Brand building vs performance: few questions come up as often in marketing teams, and few are answered as rarely in a clean way. One side wants to build reach and meaning, the other wants to see revenue this week. Both are right, as long as you know what each kind of work does.
At Breuninger I was responsible for strategy across the whole funnel, from brand campaign to performance. I learned that the argument is rarely about numbers and usually about time horizons.
- Brand building works slowly and for long, activation fast and briefly.
- Research by Binet and Field points to roughly 60 to 40 as a good average balance.
- The rule is a starting point, not a law for every brand.
- Both teams need shared goals and a shared calendar.
Contents
What research says about brand building vs performance
For the UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, Les Binet and Peter Field analysed hundreds of campaigns from the IPA database. Their finding: brand building and activation work on different time scales. Activation creates quick spikes in sales that soon fade. Brand building grows slowly but lasts much longer (see here: IPA, The Long and the Short of It).
This is where the well-known rule of thumb comes from: on average, brands achieved the best results when they put about 60 percent into brand building and 40 percent into activation. Brand building vs performance is therefore not a matter of belief but a question of the mix.
Why the 60/40 rule is not a law
The rule is an average. Binet and Field themselves stress that the right balance depends on category, market position and channel. A young brand without awareness needs a different split than a well-known brand that sells mainly online.
That is why I use the number to start a conversation, not as a target. The more important question is: what should the brand mean in three years, and what does it need to sell this quarter? Saying both out loud makes it faster to find the right mix.
In practice, that means first clarifying the brand’s job in its category. Does it need to become better known, change its image or mainly keep existing customers? Depending on the answer, the mix shifts, and that is fine. What matters is that the shift is a conscious decision and not the result of the loudest report.
Brand building vs performance in a team’s daily work
In daily work, the balance rarely fails because of strategy but because of organisation. Brand team and performance team often have separate goals, separate reports and separate agencies. Then the team with the faster numbers wins almost every discussion.
What helps: a shared campaign calendar, shared messages and creative that works in both worlds. A strong brand idea also makes performance ads better, because people recognise it. How meaning is built across the whole funnel is the topic of my post on cultural branding.
A typical mistake is to judge brand campaigns by activation metrics. Measuring a brand campaign by clicks in the first week will almost always end it too early.
How to measure the impact of both sides
For short-term impact, sales, conversion and cost per purchase are often enough. For long-term impact you need other measures: awareness, brand image, willingness to pay and market share over several quarters. At budget level, a model that separates both effects helps. How that works is covered in my post on marketing mix modeling.
A shared report for both sides helps. It shows the short-term numbers next to the slow brand metrics and makes visible how both influence each other over time. A conflict turns into shared steering.
My conclusion on brand building vs performance: the two are not opposites but two speeds of the same brand. Mixing them deliberately and measuring them honestly lets you sell today while building the brand of tomorrow.