Brandformance: why the term does not solve the brand versus performance dilemma

Brandformance is the term used in the market to describe the supposed union between brand building (branding) and sales generation (performance) within a single strategy, campaign, or asset. The promise is appealing, but the available evidence indicates that the concept merely renames an old practice: brand and performance have always worked together and still require different objectives, messages, and metrics. This article examines the arguments in favor of the term, what effectiveness research shows, and what to do instead of the jargon.

Summary

• "Brandformance" promises to unite brand building and performance in a single approach, with particular appeal for those who need to justify brand investment to the finance team.
• The term gained traction with the digitalization of media, the full-funnel narrative from ad platforms, and the division of marketing teams into silos.
• The integration the term promises is not new: late nineteenth century retailers already combined institutional campaigns with immediate sales offers.
• Les Binet and Peter Field showed that, on average, the allocation that maximizes profit sits at around 60% of the budget in brand building and 40% in sales activation, with complementary roles and distinct assets.
• The WARC report with Google (2024) indicates that advertisers focused only on short-term ROI may fail to capture up to half of media returns, the share generated by brand building.
• Effective brand campaigns produce measurable signals in the short term, and the cumulative effect tends to be between 2 and 2.5 times the initial effect, according to estimates by Koen Pauwels.
• The alternative to the jargon is strategic discipline: clear objectives, specific assets, budget proportional to the role of each phase, and measurement suited to each function.

What brandformance is

Brandformance is a label created by the digital marketing industry to designate strategies, campaigns, or assets that would supposedly build brand and generate sales at the same time. The promise is seductive because it appears to resolve a classic tension in the field: on one side, the finance department demands immediate results; on the other, brand management defends investments whose return accumulates over months or years.

The term circulates in conferences, reports, and commercial proposals, almost always without a precise definition. Before assessing whether it holds up, it is worth understanding why it gained so much traction.

Why the term gained traction

The digitalization of media and the full-funnel narrative

With the digitalization of media, any advertising asset began generating real-time metrics. Platforms such as Google and Meta built a full-funnel narrative in which the same campaign structure would cover everything from brand awareness to conversion, as if the consumer watched an institutional film one day and clicked the purchase ad the next.

Consultancies and research institutes reinforced the movement with data on the cost of ignoring the top of the funnel. The report "Beyond the Horizon: The Holistic Path to Measuring Media Investments", published by WARC in partnership with Google in 2024, points out, based on a meta-analysis of marketing mix models conducted by Ekimetrics, that advertisers who prioritize only short-term ROI may fail to see up to half of the return generated by media, the share that comes from brand building. The same report cites a Nielsen study for Google according to which raising brand awareness at the top and middle of the funnel by 1% is associated with a 0.6% increase in long-term sales and a 0.4% increase in short-term sales.

These findings are legitimate and relevant. What they support, however, is the importance of investing in both fronts, not the need to merge them under a new name.

The economic argument and the conversation with the finance team

The main argument from the term's defenders is efficiency: if the same asset moves people emotionally and sells, the company saves budget, accelerates the funnel, and proves value faster. There is also a language argument. Many boards still read "branding" as a cost, and a word carrying the suffix "formance" evokes measurement and return, which makes the conversation with the finance team easier. Not by chance, the label appears frequently in agency presentations: it sounds technical, modern, and reassuring.

Organizational silos

There is also a structural motivation. Brand and growth teams tend to work separately, with different metrics, timelines, and references. "Brandformance" presents itself as a neutral language in which everyone could talk, reconciling unaided recall and acquisition cost in the same dashboard. Faced with so much fragmentation, it is understandable that the market looks for something that unifies rather than separates. The question is whether a new term solves a problem that is about process, not vocabulary.

Brand and performance have always gone together

The pattern repeats in the early twentieth century: the catalogs of Sears, the large American department store chain, combined aspirational narrative about products and lifestyle with coupons and direct response offers in the same publication. Reputation and performance have always gone together. What changes with each cycle is the name, not the principle. If "brandformance" seems like a discovery, it is because part of the market accepted repackaging a basic fundamental as if it were an unprecedented idea.

Quick definitions

• Brand building: broad-reach communication that creates memory and purchase predisposition in those who are not yet in the market, with continuous reinforcement of the brand's main associations and emotional benefits.
• Sales activation: targeted communication that converts the demand of those already ready to buy into sales.
• Marketing funnel: model that organizes the consumer journey into stages, from brand discovery to conversion.
• ROI: return on investment, the ratio between the result generated and the amount invested.
• 60/40 rule: average proportion identified by Binet and Field as the one that maximizes profit, with about 60% of the budget in brand and 40% in activation.

Why the concept does not hold up

Binet and Field's 60/40 rule

The most influential study on the balance between brand and activation remains "The Long and the Short of It", published by Les Binet and Peter Field through the IPA in 2013, based on the analysis of hundreds of cases from the IPA Databank. The central conclusion: on average, the budget allocation that maximizes profit sits at around 60% in brand building and 40% in sales activation. It is an average, not a law. The authors themselves refined the model in "Effectiveness in Context" (2018), showing that the ideal proportion varies by category, size, and competitive context.

The logic behind the rule is straightforward: brand campaigns, broader and more emotional, create the base of future buyers, while tactical actions capture existing demand. Nothing in the study indicates that the two functions should live in the same creative asset. On the contrary: Binet and Field reinforce that each objective requires its own message style, targeting, and measurement. The central word of the model is "and": brand and activation, each fulfilling its role.

Different objectives call for different assets

Mark Ritson, former marketing professor and Marketing Week columnist, follows a similar line: the meeting point between brand and performance is not inside a banner or a film, but in the annual media plan. Building brand requires broad reach, adequate frequency, and ideas that generate memory. Performance requires fine targeting, clear offers, and constant conversion optimization. Ritson cites data from Peter Field showing that ads trying to fulfill both functions at once tend to deliver worse results than campaigns that separate the assets: the hybrid message loses emotional power and does not offer enough incentive to act.

Brand building also generates short-term effect

A common argument in favor of the term says that brand building takes time to deliver results, and that something producing sales while brand value consolidates would therefore be needed. The evidence weakens this premise. Effectiveness consultants argue that effective brand campaigns produce measurable signals within the first days of running: growth in searches for the company name, an increase in organic traffic, and a drop in the cost per click of capture campaigns. If no indicator moves in the short term, the message probably failed, and there is no reason to expect it to start working months later.

Koen Pauwels, marketing professor at Northeastern University, reinforces the link between short and long term: his estimates, based on experiments and econometric studies, indicate that the cumulative effect of a campaign tends to be between 2 and 2.5 times the initial effect, roughly double. In other words, there is no second floor without a first floor: if advertising does not move any needle in the present, there is no basis to sustain future effects. Pauwels also observes a corporate reality: the marketer who does not deliver quarterly targets loses budget before having the chance to prove any theory about brand value. There is no antagonism between immediate results and brand building; there is interdependence.

Three practical problems with the term

Adopting "brandformance" as a solution muddles this clarity on three fronts. First, it encourages hybrid metrics of little use, which measure neither memory nor conversion well. Second, it ignores that teams remain divided into silos: preaching integration without changing processes generates more frustration than alignment. Third, it pushes creative teams to reconcile emotion and promotional appeal in the same sentence, which usually produces assets with neither brand strength nor selling power.

The term offers neither method nor new theory. It renames old good practices and, in the process, creates the illusion that a single word is enough to solve a classic dilemma. When a brand feels a lack of integration between branding and performance, the most likely diagnosis is not the absence of a unifying concept: it is the absence of strategy.

How to apply

Well-executed marketing already integrates brand building and revenue generation. What sustains this integration is strategic discipline, organized on four fronts:

1. Clear objectives per campaign: define whether each initiative exists to create brand memory or to convert demand, without stacking both functions in the same asset.
2. Specific assets for each function: broad and emotional messages to build brand; targeted and direct offers to activate sales, coordinated in the same annual plan.
3. Proportional budget: use the average reference of 60% in brand and 40% in activation as a starting point and calibrate by category, brand size, and business moment.
4. Measurement that respects the nature of each metric: conversion and acquisition cost for activation; awareness, recall, and leading signals (brand searches, organic traffic, cost per click) for brand campaigns, tracked from the first week.

Fads pass. Brands that grow sustainably are built by those who master the fundamentals, not by those who collect jargon. Brand campaigns powerful enough to move indicators today and consistent enough to secure sales tomorrow, supported by activations that connect the offer to the right consumer, need no new word.

Sources: Les Binet and Peter Field, "The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies" (IPA, 2013); Les Binet and Peter Field, "Effectiveness in Context: A Manual for Brand Building" (IPA, 2018); WARC and Google, "Beyond the Horizon: The Holistic Path to Measuring Media Investments" (WARC, 2024); Mark Ritson, "Brand-building ads boost short-term sales, and now you can prove it" (Marketing Week); Quote Investigator, "One-Half the Money I Spend for Advertising Is Wasted" (2022), on the attribution of the line to John Wanamaker.