Brand vs. Demand: The False War That's Bleeding Your Budget

I've spent my career on both sides of this argument. A decade building brands at Unilever and J&J, learning that emotional connection is everything. Then another decade at Meta and Pinterest, where every pound spent had to prove itself in clicks, conversions, and cost per acquisition. I've sat in rooms where brand marketers dismissed performance as "grubby direct response." I've sat in rooms where performance marketers called brand "expensive wallpaper." They were both wrong. And the companies that listened to either side paid the price.

The war between brand building and performance marketing is a fiction. A convenient narrative that lets CFOs cut what they can't measure and lets CMOs avoid the harder conversation: you need both, and you're probably doing it wrong.

In 2013, Binet and Field published "The Long and The Short of It," the most important marketing effectiveness study of the last twenty years. Their conclusion: 60% of your budget should go to brand building, 40% to activation. Later research refined this to 62:38. The science is clear.

And virtually nobody follows it.

What research recommends: 60% brand / 40% activation

What companies actually do: Some studies show the reality is as bad as 31% brand / 69% short term performance

You're spending double on performance what the evidence says you should. And the kicker: long term ROI is 2.5x higher than short term ROI. Every pound you divert from brand to performance is costing you money in the long run.

That means over 80% know they're doing it wrong and are doing it anyway. Call it what it is: surrender dressed up as strategy.

“The addiction to the short term has worsened because with short term activities you get immediate feedback in the form of responses, clicks, or short term sales.”

— Les Binet

Your dashboards light up, your CFO nods approvingly, the quarterly numbers look good. And meanwhile, your brand is quietly dying.

The latest IPA Bellwether Report confirms it: UK companies revised total marketing budgets down for the first time in four years in Q1 2025. They're increasing short term sales promotions while cutting main media budgets. The IPA's warning couldn't be clearer: "This may offer immediate relief but is not a sustainable path to long term brand growth."

That's the System1 and IPA data. If your creative fails to generate an emotional response, you're just burning money. Dull ads require 2.6x more spend to achieve the same market share growth as ads that make people feel something. Even irritation beats indifference.

And when companies over rotate entirely to performance, the damage compounds. 42% of CFOs believe brand health has no impact on financial performance. They're wrong, but since they control the budget, their view prevails. It creates a doom loop: cut brand, watch short term metrics hold steady, declare victory, cut again. By the time the damage shows up, it takes years to repair.

Brands that cut marketing to zero in a downturn can take up to 5 years to recover. Regaining share of voice may cost 4-5x as much as the original cuts saved. Your CFO logs brand cuts as savings on a spreadsheet. Those cuts come back as costs later, with interest.

McCain: The IPA Grand Prix Winner

While everyone else was pivoting to performance, McCain stayed the course. Nine years of long term emotional brand building activity delivered:

The IPA Grand Prix recognised those results. McCain proved that patience beats panic.

P&G: Mass Reach at Scale

“The only currency that matters is sales dollars... What's important is how many people we're reaching. Excess frequency is the biggest waste.”

— Marc Pritchard, P&G Chief Brand Officer

P&G built a 1 billion strong consumer database covering 50% of adults online. Ariel "Share the Load" hit 11% annual growth rate. P&G builds brands that perform.

UK TV: The Effectiveness Data

UK television advertising delivered 54.7% of advertising generated profit in 2024. Household FMCG brands increased TV investment by £67 million (up 22%) to £368.9 million last year. They're reading the effectiveness data, even if the trade press isn't.

At Unilever and J&J, I learned that brand building is the foundation everything else stands on. Price elasticity, loyalty, organic demand. None of that comes from retargeting ads. It comes from years of consistent emotional investment. The brands I worked on that had this foundation could weather anything: price wars, new entrants, economic downturns. The ones that didn't had to buy every single customer, every single time.

Then I moved to Meta and Pinterest. Performance world. And I learned something the brand purists don't want to hear: accountability actually makes marketing better. The rigour of measurement, the demand that every pound justifies itself, that discipline sharpens everything. Performance marketing works brilliantly. Until it becomes the only thing you do.

What I saw, over and over, was that the best performing campaigns on both platforms had strong brands behind them. The companies getting the best cost per acquisition all had one thing in common: a brand doing the heavy lifting before the ad even appeared. Strong brands lowered acquisition costs. Performance data proved which brand investments were working. Each fed the other.

The companies that understood this, that invested in both, dominated. The ones that picked a side eventually hit a wall. Either they built beautiful brands that nobody bought, or they optimised themselves into a corner where every customer cost more than the last.

The brand versus demand war is a story marketers tell themselves to justify short term decisions that feel safe and look good in quarterly reports.

The 60/40 rule exists because it works, across thousands of campaigns and decades of data. The companies that will dominate the next decade aren't debating which side to pick. They've moved past the false war. They're investing in both mental availability and immediate results.

Having worked on both sides of this table, I can tell you: the answer was always both. The right proportions, with the patience to let each do what it does best.

“Do you have the conviction to reject a false choice?”

Naureen Mohammed is the Lead Partner and Founder of CMO Growth Partners, a fractional CMO consultancy helping B2B and B2C brands build marketing functions that actually work. With brand building experience at Unilever and J&J, and performance marketing leadership at Meta and Pinterest, she's spent three decades on both sides of the brand versus demand debate.

If your marketing budget is under pressure and your board thinks brand is a luxury, let's talk. The conversation is free. The cost of getting this wrong is anything but.