Brand building vs performance marketing

Brand versus performance marketing. It's a debate most marketers will have encountered at some point – and plenty have experienced firsthand.

On paper, the difference seems simple enough. Performance marketing is fast and measurable. Brand building is slower and often harder to measure. When budgets get cut – well, it's not hard to guess the outcome.

But the moment we start treating them as a choice, that's when things go wrong.

"Our industry is very good at framing brand and performance as a trade-off, and that's the issue," says Faye Daffarn, Managing Director at performance marketing and media agency Tug.

She's got a point. Performance marketing captures existing demand. Brand building creates it. One converts intent into action. The other makes sure that intent is actually there in the first place – and that when someone's ready to buy, your brand is the one that springs to mind.

The problem is, when you do treat them as separate (or interchangeable), you end up with activity that may look good on a dashboard but doesn't actually do very much in the long term.

So the question here isn't which one we're choosing. It's how we can make them both work at the same time and what that looks like in practice.

When performance becomes the default

In many teams, performance marketing takes priority. And that's fine, until it isn't.

"Go too far into performance, you optimise yourself into a corner. You chase what's easy to measure, harvest existing demand, and eventually hit diminishing returns," says Daffarn. "It looks efficient on paper, but it's not growth."

Most marketers have been here at some point. You keep targeting the same old pool of people, the returns start to dwindle, the costs creep up, and then someone in a meeting asks: "Why aren't we growing?" The activity looked ok. There wasn't anything obviously wrong with the numbers. But nothing new was being created.

Doing the opposite comes with its risks, too. Any brand activity that lacks a clear commercial link is hard to defend, especially when budgets are tight.

"Brand building and performance marketing are equally important; they play different but complementary roles," says Shane Buckley, Head of Restaurants UKI at Uber Advertising. "Without a brand, performance campaigns can lose efficiency, and without performance, brand efforts can feel unaccountable."

The brands getting this right understand that one impacts the other. Brand builds familiarity and trust, making performance activity work harder. On the other hand, performance turns that demand into measurable results.
Airbnb is a good example of this. Over the last few years, it's reduced its reliance on performance marketing in place of a more brand-led approach. The result isn't just stronger direct traffic and more profitability – it relies less on paid channels altogether. More people were going straight to Airbnb, rather than clicking on ads. Two years after the brand decided to reallocate its marketing spend, the company reported its most profitable fourth quarter on record in February 2023.

Making the case for brand

If most marketers recognise that performance-led strategies have limits, why do so many still rely on them? A lot of the time it comes down to how we measure success.

Performance marketing fits nice and neatly into reporting cycles. You can see the numbers straight away. You can point to clicks, conversions and revenue and draw a relatively straight line between activity and outcome. When someone's asking you to justify spending, of course that’s going to matter.

"For years, attribution has made performance look better than it is because it's easy to track. But it rarely answers the real question: would this have happened anyway?" says Daffarn.

It's a fair question. Performance metrics are good at showing what happened – they're less good at explaining why. Most marketers get brand intuitively. The problem is intuition doesn't hold up very well in a budget meeting, so it gets deprioritised in favour of things that feel more tangible.

"Marketing effectiveness should always be measured within the context of the company, portfolio and brand growth strategy," says Biljana Cvetanovski, Partner at McKinsey & Company. "By putting a governance structure in place, every pound spent can be tied to ROI and long-term value creation."

The reality is that most organisations aren't there yet. According to McKinsey, only 3% of CMOs can quantify the returns for more than half of their marketing investment.

That gap in measurement makes it harder to make the case for brand, but it doesn't make the case any less important.

Look at it differently, and it starts to make a little more sense. Brand isn't just about awareness or perception – it has a real commercial impact. When a brand is strong, people are more likely to choose it, and it doesn't have to work as hard to win attention. In practical terms, that means lower acquisition costs and more efficient performance activity.

Making it work in practice

Knowing that brand and performance need each other is one thing. Actually making them work together is where it gets somewhat more complicated – and it usually starts with how you measure.

Last-click attribution is the obvious culprit here. It tells you what converted, but not what created the conditions for that conversion in the first place. A customer who clicked a paid search ad might have done so because they'd seen your brand three times that week. Attribution gives credit to the click. The rest becomes invisible.

That's why more marketers are starting to look at a broader mix of signals – incrementality testing, marketing mix modelling, brand tracking, share of search. Not to replace performance metrics, but to sit alongside them and give a more complete picture of what's actually driving growth over time.

"Marketing teams are moving from brand-only campaigns to full-funnel programmes, which combine long-term equity-building with immediate sales," says Cvetanovski.

That shift changes how activity gets planned. Instead of brand and performance running as parallel workstreams that might occasionally overlap, the thinking becomes much more joined-up – each channel playing a role at a different point in the journey, with consistent creative and messaging tying it all together.

"The most effective strategies treat brand and performance marketing as interconnected," says Buckley. "Understanding the moments that matter and leveraging first-party data allows marketers to combine brand messaging with conversion tactics, making campaigns relevant, memorable and effective."

Consistency is a bigger part of this than it might sound. When the same brand cues – tone, creative, messaging etc. – show up across every touchpoint, each interaction builds on the last. Over time, that familiarity starts to do a lot of the work for you.

For example, Uber Advertising's campaign with Boots targeted people on the move during summer events, driving immediate purchases while also boosting brand awareness and favourability. Pizza Hut's "Handcrafted" campaign used interactive formats to turn passive journey time into active engagement and sales.

"Both campaigns show how high-attention, context-driven marketing can drive performance and brand impact together," Buckley adds.

Budgets are starting to shift as well. Fixed splits are giving way to a much more flexible approach, with spend moving depending on where it's going to have the most impact.

"Budgets should reflect the moment. Performance often takes the lead during seasonal spikes or when short-term results are needed, while brand investment should be consistent to sustain demand and trust," says Buckley.

AI is also helping change things as well. McKinsey research estimates that AI could deliver productivity gains of 5-15% of total marketing spend – money that can be reinvested rather than just saved.
It's important to recognise that none of this requires any sort of extreme business transformation. For most teams, it all starts with a fairly simple shift: stop asking "brand or performance?" and start asking how each one makes the other work better.

Final thoughts

There's no magic formula here. What works for one business won't always work for another. But the brands growing consistently tend to have one thing in common: they stopped treating this as a debate a long time ago.

They're not necessarily spending more. They just know what they're spending for.

Want to know more about Performance Max in practice? Learn how to build, optimise and scale Google Performance Max campaigns across all channels in CIM's training course.