instant connection between visual identity and brand reputation. That idea of establishing a brand is the focus of the next instalment in our Marketing Leaders roundtable, where we dive into how marketers move their brand from recognition to recall. In our second piece, we speak to Martin Hodges (Co-Founder and CMO, BetComply), Robin Becker (Director of B2B Marketing, Hub88), Michael Baker-Mosley (Founder, Triumph B2B), Seda Baburyan (Marketing and Partnership Manager, PartnerMatrix), Dorota Gruszka (Head of Marketing, Booming Games) and Pierre Pulis (Marketing Director, BETBY). If you missed part one, you can check it out here. For you, what’s the secret to creating a successful marketing campaign that actually resonates with your audience and creates instant brand recall? And how do you maintain that brand recognition beyond the initial awareness phase? Martin Hodges: I don’t think there’s a secret, but there is one thing I always come back to… consistency. It’s easy to get distracted by the latest trend or feel like you constantly need a new campaign. But the brands people remember are usually the ones that keep reinforcing the same underlying message. They know what they stand for, who they’re talking to and they don’t try to be everything to everyone. At BetComply, we don’t try to talk about every part of the industry. We want people to immediately think of us when they think about licensing, compliance and market entry. The same message comes through whether it’s our website, LinkedIn, events or the conversations our team has. It probably isn’t the most exciting approach, but that’s exactly the point. Repetition builds recognition. I’ve also found that the best campaigns feel human. The posts that perform best for us are rarely the ones promoting a service. They’re the ones where someone shares an opinion, talks about something they’ve learned, or explains a complicated topic in a simple way. People connect with people far more than they connect with logos. Don’t underestimate consistency. One good LinkedIn post won’t build a brand. Neither will one event or one PR story. Brand recognition comes from turning up week after week with the same tone, the same values and the same expertise. After a while, people know what you stand for without you having to tell them. That’s when marketing becomes much easier. You’re no longer trying to convince people who you are. They already know. You’re simply reminding them why they should talk to you. Robin Becker: Every successful campaign starts by understanding exactly what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. Marketing shouldn’t work in isolation, your marketing department needs to collaborate closely with the commercial, sales and product teams because, ultimately, they’re the people speaking to clients every day. A good example is when we launched Hub Connect, our client portal. Before that, Hub88 had a strong aggregation platform, but there wasn’t a centralised space where operators and suppliers could easily access the tools and information they needed. We recognised that this was something our clients genuinely wanted, so the first step was working with the product team to understand exactly what we were building before deciding how to market it. Naming was also incredibly important. We didn’t want to call it something generic like ‘the client area’ because that doesn’t create any emotional connection or memorability. We wanted the product to reinforce our wider brand identity. Because our company is called Hub88, we wanted every product to feel connected to that identity. The portal links suppliers, operators and our platform together, so the name Hub Connect felt like a natural extension of the brand. It also complemented our tagline, ‘Better connected’, allowing every element of the campaign to reinforce the same message. Consistency is what builds recognition. If every new product follows the same branding logic, people begin to associate those products with your company automatically, helping to strengthen brand recall over time. Timing is equally important. We launched Hub Connect shortly before ICE because that’s where our clients would already be. The announcement and PR activity happened in advance of the exhibition, giving the media time to cover the launch before the event started. By the time the exhibition opened, our commercial team could immediately demonstrate the platform to clients during meetings. We also integrated the campaign into our stand, including branded charging stations themed around Hub Connect, ensuring visitors encountered the product throughout their experience. Launching before the event also allowed us to build momentum ahead of one of the busiest trade shows of the year. Alongside the announcement, we arranged interviews and feature articles with industry media, followed by live interviews and additional media activity during the exhibition itself. That creates an ongoing story rather than relying on a single announcement. Even when we don’t have a major product launch, we follow the same principle. Ahead of every exhibition, our communications shift towards the event weeks ahead of time. We arrange interviews, discuss recent product developments and make sure our sales teams have everything they need to continue those conversations with clients on the stand. Everything should work together. Media coverage creates awareness before the exhibition, the event provides face-to-face engagement and social media extends that conversation afterwards. There is another element here to consider, and that’s people. One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that people engage with the individual personalities that make up our brand. Our most successful social media posts aren’t product announcements – they’re photographs of colleagues, live interviews, client meetings and moments from industry events. That’s especially true in B2B. We’re marketing to other people within the gaming industry. Clients don’t just buy products; they buy relationships and they buy into the people behind the brand. That’s also why I believe companies need to be careful about relying too heavily on AI. It’s an excellent tool for improving efficiency, whether that’s enhancing videos, creating subtitles or speeding up production processes. However, it shouldn’t replace creativity. AI doesn’t understand humour, branding or memorable naming conventions in the way that people do. Brands are built on personality, creativity and human relationships. If every company relies on AI to create identical content, they’ll lose the individuality that makes their brand memorable. Seda Baburyan: The second piece is that the idea has to be true to the product, not just clever on its own. In B2B especially, the audience has become rather skeptical and blind to claims, whether true or false. The campaigns I’m proudest of were never the most creative in the room, they were the ones where the creative and the actual product truth were the same sentence, just said better than the competitor said theirs. As for staying recognized past that first flash of awareness, that’s a different issue. Recall decays unless you keep showing up in the same register, same voice, same visual language, across campaigns, events, sales materials, PR and everyday communication, long after the campaign budget has moved on to the next thing. Consistency compounds in a way that a single big splashy moment never does. What buyers remember eighteen months later isn’t your best campaign, it’s the accumulated impression of a brand that never sounded like five different companies depending on the quarter. A brand is not built by one big moment, it is built through repeated contact that always feels like it comes from the same company. Michael Baker-Mosley: It’s quite simple really: know your audience. It sounds obvious, but so many marketers don’t actually spend enough time talking to customers and fully understanding not just what they want, but what they actually need. They don’t survey them, they don’t interact with them and they don’t spend enough time with sales or account management to understand what customers are thinking, feeling and reacting to. How can you create a marketing campaign without actually understanding your customer? I firmly believe marketing has to own that understanding. If another department knows the customer better than marketing does, it’s incredibly difficult to create campaigns that genuinely resonate. Marketing should be the function that understands what matters to customers, what bottlenecks they’re facing, what they’re trying to solve and what’s actually going to capture their attention. Once you have that understanding, you then need to match it with your own business. The campaign has to resonate with the audience, but it also has to reflect your real capabilities. There’s no point promising something that you can’t deliver. From gaining that understanding of what your clients need, you can then begin to focus on translating that knowledge into brand recognition. Ideally, you want your brand to be synonymous with values such as innovation, integrity and responsibility. But to build brand recognition, you need to be consistent with the content you’re publishing. I think too many marketing teams are constantly looking for the next new bandwagon to jump on, when what they actually need is the discipline to double down on the right message, over and over again. Every touchpoint should reinforce the same positioning, the same values and the same story. It might sound repetitive, but if people can recognise your brand name or logo and automatically think, “This is the company that focuses on innovation,” then you’re on to a winner. We’re all competing for attention in a very noisy market, and consistency is what ultimately creates brand recall. Brands aren’t remembered because they say lots of different things. They’re remembered because they consistently say the same thing. Marketing’s role is to own that consistency and ensure the business delivers it every single day. Dorota Gruszka: For me, the secret is consistency combined with a strong creative idea. If you want instant brand recall, you need to give people something distinctive enough to remember and then make sure that everything around the campaign reinforces that identity. The strongest campaigns are usually the ones that are simple at their core. You should be able to understand the idea quickly, whether you see it at an event, on LinkedIn, in a trade publication or through an operator campaign. Strong visuals help, but the concept also needs personality and, most importantly, a clear connection to the product. Being creative just for the sake of being creative might get attention, but it doesn’t necessarily build the brand. Maintaining that recognition is where consistency becomes really important. You can’t build awareness with one big campaign and then disappear or completely change direction with the next release. The brand needs recognisable elements — whether that’s the tone of voice, visual identity, messaging or the way you present your games — that people begin to associate with you over time. I also think you have to keep giving the audience reasons to engage after that first touchpoint. That means extending campaigns beyond the initial game launch through operator activations, events, social content and other touchpoints rather than treating every release as a standalone moment. Brand recognition is built through repetition, but it has to be repetition with personality. The goal is that someone sees a campaign and knows who is behind it before they even see the logo. Pierre Pulis: If we make reference to the marketing funnel, almost everyone is focusing on the top part – they launch a press release, a banner, a social media image. That stuff is all great, and can be valuable. But successful campaigns need to move well beyond the brand awareness part. So, how are you going to communicate exactly the value that the product is bringing to the market? You need to do thought leadership. You need to really segment the product in an educational way and demonstrate real life benefits for your partners – this will help you show how the product is actually having an impact from an operational point of view. Then you need to be able to show what long-term benefits that the product has for your partners. As a marketer, you need to be able to communicate all of that. If the product is as successful as you’re saying it is, you need to show that. In my opinion for marketing to be really efficient you need to talk the talk, but you also need to walk the walk. John Cook: For me, there’s an important distinction between being recognisable and being remembered for the right reason. You can spend a considerable amount of money making sure someone recognises your logo, your colours or your exhibition stand, but if they can’t explain what your business actually represents, how valuable is that recognition? The strongest B2B brands create an association in the customer’s mind. When a particular commercial challenge arises, you want your company to be one of the first names they think of. That means marketers need to identify what they genuinely want to be known for and then reinforce that position consistently across every touchpoint. But consistency shouldn’t mean simply repeating the same advert or slogan until people remember it. Your marketing needs to continually provide evidence for the position you want to own. If you want to be recognised as an expert in payments, for example, your research, thought leadership, event strategy and sales conversations should consistently demonstrate that expertise. This is where I think the shift from recognition to recall really happens. It’s the accumulation of experiences someone has with your business. They might read an insightful article from your team, see you discussing the same challenge at an event and then have a conversation with someone from your sales team who genuinely understands the problem they’re trying to solve. Suddenly, the brand promise has substance behind it. Ultimately, instant recall isn’t about being everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s about creating such a clear and credible association with a particular area of expertise that when a customer has a problem, they already know who they want to speak to.