Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
9 tactics from Shireen Khi
Why Brand Marketing Matters More as Your App Scales
Watch the full episode“The campaign is really about enforcing the positioning of our brand — it's not talking about the price, about the trial period, it's not even encouraging you to download the app. It's more really about what it means to be a user of Deezer.”
Brand campaigns should sell identity, not features — no price, no trial, no download CTA
Deezer's TV and out-of-home campaign in France contained zero conversion mechanics — no price mention, no trial offer, no download nudge. The sole objective was making Deezer synonymous with music in users' minds. Brand campaigns are not meant to convert; they are meant to create the emotional context in which conversion campaigns can work later.
“For Deezer, everything is about music and everything is about living the music. We are not positioned on all the audio — we are very centered around music and all our branding is really around this core idea.”
Own one lane, not all of audio — narrow brand positioning beats broad category claims
When Deezer competes with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, the instinct is to broaden positioning to cover every audio use case. Shireen Khi argues the opposite: deliberately narrow to a single positioning lane so the brand occupies a clear mental slot. Broad positioning on 'audio' is invisible; owning 'music' is something users can feel.
“When people do have some level of affinity or understanding of the brand, when you do hit them with that performance marketing it can be way more efficient and effective because you've kind of warmed them up as a lead.”
Brand affinity pre-warms audiences so performance campaigns convert more efficiently
The hidden value of brand campaigns shows up in performance campaign CPAs, not brand metrics. Users who have been exposed to brand messaging are already partially convinced before they see a conversion ad — so performance campaigns harvest that warmth rather than trying to build trust and drive action in a single step. Brand investment is pre-paying for future performance efficiency.
“At first it will work at small scale, it would be super profitable — but then it's very short term. As you scale, you're going to find that performance marketing becomes less and less effective and that's where brand marketing starts to come into play.”
Performance marketing hits a ceiling at scale — brand is what keeps the funnel growing
Every app's performance marketing journey looks the same: cheap CPIs early, then rising CPAs as the platform exhausts high-intent audiences. Shireen Khi maps out the arc: performance works until it doesn't, at which point brand investment isn't optional — it's the only way to keep filling the funnel with people who are worth converting.
“When you start fighting against an Amazon for instance — what do you have left if you don't have a brand? All you have is this emotional connection that you managed to build with your brand.”
Brand is the only moat left when a bigger competitor enters your category
Price and features are copyable. When a well-funded competitor enters your category, every acquisition lever — ads, ASO, pricing — can be outspent. The only thing they cannot replicate overnight is the emotional relationship users have with your brand. Building that relationship before the competition shows up is the only durable competitive strategy.
“Everything became even more complicated with privacy rules — you cannot track everything you want anymore. For me, measurement is really about multiplying the sources of truth. You have to use different methodologies, different techniques to measure different KPIs and make sure they all align and point to the same conclusions.”
Post-privacy measurement: multiply sources of truth — no single tool is reliable
Privacy changes killed the clean single-source attribution stack. Deezer's response: run last-click MMP data, multi-touch attribution, incrementality geo-tests, brand lift studies, and media mix modeling in parallel — then look for convergence. One tool showing a lift is noise. Three tools independently pointing the same direction is a real signal worth acting on.
“Every quarter, every semester we ask a panel of our audience: does Deezer know music, does Deezer understand me, do I feel close to Deezer — and we especially focus on the paid consideration part. What's actually reliable is that we follow the trend.”
Track brand health as a directional trend, not an absolute number — quarterly panels
Deezer measures brand health through quarterly quantitative panels that ask users about awareness, affinity, and paid consideration intent. The panels don't produce precise numbers, but they produce reliable directional signals. An upward trend in paid consideration quarter over quarter validates brand investment even when the absolute number is uncertain.
“We try to figure out what is the right level of investment on the digital upper funnel campaigns — how do these impact our performance campaign. You can actually do this very easily with a conversion lift study through Meta among other partners.”
Conversion lift studies prove how much upper-funnel brand spend boosts performance campaigns
One of the hardest questions in mixed brand/performance budgets is proving the causal link between upper-funnel spend and downstream conversions. Meta's conversion lift study (and equivalents from other platforms) shuts down specific audiences temporarily to measure the counterfactual. At Deezer, this validated assumptions at a much larger magnitude than last-click attribution ever showed.
“Measurement is everything. If you cannot measure what you do, all your efforts are a waste — you have no idea what you're doing. My main focus is to make sure that we are always one step ahead in terms of measurement.”
Measurement obsession is the meta-skill — if you cannot measure it, you are guessing
Shireen Khi's operating principle: investing in measurement infrastructure is the highest-leverage marketing activity. It's not about any single tool — it's about maintaining a measurement stack sophisticated enough to give confident answers about what's working. Apps that run good campaigns but poor measurement stay stuck guessing which half of their budget is wasted.