Stop saying ‘brand marketing’, it’s one half of a false dichotomy

Just before Christmas, I wrote a column arguing that performance marketing should be retired. It’s a misleading label for direct response marketing that delivers mostly confusion – particularly in boardrooms increasingly anxious about short-term results.

The response was immediate and broad. Hundreds of messages from marketers around the world agreed. ‘Direct response’ it is.

But almost immediately, another pattern emerged.

Many replies pivoted not to language, but to budgets. “We should spend more on brand.” “My brand team says the same.”

It seems performance marketing didn’t arrive alone. It acquired an evil twin: brand marketing. Two labels, supposedly describing opposite ends of the spectrum, both promising clarity. And yet, both managing to make the job harder.

What’s particularly curious is how ‘brand marketing’ has come to mean something very specific. Not the cumulative effect of products, prices, services and experiences. But a role. A budget. In some organisations, people are hired explicitly to ‘do brand’, often with little influence over the things that actually shape it.

I should explain where my confusion comes from. I grew up in the FMCG sector. Heavy TV, outdoor, print – and plenty of direct response. My global team had a very simple job: ship boxes. We measured short-term results relentlessly. We also tracked brand health over time. But we never treated these as separate worlds.

I commonly meet marketers working in ‘brand’ departments, far removed from commercial decisions.

The first time I encountered a hard separation was when telecoms and pharma companies tried to recruit me to build so-called ‘brand teams’. On paper, it sounded strategic. In practice, it was baffling. ‘Brand’ meant advertising. Full stop. Not product. Not pricing. Not service or distribution. Just decks, frameworks and campaigns. When I asked how a brand could be built without touching product, price or place, the conversation tended to stop.

This isolated brand thinking has now become widespread. Today, at conferences, I commonly meet marketers working in ‘brand’ departments, far removed from commercial decisions, producing elaborate positioning frameworks while lamenting that their company doesn’t spend ‘60% on brand’. That’s a generalisation. But it’s a familiar one.

At this point, it’s worth pausing to restate some basics:

Every marketing activity builds the brand

Customers don’t experience marketing in silos. They don’t distinguish between a TV ad, a price increase, a frustrating call-centre interaction, a broken product, a Facebook coupon or a confusing offer. It all blends into a single view of the brand. Professor Patrick Barwise, former head of London Business School’s marketing department, showed this neatly years ago:

Every customer experience creates a short-term financial effect. You typically spend money. That’s a cost. The customer may or may not respond and generate revenue.

That same experience also creates a memory. A good one. A bad one. A memory of your product, your price, your service, your advertising. Over time, this brand equity may translate into revenue. Brand building does result from the sum of everything a customer experiences.

Effective long-term brand building sells in the short term

Millions of viewers have shed a tear this year watching Waitrose’s ‘The Perfect Gift’ Christmas ad. It was cool, long and expensive. And it contained virtually no product promotion. System1 scored it with a 2.5-star long-term effectiveness uplift versus the supermarket category. But for Waitrose, ‘winning Christmas’ is not about winning prizes. It is about winning Christmas revenue. This year.

This is where The Long and the Short of It, by Les Binet and Peter Field, is often invoked – and rarely read properly. For those not familiar: Binet and Field ploughed through hundreds of campaigns from the IPA Databank, they examined short-term activation and longer-term brand campaigns (as far as that distinction can realistically be made).

What they found is frequently glossed over: the campaigns that deliver the strongest long-term effects also produce the strongest short-term results. Binet and Field call them ‘brand response’ campaigns. They work immediately and they work over time. This is uncontroversial in FMCG. It‘s far less comfortable for organisations built around separating short and long into different teams.

The category determines how brand building works

Binet and Field made another important observation: campaigns with roughly a 60/40 split between brand building and activation tended to perform well over time. It’s the figure most people cite today. What most people ignore: 60/40 is an observed average, not a rule. The authors are clear that the balance varies by category.

That matters because the IPA Databank leans heavily toward consumer goods and services. Categories with long purchase cycles – durables, capital goods, many B2B markets – are thinly represented.

And categories behave very differently. Chanel handbags operate with long cycles and high emotional investment. Very few buyers are in market at any one time. Heavy activation would be wasteful and do little to build the aspiration the brand needs to have.

Kitchen towel is different. Low involvement. Frequent purchase. Winning at the checkout matters. Activation is king.

The mechanical application of 60/40 to all categories is simply difficult to justify.

Brand building doesn’t equal campaigns

Trader Joe’s goes from strength to strength. The US retailer has a clear positioning. Fierce loyalty. Strong economics. No classic brand campaigns.

What customers experience instead is a coherent system: the store, the assortment, the pricing, the packaging, the people at the checkout. Promotions exist. Activation exists. And all of it builds the brand.

Brand building isn’t always synonymous with big above-the-line budgets. In fact, some of the world’s strongest brands run little or no brand advertising. The mistake is turning one executional approach into an organisational doctrine.

The neat separation of activation and brand building looks tidy on slides. Less so in the real world, where customers stubbornly refuse to experience brands in departmental chunks.

There is, of course, a role for some brand-focused work in large organisations: consistency, efficient central campaign platforms, measurement. Scale helps here. These things matter.

But treating ‘brand’ as a separate discipline never really did.

When organisations build two separate silos – one for ‘short-term activation’, one for ‘brand’ – and blindly push a 60/40 split, it’s worth pausing. And in many cases, it creates exactly the frustration it was meant to solve.

A more useful lens is the one supported by evidence, not ideology. This leads to two questions that actually matter:

1. How does profitable brand response get built in your category?
2. What does that imply for how you allocate tasks and budgets?

In B2B, brand response may mean communicating the positioning plus creating leads. In FMCG, it may mean shipping boxes and building the brand through consistent execution. Elsewhere, it may mean experience over advertising.

Search, coupons, TV, product, pricing – people only experience one brand. That’s why every marketer is a brand builder.

Once you accept that, the idea of ‘brand marketing’ starts to look less like a discipline and more like a misunderstanding.