Brand and performance were never two budgets I Fospha Academy

Somewhere in your company, probably every quarter, brand and performance marketing are fighting over the same money. Performance marketing walks in with a clean number from last month, and brand walks in with a slower story about awareness and preference that it can’t quite prove, so when things get tight, the story loses, almost every time. That can feel like discipline. Most of the time it’s a mistake, because brand and performance marketing were never two teams competing for the same budget. They’re two ends of the same job, and they simply show up in your numbers at different moments, which is most of the reason the whole thing gets so confusing.

And brand almost never loses this fight because it stopped working, but rather because of three specific reasons that all feel completely reasonable in the room and quietly add up to lost growth over the year. Once you can name them, they stop catching you out, so let me take them one at a time.

You’re funding one journey, not two teams

Think about what has to happen before someone buys from you. First they have to know you exist. Then they have to hold a picture of you in their head that makes them want you instead of someone else. Then, at some point, they have to be in the market and take a step toward you. Then they buy. That’s a journey, and every customer you’ve ever had traveled the whole thing, whether you planned for it or not.

Take something simple, a pair of running shoes. The person who bought them today didn’t decide today. They’ve probably known that brand for a while, built up a feeling about it from many small moments, an ad they vividly remember, a friend who wore them, an athlete they liked, a store they walked past, and then one Tuesday they were finally in the market, searched, and bought. The search ad was right there at the end and it will happily take the credit for the sale. But almost all the work that turned that person into a buyer happened much earlier, and none of it was performance.

Performance marketing lives at the bottom of that journey. It’s very good at catching people who already know you, already want you, and are already close, and giving them the final push. Brand lives at the top, getting you into their preferred set of names and shaping how they feel about your brand long before they’re anywhere near buying. You need both, because if you only ever work the bottom of the funnel, you’re harvesting demand that something else has to keep creating, and if you only ever work the top, you create a lot of demand with no clear way for anyone to act on it.

So, the honest way to see them is as two parts of one journey, not two budgets fighting each other. The only reason they feel like rivals is measurement, and that’s worth discussing further, because it’s the thing quietly influencing most of the budget meeting you’ve probably sat in.

Brand does its work upstream, so the sale takes the credit

The mechanism here is straightforward. Money only ever changes hands at one point, the sale, and that’s the only moment that leaves a receipt. So, whatever touched your customer last right before the purchase, whether it was the search ad, the retargeting or the discount code, it gets the credit while ignoring all other marketing steps the customer took along the way.

Brand did its work earlier, and somewhere else. It’s the reason they typed your name into the search bar instead of a competitor’s, and the reason the retargeting ad landed on someone who already felt warm toward you rather than a total stranger. None of that leaves a trace. It shows up as a better result on the exact channels that then claim the win, which means your brand work is often paying for performance’s numbers without a single one of those numbers pointing back to it.

You can see this inside one funnel. Retargeting always looks like the most efficient money you spend, because it converts better than anything else, but it only works on people who already came to you and already showed interest, and something made them interested in the first place. The retargeting ad gets measured and the thing that first caught their interest does not, so your budget drifts toward the end of the journey and away from the start of it, one reasonable decision at a time, until you’re spending a lot on converting demand and almost nothing on creating it.

Therefore, calling brand unaccountable isn’t quite right. Compare it to a film. Brand does its part earlier and off-screen, while the accounting only starts recording at the checkout, so you end up looking at the last few seconds of a long film and giving all the credit to whoever happened to be on screen when it ended.

The payoff lags, so brand always looks expensive

The second thing that makes brand work hard to defend is time. Performance pays you back inside the week, which is addictive, because you can watch it move. Brand pays back over quarters or even years. The awareness and the preference you build this month mostly turn into revenue two, three or maybe even four quarters from now, when those people finally come into the market and remember you.

Which means brand always shows up in the budget meeting as the expensive option, because you’re paying now for a return that lands later, on a line that won’t clearly say “brand” when it arrives. Looking back, it usually turns out cheap, sometimes very cheap, but looking back isn’t where budgets get decided. They get decided in favor of the fast, clear number, sitting right there on the table, whereas the slow win is still two quarters away. As a result, a slow return you take partly on trust will lose to a fast one you can watch, almost every time, unless someone in that room understands what they’re giving up.

You’ve probably seen this happen: someone cuts the brand spend in a weak quarter to protect the number. And the strange part is that it works, at first. The number holds, because you’re still harvesting the demand your brand built over the last two years. The bill for that cut doesn’t arrive in the months after the cut, when the pipeline of people who already knew you and wanted you starts to shrink. And by the time the bill does arrive, it looks like a market problem, or a performance problem, anything except the brand cut that caused it. The cause and the effect sit so far apart in time that almost nobody connects them, so the same cut gets made again the next time things get tight.

I’m not asking you to spend on faith here, quite the opposite. If you know the return is real but delayed, you plan for the delay instead of getting surprised by it and stopping the thing right before it was about to pay off. Most brand budgets don’t die because the work failed, but because someone judged a slow effect with a fast clock.

You’re judging brand by rules it was never meant to play by

A sale is easy to measure, because you have all the data. Someone clicked, someone paid, and you can tie that dollar to the touch and have it in a dashboard by morning. Brand awareness and brand preference are hard to measure, and there’s no honest way around that. How do you cleanly put a number on whether more of the right people know you, or whether the picture they carry of you got a little better this quarter? You can get at it, with surveys and modeling and testing, but it’s never exact, and it never has that clean, same-day certainty of a sale.

So, hear me out on the following human flaw, because it’s very human and very expensive. For a lot of companies, return on ad spend became the holy grail number, and a big part of the reason is simply that it’s the clean one, the figure you can measure fast and drop straight onto a slide. And what you can measure easily starts running everything, not because anyone decided it was the most important thing, but because it’s what everyone can see and point to and be held to. You manage what you can measure, so the easy number ends up in charge, and it starts overruling the harder-to measure work that’s potentially doing far more for real growth.

That’s how you end up with teams pushing a return number harder and harder, squeezing the same warm audience the brand built, watching the metric look great while the business gets weaker underneath, because nobody is refilling the pool they’re fishing from. It’s also how the most creative, least measurable work ends up treated with the most suspicion, only because it’s hard to measure, when hard to measure and unimportant were never the same thing. The measurement got easy in one place and stayed hard in another, and the money simply followed the measurement instead of the value.

There’s a trap underneath all of this, the assumption that if you can’t measure something cleanly it must not be real or can’t matter much. Some of the most important things in any business are exactly like that. You can feel a company’s reputation without being able to price it to the dollar. The right move when something is hard to measure is to measure it as well as you honestly can and stay humble about the gap, not to call it zero just because zero is the number that fits neatly in the model.

None of this means you should stop measuring. It means being honest about what your measurement can and can’t see and not letting the number you can see push out the work you can’t easily put a number on. This is exactly where good measurement proves its value, because the moment you can start to see that upstream effect, even roughly, the quality of brand output stops being a matter of faith and becomes a matter of evidence. As a result, the budget conversation stops being brand people talking about feelings and finance people talking about returns. Instead, it becomes an honest conversation about a single funnel.

Performance harvests demand, brand creates it, so fund both

Put the three arguments together and the picture is clear enough to plan against.

1. Brand works at the top of the journey, off-screen, so it never gets the credit at the checkout.

2. It pays back slowly, so it always looks expensive in the room.

3. And it’s hard to measure, so it loses the argument to the number that’s easy.

Three separate reasons, and every one of them pushes you to underfund the thing that feeds everything else.

The fix is to hold both ends of the journey on purpose, without swinging the other way and falling in love with brand for its own sake. Performance harvests the demand that already exists, and brand creates the demand you’ll harvest later. A plan that only ever harvests looks great for a while and then slowly run out because not enough seeds were planted, because it spent everything catching customers and nothing creating the next ones. Do the opposite, all seeds and no farmer to pick, and you fill a room with people who want you but never give them a reason to move.

In practice that means giving brand a real line in the plan, sized on purpose and defended like any other investment, instead of a number that only exists if performance overdelivers and there’s money left over at the end of the quarter. Money you only spend when everything else went well behaves like a tip, not an investment. And the demand that money creates is the thing that makes next year’s performance numbers look good in the first place, so starving it to protect this quarter is really just borrowing from the exact budget you’ll need to hit the same target again next year.

Which brings it right back to where any plan should start, the number the business must make. Brand isn’t a nice-to-have you fund with whatever performance leaves behind, it’s next year’s revenue, built on purpose this year, and it deserves a place in the plan as deliberate as the sales you’re chasing this quarter. You fund performance marketing because it pays the bills now, and you fund brand because it’s the reason there will be bills worth paying next year.

And the creative work, the part that’s hardest to measure and easiest to doubt, isn’t the soft edge of any of this, it’s the engine of the half that creates demand instead of just cashing in on it. Therefore, the job is to understand why brand work shows up late, and off-screen, and is hard to count and back it anyway, because the companies that keep growing are the ones that kept creating demand while everyone else was busy congratulating themselves for harvesting it.

Hugo van den Biggelaar spent 8.5 years at Nike across finance, insights and brand. He now runs BITSing in the US, a growth methodology built over thirty years and used in more than a thousand organizations. He also runs Think Biggie, a Brooklyn-based creative studio, and is a founding contributor to the Fospha Academy.