Long-Term Brand Building Loses Budget to the Weekly Report

The research on long-term brand building vs short-term sales activation is well known, mostly through Les Binet and Peter Field. Teams that accept it still give brand less than it calls for, because activation shows up in this quarter's report and brand pays off after the report has moved on.

The fix is to stop judging brand on the weekly clock. Give it a slower set of signals, agreed before the money goes out, and a budget floor that a bad quarter can't touch.

Binet and Field found brand pays less at first and keeps paying

Binet and Field's work, often called The Long and the Short of It, splits marketing into two jobs. Sales activation gets a big response quickly, and that response fades fast. Brand building gets a smaller response at first, but the effect lasts and builds on itself over time.

That gap in timing is what the short-term vs long-term marketing argument comes down to. Both kinds of spending work, on different schedules.

For B2B, their report for the LinkedIn B2B Institute puts the best results at around 46% brand and 54% activation. LinkedIn funded that report, and LinkedIn sells B2B advertising.

The same report finds that brand building takes over as the main driver of growth after about six months. Treat the ratio as a place to start the budget conversation. The right split for one company still depends on its market and its goals.

For the wider difference between the two kinds of marketing, see why positioning comes first in brand vs performance marketing.

Teams underfund brand because its payoff lands after almost everyone stops measuring

The six-month mark matters because of who is still watching by then. The LinkedIn B2B Institute report found that only 4% of B2B marketers measure impact beyond six months. Brand becomes the main driver of growth in a window almost nobody checks.

The marketers surveyed mostly believe in brand. EMARKETER's piece on B2B brand marketing stats draws on a report made with StackAdapt, an ad platform. In it, 62.7% said brand is critical to long-term success, and the piece names ROI as the single biggest barrier to investment.

What a weekly number gives a team is a story to tell. Activation hands a team something to say in every weekly meeting: spend went out and leads came in. Brand gives them nothing to say for months.

Heather Shelstad traces the habit back to digital measurement. Once marketing became measurable, she writes, "the mantra became 'if you can't measure it, don't spend it,'" and "brand marketing went into hiding." She calls the pull toward short-term priorities "a response to organizational pressure."

Attribution reports pushed Adidas into overspending on performance

Adidas shows what judging spend on short-term reports costs. It's a consumer brand selling through wholesale, retail and ecommerce, and it isn't a B2B vendor.

The split and sales figures below come from Marketing Week's reporting on Adidas; the executive it quotes doesn't state them himself. What carries over to B2B is how it happened: the report told a story, and the budget followed it.

For years, Adidas put most of its advertising into digital and performance, because attribution showed those channels driving ecommerce sales.

Marketing Week put the split at about 23% brand to 77% performance. Simon Peel, the global media director, told the magazine in 2019: "We had an understanding it was digital advertising driving ecommerce sales and as a consequence we were over-investing."

The attribution, he said, "told a very digitally focused story." When Adidas ran econometric modelling, brand activity turned out to drive about 65% of sales across wholesale, retail and ecommerce.

Peel's own diagnosis: "We had a problem that we were focusing on the wrong metrics, the short-term." The budget had followed the channel the attribution reports could describe.

Give brand its own slower clock, agreed before you spend

Brand needs a short list of signals that move over six to twelve months, agreed before the money goes out. A signal picked after the spend looks like a team grading its own homework.

Good candidates for that list:

• Branded search. How many people search for the company by name.
• Direct traffic. Visitors who type the address or come back with no ad sending them.
• Win rate against the competitors you meet most. Whether you win more of the deals where buyers compare you with the rivals they shortlist most often.
• Price. Whether you're holding price, or discounting more to close.

Report these every quarter, on their own page, next to the weekly activation numbers. Each set then gets judged on the schedule it runs on.

Say a firm sells industrial equipment. Its weekly report keeps tracking leads and campaign spend. Its quarterly brand page shows branded search, direct visits, how often it beat its two most frequent rivals, and how much it discounted to win. Nobody has to defend brand with a weekly number, and nobody has to take it on faith.

Protect a brand budget floor that one bad quarter can't cut

A slower clock only helps if the brand budget survives long enough to be measured. When a quarter looks bad, brand is the first line to go, because cutting it costs nothing the next report will show. Set a minimum brand budget in advance and treat it as fixed.

Give activation its due while you're at it. Activation pays the bills, and it turns the attention brand builds into sales. Binet and Field's B2B numbers give activation the larger share, and their case is for funding both, each on its own schedule.

The research has limits, and a short runway changes the answer

The strongest case against all this is fair. Binet and Field's data comes from effectiveness award entries, which lean consumer, and companies chose whether to enter. The B2B ratio is a guide. And a company with a few months of runway can't wait six months for brand to pay back.

A company that needs cash this quarter should spend on what pays this quarter. Most teams aren't in that position, though. They cut brand because it doesn't show up in the report, even when they could afford to wait. The right split depends on your goals and how long you plan to be around.

If you're working out which slow signals would mean something in your market, and how big a floor your brand needs, we're glad to talk it through with you.

Binet and Field's numbers won't change what gets funded on their own. A brand page in the quarterly report and a floor under the budget give them a fair chance.