Let me start with something that should be obvious but clearly isn't, given how most businesses spend their marketing budgets.

Brand building works. It has always worked. The evidence is overwhelming, the research is decades deep, and the results are there for anyone who cares to look. And yet, right now, in boardrooms and marketing meetings across New Zealand and around the world, businesses are systematically underinvesting in brand while overinvesting in short-term activation, only to wonder why growth is getting harder and more expensive.

This article is my attempt to lay out the case, plainly and completely. The history, the research, the examples, and the practical argument for what to do about it. It's longer than most things I write, because this topic deserves more than a LinkedIn slide.

If you run a business, lead a marketing team, or sit on a board, I'd encourage you to read it. It might be the most commercially important thing you read this year.

This isn't new thinking. It's just thinking we keep forgetting.

The power of brand was understood long before the digital age gave us the illusion that everything could be measured and everything worth doing was measurable.

David Ogilvy, writing in the 1960s, put it with characteristic directness: "The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit." He also said, and this is worth sitting with, "Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night."

Leo Burnett, building some of the most enduring brands of the 20th century, understood that the emotional connection between a brand and its buyers was not a nice-to-have. It was the commercial engine. "What helps people, helps business," he said. He also understood the value of patience: the Tony the Tiger, the Marlboro Man, the Jolly Green Giant, these weren't one-campaign wonders. They were built over years, consistently, until they became cultural fixtures.

Bill Bernbach, whose work for Volkswagen and Avis changed the way the world thought about advertising, made perhaps the sharpest observation of all: "If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic."

These weren't visionaries ahead of their time. They were practitioners who understood something fundamental: that business growth is a function of how many people know you, like you, and remember you when they're ready to buy. Brand building is the work of making that happen. Everything else is tactics.

The research that changed everything, and that most businesses still ignore.

In 2013, Les Binet and Peter Field published The Long and the Short of It, an analysis of the IPA's Databank of effectiveness case studies spanning more than 30 years of advertising data. It's one of the most important documents in marketing history, yet most businesses have never heard of it.

The headline finding was this: marketing works in two fundamentally different ways, operating on different timescales, requiring different creative approaches, and generating different types of business effects.

Short-term sales activation: performance marketing, direct response, promotions, produces immediate revenue spikes that decay almost immediately once the campaign ends. It works by converting existing demand: reaching people already in the market and persuading them to buy now.

Long-term brand building: emotionally resonant, broadly reaching, consistently executed, builds memory structures that influence behaviour months or years later. It works by creating future demand: making your brand the one that comes to mind when someone enters the market for what you sell.

Both are necessary. But the research was unambiguous about the balance required. Binet and Field found the optimal split to be approximately 60% brand building, 40% sales activation. Updated work in 2017 and 2018 found the sweet spot had barely moved, 62% brand, 38% activation. The split does flex depending on your category and your place in it, but rarely more than 50:50, unless you are a startup that needs to quickly get runs on the board.

The evidence also showed that emotional advertising, the kind that makes people feel something about a brand rather than simply informing them, is almost twice as likely to drive top-box profit growth over the longer term. Not marginally more effective. Almost twice as effective. Take a moment to let that sink in.

And yet, in practice, the tide has moved the other way. Digital marketing made short-term results measurable in ways that brand effects are not. And so, gradually, budgets followed the metrics. More activation. Less brand. More performance marketing. Less long-term thinking. And as the research predicted, effectiveness has declined.

Peter Field has called it "the tide of activation." It's been rising for years, and it's costing businesses dearly.

The 95-5 rule, and why it changes everything.

One of the most important numbers in marketing is 95.

At any given moment, approximately 95% of your potential buyers are not in the market for what you sell. They're not ready to buy. They're not researching. They're not comparing options. They're simply going about their lives.

This matters enormously, because most marketing, particularly digital performance marketing, is aimed entirely at the 5% who are in the market right now. And the 5% are a finite pool. You can fish it efficiently. You can optimise your way to the bottom of it. And then you hit a ceiling.

For those aware of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s 95-5 Rule, you will know it was focused on Business-to-Business (B2B) categories, focusing on longer buying cycles (how frequently potential buyers are in market to buy), but even in Business-to-Consumer (B2C) categories, some have very long buying cycles, others could be quarterly or annually, so the thinking still applies. Most people who could buy you are not looking to do so this quarter, or even next.

James Hurman, the New Zealand-born strategist and author of Future Demand, has documented this pattern with uncomfortable precision. Start-ups grow rapidly by harvesting existing demand through performance marketing. Conversions are easy, cost per acquisition is low, and growth looks spectacular. And then, around three years in, something strange happens. Customers become harder and more expensive to find. The ads stop performing as well. Growth stalls.

What happened? They ran out of existing demand. They'd been so efficient at reaching the people already in the market that they hadn't built any brand presence among the 95% who weren't. And when that 95% eventually entered the market, there was no brand memory to draw on.

Hurman's framework is elegantly simple: performance marketing converts existing demand. Brand building creates future demand. You need both, and if you neglect the second, you eventually have nothing left to convert.

The evidence from econometrics supports this. Research by Magic Numbers found that brands relying solely on performance marketing hit a growth ceiling, while those who added brand-building investment broke through it, and the effects of that investment persisted for up to two years.

WARC's Multiplier Effect: brand × performance, not brand + performance.

The latest and perhaps most compelling body of evidence comes from WARC's Multiplier Effect report, developed in partnership with Analytic Partners, BERA, Prophet and System1.

The finding is both simple and radical: the relationship between brand and performance marketing is multiplicative, not additive. It is brand times performance, not brand plus performance.

In practice, strong brand equity makes performance marketing more effective. A brand with high mental availability converts more efficiently from search, social, and direct response. A brand with low mental availability has to work harder and spend more to achieve the same result.

The data shows that shifting from a performance-only approach to a balanced brand-and-performance strategy can improve total revenue ROI by between 25% and 100%. The median uplift is 90%. That is not a rounding error. That is a transformational commercial difference.

The report also found that 90% of companies outperforming their competitors were at least somewhat integrated in how they connected brand and demand, while underperformers were consistently siloed, treating brand and performance as separate, competing activities.

Kantar's evidence: strong brands outperform on every dimension that matters.

Kantar's BrandZ research, which has tracked the world's most valuable brands for nearly two decades, reinforces the commercial case from a different angle.

Strong brands don't just grow faster. They are more resilient in downturns, command higher prices, and attract better talent. They outperform the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index over time. Brand value accounts for 32% of company value among the top 100 most valuable global brands, and that figure has been growing.

Kantar's framework identifies three drivers of brand equity: being Meaningful (meeting functional and emotional needs), being Different (being seen as distinct and leading the category), and being Salient (coming to mind easily in relevant buying situations).

The businesses that invest in brand build all three over time. The businesses that don't compete on price, because without a meaningful difference and mental salience, price is the only lever left.

And here's the uncomfortable truth that the Kantar data reveals: weak brands compete on price. Strong brands command premiums. Short-termism destroys pricing power. If you want to protect your margins, not just next quarter, but over the next five years, brand investment is not optional. It is protective.

What brand investment can do: three examples worth knowing.

Apple, 1997. When Steve Jobs returned to a company that was weeks from bankruptcy, his first major move wasn't a new product. It was a brand campaign: "Think Different." The campaign, which celebrated the rebels, the misfits, the people who think differently, didn't mention a single product feature. It repositioned Apple from a struggling computer maker into a cultural icon. The products followed. But the brand came first.

Old Spice, 2010. By the late 2000s, Old Spice had become inextricably linked to older generations and was losing market share to younger competitors. Rather than cutting prices or doubling down on promotions, Procter & Gamble invested in a bold, humorous, distinctly odd brand campaign: "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like." Sales of their body wash increased by 107% in the month following launch. The campaign won the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. But more importantly, it repositioned an entire brand for a new generation and restored pricing power in a commoditising category.

Nike, throughout the 1990s. Nike didn't become the dominant global sportswear brand by having better shoes. They became dominant by investing relentlessly in a brand idea, "Just Do It", that connected with a universal human truth. The emotional resonance of that campaign, sustained over years, built such deep mental availability that the swoosh became a cultural symbol. The commercial result: category dominance, premium pricing, and a brand that has weathered market changes, cultural controversies, and competitive pressure for decades. It’s worth looking at Nike now to see what a short-term focus can do to a company’s fortunes.

None of these is a coincidence. They are the compounding returns of consistent brand investment, made visible.

How to sell brand investment to the C-Suite.

This is where many marketers struggle, and understandably. Brand investment produces effects that are slow, diffuse, and harder to attribute than a Google Ads conversion. Finance teams are trained to value the measurable and discount the uncertain. And in a world of quarterly reporting, the long term can feel like someone else's problem.

Here is how I'd approach it.

Speak the language of the boardroom. The case for brand is not a creative argument. It is a commercial one. Frame it in terms your CFO and CEO care about: pricing power, market share, customer acquisition cost, and long-term revenue growth. The WARC data, 25% to 100% improvement in revenue ROI from a balanced approach, is a number that lands in a finance meeting.

Reframe brand as future demand. James Hurman's framing is enormously useful here. "Brand building" sounds like spending. "Creating future demand" sounds like investing. Same activity, very different conversation. What you're doing when you invest in brand is building a pipeline of future customers who will choose you over a competitor when they enter the market in six months, a year, or three years. That is a business asset.

Use the 95-5 rule. Ask your leadership team: of all our potential buyers, what percentage are ready to buy from us right now? In B2B, the answer is roughly 5%. Your performance marketing is reaching them efficiently. Who is reaching the other 95%? Who is building the brand memory that will make them choose you when they are ready? If the answer is no one, you have a structural growth problem.

In B2C, build an understanding of how many potential buyers are ‘in-market’ this quarter, so you can better understand your opportunity. Having looked at this for clients in the past, findings indicate that 5-30% is most common. Are you speaking to the 70-95%?

Show the cost of going dark. Ehrenberg-Bass research tracked 57 brands that stopped advertising for a year or more. On average, sales fell 16% after year one, 25% after year two. The brands that recovered the quickest were those that immediately restarted brand investment. The cost of underinvesting in brand eventually shows up; it just takes time, which makes it easy to deny until it's too late.

Connect brand to pricing power. This is often the most powerful argument. Weak brands compete on price. Strong brands set the price. Each time you discount, it reduces your margin. Every time you build brand equity, you protect it. If the business is under margin pressure, the answer is rarely to spend less on brand. It is often to spend more.

What to measure.

Two objections to brand investment are that it's hard to measure and expensive. This used to be partly true. But "hard to measure" and "not measurable" are not the same thing. And measuring it is rather easy and affordable these days, thanks to companies like Tracksuit.

Brand health metrics. Track awareness (both spontaneous and prompted), consideration, preference, and mental availability within your category. These are the leading indicators of commercial performance. They move before sales do, which means they give you early warning on whether something is working or not.

Share of voice vs. share of market. The relationship between these two figures is one of the most reliable in marketing. Brands that maintain a share of voice above their market share tend to grow. Those below it tend to shrink. Track both.

Pricing power and margin. Are you able to maintain or grow your price in the market without losing volume? Brand equity is the primary driver of pricing power. If it's eroding, so is your ability to command a premium.

Customer acquisition cost over time. Brands with strong mental availability convert more efficiently from performance marketing. As brand equity builds, you should see Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) fall, or at a minimum, not rise as fast as it would without brand investment. This is the multiplier effect made visible.

Marketing Mix Modelling. For businesses with sufficient scale, MMM is the most rigorous way to attribute long-term brand effects alongside short-term activation results. It's not cheap, but it's the clearest evidence available for a finance-facing conversation.

The goal is not to measure brand perfectly. The goal is to measure it well enough to make the case and to track trends over time that confirm the investment is working.

Most of your competitors aren't doing this. Which means you should.

Here is the final argument, and in some ways the most powerful one for a business leader with competitive instincts.

The research is clear. The case is overwhelming. The evidence has been mounting for decades. And still, most businesses, including most of your competitors, are underinvesting in brand and overinvesting in short-term activation.

This is not a warning. It is an opportunity. And opportunities are great.

The brands and businesses that commit to consistent, long-term brand investment right now, while the market is distracted by performance metrics, quarterly targets, and the false efficiency of last-click attribution, will compound their advantage over the next three, five, and ten years in ways that will be very difficult and very expensive for competitors to undo.

Brand equity, built consistently over time, becomes a moat. It raises the cost of competitive entry. It increases customer loyalty, or if you don’t believe in customer loyalty, it will increase lifetime customer value and the likelihood they will buy from you again. It reduces the cost of acquiring new ones. It protects margins when competitors discount. And it creates the kind of mental availability that means your brand comes to mind first, at the moment that matters most.

The people who understood this decades ago, Ogilvy, Burnett, and Bernbach, were not just great creatives. They were great businesspeople who understood that brand was the most durable competitive advantage available to them.

The research has caught up with the intuition. The data is overwhelming. The commercial case is stronger than ever.

The question is whether you'll act on it before your competitors do.

If you'd like to talk about brand investment for your business, I'd be glad to have the conversation.

Best, Gareth.