Balanced Marketing Spend Builds Enduring Brand Strength.
Growth Relies on Disciplined Allocation Across Brand Building and Activation.
The Structural Question of Balance
Marketers today face a defining question: how should budgets be split to create sustainable brand growth? For years, the industry focused on optimizing channels or creative assets, but research now emphasizes that the framework of balance between different types of spend is the true driver of outcomes.
Balance means aligning long-term effects with short-term sales, brand-building with performance, broad audience reach with targeted activation, and upper-funnel exposure with lower-funnel conversion. Across all these dimensions, one message emerges: sustainable effectiveness depends on equilibrium.
The Dual Engines of Marketing
Les Binet and Peter Field’s pioneering work on the IPA Databank laid the foundation for how we understand balance. They distinguished two complementary effects:
Sales activation (performance marketing): quick to generate measurable uplifts, typically dominating within six months.
Brand building: slower to show returns, but capable of compounding memory structures, supporting pricing power, and generating enduring growth.
This depicts this duality. Sales activation delivers a series of short-lived spikes, effective for quarterly reporting, but fading as soon as budgets stop. By contrast, brand building produces a steady, compounding growth curve. The 2019 Kraft Heinz write-down illustrates the risk of neglecting brand investment: insufficient long-term support eroded asset strength despite strong short-term promotions.
The 60/40 Rule as Strategic Discipline
Binet & Field translated their analysis into a simple heuristic: 60% of spend should go to brand building, 40% to activation. This split has become one of the most widely cited rules in marketing effectiveness.
Yet the evidence is not static. Sector and context matter, activation-heavy categories may require adjustments, but the principle holds: a structural bias toward brand-building investment produces superior outcomes. Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome reinforces this: campaigns with upper-funnel orientation outperform those with narrow activation focus.
This makes the trade-off visible. Heavy lower-funnel focus delivers stronger short-term ROI (2.67 vs. 2.19 balanced), but total ROI is modest. By contrast, campaigns with heavy upper-funnel investment achieve the highest long-term returns (6.49, +65% over balanced). The conclusion is unavoidable: upper-funnel brand spend is the growth driver.
Brand as Future Demand
James Hurman advanced this thinking by framing brand building as the creation of “future demand”.
His argument is reinforced by data: LinkedIn’s B2B Institute found that 95% of B2B buyers are not in-market at any given time. Marketers who limit their spend to current demand effectively cap their growth potential.
Google’s Messy Middle research supports this. In experiments, consumers exposed to behavioral nudges were encouraged to switch from their preferred brand to a fictional competitor. Despite the intensity of the intervention, many remained loyal to their first choice. This shows just how strong brand preference is, with most fictional brands unable to dislodge incumbents. This proves why brand investment today is the price of sales tomorrow.
Media Selection and the Balance Imperative
Balanced spend is not only about the 60/40 split; it also requires allocating the right roles to media. Evidence from Ebiquity and Analytic Partners demonstrates that different channels excel on different horizons:
Online video and TV: best combined ROI across both short- and long-term.
Social media and digital display: useful for activation and engagement, weaker on durable impact.
Paid search: efficient for immediate conversion, limited brand-building power.
Print, radio, and OOH: important complementary roles but less dominant drivers.
Online video and TV deliver the strongest long-term ROI while also supporting short-term effects, making them central to balanced portfolios. Paid search and display drive immediate demand capture but lack compounding value. Brands that overweight the latter risk hollow growth.
The Evidence in Full
Taken together, the evidence base is overwhelming:
Short-term activation is effective but insufficient.
Brand building produces greater total returns.
Balanced 60/40 splits outperform skewed allocations.
Media choices must align with campaign horizon and role.
Targeting only in-market buyers forfeits the majority of future growth.
Balance is not an abstract concept; it is a measurable determinant of sustainable growth.
Brands
The three directives for brands seeking to reconcile short- and long-term growth.
Understand the Consumer: Marketers must resist the temptation to reduce people to in-market data points. True effectiveness requires understanding how consumers behave outside purchase moments, building memory structures that prime them long before a transaction occurs.
Unpack Attribution: Short-term monetization models from platforms incentivize immediate spend but distort the bigger picture. Brands must develop robust attribution frameworks that recognize both the short-term role of activation and the long-term compounding of brand building.
De-Silo Organizations: Perhaps the hardest challenge is organizational. Marketing teams are often fragmented into specialized silos, from digital performance to brand strategy. Effectiveness demands integration, with teams sharing insights across media, commerce, and consumer journeys. Without this, brands behave like disconnected units rather than unified growth engines.
Leaders
Enforce the 60/40 Rule: Boards must require that budgets maintain a structural bias toward brand building.
Design Dual-Horizon Strategies: CMOs should set KPIs for both short-term activation and long-term brand equity, measured in parallel.
Target the 95% Out of Market: Growth strategies must actively address future buyers, not just immediate converters.
Allocate Media by Role: Place online video and TV at the heart of portfolios, using search and display for activation, and print/OOH as complementary.
Fix Attribution Models: Finance and marketing must align on attribution frameworks that reflect the combined value of long and short-term spend.
Break Down Silos: Organizations must integrate marketing structures, creating joined-up strategies rather than fragmented campaigns.
Bottom Line: Balanced Spend is More than Budget Split, it is Strategic Infrastructure for Growth
Sustainable effectiveness comes from disciplined 60/40 allocation, recognition of future demand, media deployed by role, robust attribution, and organizational integration.
Brands that fail to achieve this balance will secure fragile spikes; those that do will build enduring market leadership.
