Long Term Brand vs Activation Budget Mix

Brand vs. Sales: Why most get it wrong. Most businesses I talk to, especially in B2B, get in a dangerous cycle… and they don’t even realise it. They pour money into lead generation, paid ads, and promotions because it’s easy to track, CEOs love it, and it delivers instant gratification. This is what I call buying attention. It works, but the second they stop, the attention disappears. So, they spend more. And more. And more. And some more... Until they’re trapped in an expensive game with no way out. The fix? Brand. Not logos, not colours. But real brand-building—the kind that makes customers come to you, that reduces acquisition costs. The kind of brand that makes that company top of mind when the need arises. The problem? Brand takes time. It’s harder to track, and most CEOs lose patience before it starts working. But once brand starts working, you hit the brand flywheel—an upward momentum that attracts the right users and cuts costs across sales, marketing, hiring, and retention. It’s a balance game. Neither extreme works. Too much focus on short-term sales burns money and makes it very hard to stand out and earn trust. Too much focus on brand without activation leads to slow, painful growth. That’s why the strongest businesses do both... in parallel. They buy attention for quick wins and generate attention for long-term dominance. Binet & Field’s research proves it: 60% brand, 40% sales. Start branding today to make the sales of tomorrow easier.

Before you can convince the CFO or Board about adding brand investments, you need to first convince yourself exactly why and how brand building leads to higher margins, and why performance marketing alone won't do it. So you don't have to learn all the same lessons yourself, here's how I'd think about it if I were to do it all over again 1. Exactly why performance marketing alone doesn't drive increasing margin and profit$ This driving assumption that kept us on the DR hamster wheel for so long: 1-day click ROAS was the best indication of what would drive the most contribution dollars over the long term Given the measurement tools we had, that assumption made sense It was only after many years that we realized the creative, channels and tactics that best drive 1-day click results were *not* the things that *best* drove 90 or 180 contribution-dollar LTV After years, we saw: - Paid revenue as a percentage of total kept creeping up and up - Cost per order kept increasing (hard to see in short term, and easy to chalk up to external factors or temporary blips) - % of revenue on discount needed to increase to hit ROAS goal 2. Exactly why a balanced approach of performance marketing + brand building drives increasing contribution margin and $ As you grow and make more mistakes, you learn Revenue and ROAS are vanity metrics, and it becomes more about increasing marginal contribution $ LTV and long-term incrementality Focusing on driving those metrics is the only way to start to see the accumulating benefits we all strive for The best way to drive ^ is by driving increases in your resilient base of branded searches The best way to drive ^ is the below: Different tactics: a) Reach more people (AKA lower intent) b) With emotionally driving content or experiences (AKA minimal offer/urgency/CTA) Note: just like there's ineffective creative for driving 1day click ROAS, there's ineffective 'Brand' content It can't just be meme content where virality is the only goal (been there, done that. doesn't work) The creative needs to do 4 things: - Emotional response (laugh, cry, beauty, aspiration, inspire, excite, feel validated or not alone) - Your brand name and/or logo - The problem you solve/use case/job to be done - Your solution Why all 4 parts are essential: - The emotional response creates the memory, but for the memory to lead to dollars in your bank account, it has to facilitate the purchase process you want - Your brand name becomes the way customers refer to the product when they look for the product when in market - Rather than searching description of product and having to play the SEO game (not a bad game to play, just don't want to depend on it), they add your brand name to the search query at the moment they need the thing you sell - To the extent you've provided a positive feeling stronger your competitors, you're at the top of the mental list when the customer need arises (Ran out of characters. Continued in comments)

Performance marketing is fishing with a spear. Brand is building a net. One gets you today’s catch. The other sustains you for quarters to come. Les Binet and Peter Field’s research across 1,000+ campaigns shows: The ideal media mix is 60% brand, 40% activation. Here's why: • Brand builds mental availability (So when the customer is ready, they remember you.) • Activation captures existing intent (But only works if people already know and trust you.) Here’s the trap: Most brands over-invest in short-term performance. Cost per acquisition rises. Clicks fatigue. Growth plateaus. The smarter play? • Use performance to drive precision — and learn fast. • Use brand to create memory, emotion, and pricing power. • Align both to a unified customer journey, not siloed KPIs. The brands that win long-term aren’t just optimizing, they are orchestrating a long game. It’s not brand or performance. It’s brand as performance — just with a longer timeline. Do you agree?

I've been deep in a bunch of marketing research lately and keep finding things that challenge how most of us actually work. Like this one: brand building and activation aren't really separate functions. They have different purposes, but they’re two halves of the same system. And they work through different mental processes. Brand-first messaging uses repeated emotional experiences to build mental availability that accumulate until (hopefully) someone automatically thinks of you when a need comes up. Emotional messaging is repeatedly shown to be most effective at capturing attention and creating salience for people in low-attention states—like people who aren’t in-market for your product today. The hope is that your brand is associated so strongly with a specific product category, use case, or outcome, that buyers automatically think of you when a problem moves them into the market. That’s when they start paying attention to your evidential messaging, and where activation messaging comes in. Activation messaging converts that mental availability. When buyers enter evaluation mode, they need to address buying criteria with rational validation like proof, features, outcomes. You need to supply them with detail that gives them confidence in choosing you over the competitors. What makes this all so tricky: brand building works slowly through accumulation. And since buying cycles can be years in B2B, the results of that brand effort can be very long tail. So, if your success is being measured quarterly (like most of us, gotta pay the bills), you're probably being guided toward activation campaigns where results show up quickly. They’re easy to attribute and the numbers look great on dashboards. And once the sales leader gets a little hit of that sweet sweet direct response, it’s literally all they want to see. The problem is that activation only works on the 5% who are actively in-market right now. You're sucking up easy wins today, but maybe at the expense of building a steady supply of mental availability tomorrow or 1 year, 5 years down the road. It’s supported by data, too! In "The Long and Short of It,” Les Binet and Peter Field found (among many other things) that emotional campaigns are nearly twice as likely to deliver very large profit growth at the three year mark. But they underperform for the first six months. So they’re at risk of early scrutiny and closure. And wide reach really matters for brand: Campaigns targeting the whole market (rather than just existing customers) are 10x more efficient than those targeting existing customers. The hard part isn't knowing this information. It's getting people on board with patiently investing in things that can't be neatly measured. Still working on that one, myself!

The whole brand vs performance ad debate is really dumb. It's like saying should we eat food or drink water. Should we plant crops or harvest them. Somehow the industry loves these lines. We had ATL and BTL spend before, then it morphed into online vs offline, and now it's Brand vs Performance. But we should probably completely rethink all of marketing around TIME. It's not about the channel, it's not about the KPI, it's not about the response mechanism, it's what period it's designed to make a difference. LONG We'd have activity ( not just ads) designed to impact business over periods of 2+ years, we'd call this "long" term marketing SHORT We'd have activity designed to impact business over periods of < 1 month - "short" term marketing CAMPAIGN We'd have activity designed to impact business over periods of 1 month - 2 years. "Medium" term marketing We wouldn't go around with nonsense terms like performance marketing, which suggests "brand" ads don't perform. We'd not stupidly think "digital" can only be used for immediate impact, just because we CAN use it this way. We'd not spend our lives with dumb debates about marketing being good or bad, or brands being wasteful, we'd have a smarter sense of what we're trying to do. Long term marketing would be things like - Brand campaigns ( on any media ) - Sponsorship - Partnerships - Core innovation - Customer Service - Loyalty marketing - Core PR Medium term marketing would be things like - Ads like we used to make for most media, like TV ads, - Sponsorship activation - Brand activations - New product variants - Content marketing - Activation of long term marketing in specific ways Short term marketing would be things like - Price promotion - Retargeting - DCO ads. - Affiliate Marketing  - Shoppable Ads - Tactical PR - Influencer marketing - Optimization - CRM - Referral programs Etc. it's not perfect, some tactic span the lines But it's a much much better way to think of it It's a much more informed way to think about what "works" And the key would always be to ensure that the right KPI are used and that they are different to each other. Why isn't this being done?

90% of high-growth companies integrate brand and performance marketing. Most businesses don’t, and nd it’s costing them millions. Why? CMOs are chasing short-term wins, pouring money into performance ads, and thinking they’re optimizing for ROI. But, according to WARC's fascinating and latest Multiplier Effect report, the data is clear: This is a false choice, and the real cost is long-term growth. Some interesting findings: ➝ Over-investing in performance ads leads to 20-50% percent lower revenue returns ➝ Brands that shift to a balanced mix of brand and performance see up to 100% revenue lift ➝ The most successful brands allocate at least 40% of their budget to brand equity-led advertising ➝ The brands that understand this (such as McDonald’s, Airbnb, even Nike) know that brand and performance together create exponential growth But many companies fall into what the report calls the "doom loop." - Over-reliance on performance ads. - Short-term gains, long-term stagnation. - Higher acquisition costs, lower brand equity. The brands that win build mental availability before consumers even enter the market, not just chase clicks when they are already shopping. What do you think? Image credit: Analytic Partners

Marketing has two big jobs, but we're usually judged on only one. Our job in marketing splits into two parts: Building mental availability: making sure people know who we are and remember us when they’re ready to buy. This is often called brand marketing. Activating demand: making sure that people who are ready to buy choose us. This is typically performance or demand marketing. Here’s the challenge — most of our metrics (MQLs, pipeline, revenue) are tied to demand activation. But brand and demand aren’t separate – they work together. Still, they behave differently and aren’t always easy to measure in the same way. Brand is like staying in shape. You go to the gym, eat healthy, and take care of yourself. You don’t always see instant results, but over time, your body gets stronger. → In marketing terms: We want more people to know us, remember us, and think of us when they’re ready to buy. This is a long-term game. Demand activation is like showing up on race day. You’ve trained for months, and now it’s time to perform. If you’re fit, you’ll likely do well. → In marketing terms: When someone’s ready to buy, our goal is to be easy to find and hard to ignore. Most of the time, our execs care about the race day numbers – leads, opps, deals. That’s fair, because those drive revenue. But if we don’t also take care of our brand (our fitness), performance eventually suffers. So what do we do? We need to measure both. Performance marketing already has clear metrics. But brand often feels fuzzy — hard to prove it’s working. That’s why Share of Search (SoS) is useful. It’s a quantifiable way to track how much people are searching for our brand compared to competitors. It acts like a “brand scoreboard”, so we can see how campaigns are moving the needle, even if the revenue impact comes later. So: Use performance metrics for activation (leads, opps, CAC, etc.) Use Share of Search as the north star for brand Run both in parallel, and know that each supports the other Two different motions. Two different metrics. One goal: revenue growth.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘃𝘀. 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 The 95:5 Rule says that for a product like most B2B SaaS, we expect to see only about 5% of the buyers in-market each Quarter, with about a 5-year inter-purchase period (give or take a bit and different for other categories) 𝙌𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣: So what does this say about the value of our investment in Brand vs. Performance Ads? Under this scenario, if we track a single potential buyer, they will be actively in-market to buy only about 90-days every five years (or ~5% of each 5-year period) There's solid research data to suggest: 👉 CTA-based "performance ads" typical of lead-gen activity produce zero long-term memory associations. This is largely because they're based on the sort of detailed product information and logic-based calls-to-action that work well ONLY if you're actively in-market. 👉 Brand marketing ads, characterized by low information detail with clear emotional triggers, work equally well at implanting brand awareness memories and (if properly designed) at driving active buyers into the sales process. --- 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗔𝗱𝘀: Those logical CTA-based "performance ads" are a one-trick pony but can often be high-performing at driving someone who's in-market into a sales activation process. 👉 Before that narrow buying window, they have no interest...and after that buying window, they have no need If we follow the "buying journey" of a single buyer, such ads will only function for a brief window every few years. You can show those ads 100 times a month to someone, but if they're not actively in-market to buy yet, it will have zero impact. --- 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗱𝘀: The problem with the buying window isn't just that it's very narrow, but we have NO way to predict when a given customer might be ready to come in-market. In spite of the nonsense from the "signals" crowd, most companies throw off few, if any, publically visible signals until most of the process of selecting the initial "consideration set" is complete. By then, if the buyer doesn't already know you exist, your chances of eventually being found and selected are very low at this point. So, to maximize the chance of being in that initial day-one consideration set, you need to be in the memories of as many potential future buyers as possible. Unfortunately, memory isn't forever! There's typically a fixed window of time after which that memory is forgotten and needs to be refreshed. For high-value, high-consideration goods (typical of B2B), that window is about 6-12 months for aided-recall and 2-3 months for unaided-recall. So, you have to maintain a sufficient frequency of brand advertising to reach your core group of future buyers at least once every few months to ensure those brand memories are there when they're ready to come in-market. --- 👉 Over the long term, almost all the impact of your marketing is in the Brand Marketing, not the short-term Performance Marketing

Oh no, here we go AGAIN... It looks like in 2025 most marketers are back on the short term 🐹 hamster wheel. 📊 The CMO Survey ⬇️ 🔗 - Fall 2024 reveals that 68.8% of marketing budgets, more then the year before, are being pumped into short-term performance. You know, the "quick wins." Meanwhile, long-term brand building—the kind that creates evidence-based, real, lasting growth—is slowly being "sidelined". This isn’t new. It’s the same mistake, dressed up for a different meeting. Byron Sharp tells us in How Brands Grow that brands thrive when they’re 🧠 easy to think of and 👀 easy to find. Les Binet and Peter Field, with their 🔄 60:40 rule, support it: 60% brand building, 40% activation. Not the other way around. Whatever data, study or approach you pick: TLDR you can not just skip the brand building. But with 2025 just around the corner here we are, again. Chasing clicks, squeezing banners, 🖱️ bidding for the best spot online, and ignoring the compound interest effects of a strong brand. 🍎 It’s like pulling all the apples off the tree but forgetting to water it. The tree’s still there— yes, for now. But what about next year? 🌳 Why not grow the tree and get more apples in the long run? The truth is simple: short-termism is hurting marketing. It’s riskier than long-term investment because, I’m convinced, it’s a dead end. You’ll hit a ceiling, and when you do, it will hurt. 🤔 So, let’s ask the real question: Do we want quick wins or lasting impact? Because you can’t have both unless you balance them. Building a brand takes time. Like 💹 compound interest. It’s not sexy, but it works. There is plenty of evidence. So, what’s stopping marketers? They don't know? 😰 Fear? 👫 Peer pressure? 📊 The next meeting’s vanity metric spreadsheet? 🧪 The new flashy tech or AI? All of them? Whatever it is, I think we need to fix it. If you don’t look at the longer term, I think you’re mostly a caretakers of a brand in decline. 💬 Why are we so stuck in this short-term trap? Ideas, anyone? Asking for a brand. 🙏

How much should you invest in brand vs. demand in your 2025 budget? 💰 That’s a question on every CMO’s mind. And I suspect more marketing leaders will find ways to allocate a larger portion to brand initiatives for next year. Why? Because only ~5% of your buyers are actively in-market. The other 95% aren’t looking to buy — yet. They will eventually enter the market. And when they do, their perception of your brand will determine whether you make the shortlist. TrustRadius found 78% of buyers in 2024 selected products they’d heard of before starting research. For enterprise buyers, it’s 86%! 6sense’s research shows 80% of B2B buyers already have a preferred vendor by the time they contact sales — and that vendor wins 80% of the time. That's why brand matters. So how much should we invest? A 60:40 Split? In their 2017 book, Media in Focus, Les Binet and Peter Field famously argued companies should allocate 60% of marketing budget to brand and 40% to “sales activation.” Then in 2019, they worked with LinkedIn to update the recommendation for B2B companies to 54% on demand generation (or activation) and 46% on brand building (see comments). This reflects B2B’s longer sales cycles and supposedly “rational” buyer journeys, but the core message remains: brand building shouldn’t be sidelined. Some other tips from Binet and Field: 💡 Remember: brand is about emotions Emotional campaigns are generally more effective for long-term brand building than rational, product-focused messages. They create stronger memories and connections, which leads to increased brand loyalty and better performance over time. This is true in B2B as well because, despite the “rational” facade, B2B buyers are still human. 🍬 Avoid the gumball machine mentality of marketing They warn against “short-termism” in marketing, prioritizing immediate results over sustained growth. The ability to measure demand gen campaigns more easily than brand can push companies toward optimizing for quick wins at the expense of long-term brand health. 📊 Use the right metrics Tactical metrics like clicks and MQLs provide immediate feedback but don’t reflect long-term brand. They suggest metrics that reflect brand strength; most importantly, they say to grow, B2B brands should ensure the share of voice exceeds their market share. Note: creating a strong brand isn’t about flashy TV campaigns. Creativity matters. Use emotional appeals such as humor, storytelling, or social proof to make your marketing engaging and relevant. Focus on getting your core positioning right before investing in expensive brand activations. And remember many investments, such as events, deliver both demand creation (brand) and demand capture (activation). Let me know in the comment how you are budgeting for brand in 2025! #B2BMarketing #MarketingStrategy #BrandBuilding #DemandGen #Budgeting