Performance vs. brand: The tug of war that doesn't need to exist
If 2025 has taught us anything so far, it's that this battle is exhausting and increasingly unhelpful.
The smarter question is not 'Which one wins?' but 'How can we make them work better together?'
Short-term sprints. Long-term vision. Both matter.
There's no denying that performance marketing plays a vital role, especially in markets with organic demand on the table. When the customer is actively shopping, you'd better show up, and fast.
Miss that moment, and you might lose them not just for the day, but for the entire customer lifetime. In categories like parenting, where brand trust builds early and sticks, this matters even more.
But let's not forget: Brand isn't a soft concept floating above the numbers. It fuels demand. It makes performance marketing cheaper, more efficient and more effective.
Which begs the question: what's stopping us?
Performance is learning from brand and vice versa.
The line between the two has already blurred. Great performance campaigns are now brand vehicles too, especially when they show up in high-visibility formats and sound like the brand they represent.
Likewise, brand campaigns increasingly carry performance triggers – swipe-up CTAs, limited-time drops, product-led storytelling.
Yet many organisations still plan and measure them in silos. The media team chases click-through rates while the brand team polishes a film. Agencies work off different briefs. Metrics clash. Timelines don't align. And somehow, we expect synergy.
The brands that get it right? They collapse those walls. They look at the customer journey, not the org chart. They stop treating campaigns as either/or, and instead ask: How does this ad serve the now and the next?
CFOs aren't anti-brand. They're pro-clarity.
Now let's talk about the tension we all feel but rarely say out loud.
It's easy to pin the blame on finance. We say brand budgets are under pressure, performance is taking over, and CMOs are losing ground in the boardroom.
But here's a gentler truth: CFOs aren't allergic to brand. They're allergic to vagueness. And if brand marketers show up with slides full of sentiment scores and no commercial link, it's no surprise when the budget tips the other way.
This is where bold marketing leadership comes in.
Of course, building the case for brand isn't always straightforward, especially when you're balancing monthly performance targets and a CFO who needs numbers, not narratives. But this is where a strong CMO and CFO partnership matters. Ongoing conversations, shared learning from campaigns and transparent tracking
of both short- and long-term results can build the trust needed to back brand investment.
Tools such as Binet and Field's 60/40 rule, WARC's effectiveness studies, or even brand health metrics linked to commercial outcomes can help bridge the gap. The goal isn't just to justify brand, but to embed it in business thinking.
Brand is everyone's job now. Especially yours.
Here's something we don't talk about enough: brand-building is no longer just a creative or media challenge. It's an orchestration challenge.
In 2025, your brand shows up in a hundred places at once – from search results to in-store displays to influencer shoutouts to that oddly specific push notification your CRM team just sent out. The old model where agencies handled the polish and internal teams handled the plumbing just doesn't cut it anymore. If your brand feels fragmented, inconsistent, or 'same-same' in a cluttered market, chances are the issue isn't the agency's ways of working. It's a lack of internal ownership.
We've learned this first-hand. With multiple segments across different parenting life stages, precision matters. Segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP) is not just a framework – it's our operating system. But creative and media strategy alone won't save you. It's the marketing team's orchestration – the tone, the timing, the tenacity – that makes it land. CEOs, take note: this is not where you compromise on teams.
The real magic? When both sides respect each other.
At its best, marketing doesn't live in extremes. It thrives in balance.
Performance without brand is a short-term sugar rush. Brand without performance is a beautiful film no one watches. But together? They can move markets and mindsets. So let's drop the tug of war. Let's build teams, tools and trust that allow both sides to do what they do best, with one shared goal: meaningful, measurable, sustainable growth. Not just now. But for the long run.
By Mitin Chakraborty, Head of Marketing – Babyshop, Landmark Group.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ITV News
a day ago
- ITV News
Minister lays out £350 million plan to fund Jersey's health and infrastructure needs over five years
A Jersey Government minister has revealed proposals to invest £350 million across the health service and infrastructure developments. Talking exclusively to ITV News, Deputy Tom Binet says Project Breakwater is a five-year plan to tackle "critical" shortfalls in funding, with £220 million allocated for infrastructure needs such as the regeneration of Fort Regent and the town centre market, and a long-term commitment to European flights. The remaining £130 million will go towards overhauling the health service's digital systems and measures to prevent illness. Ideas for where to get the money from will appear in the Budget later this year but could include borrowing, dipping into savings and new medical charges. Speaking about the issues across infrastructure and health, Deputy Binet says: "Both of these areas have been badly underinvested in over the last ten years. "I'm very determined that we press for this money and commit to it properly. "Some of it might have to come from savings ... we do have a strategic reserve which we may or may not look at borrowing against. There are a number of different options." Highlighting the importance of increased funding, Deputy Binet adds: "It's critical. If we don't, we're just building up a lot of trouble for the future. We've identified, particularly in health, what needs to be done and have a very clear vision to make it right. "I think the savings are being delivered as aggressively as we possibly can; there's only so much you can do in terms of cuts against a background of making sure patient safety isn't compromised." He acknowledges the plans may have to be flexible, perhaps cutting out the "nice to haves" to reduce the overall cost slightly or extending the five-year funding period. US President Donald Trump has already put a dampener on the Government's previous hope to raise £52 million a year from taxing the biggest multinational companies at 15%, by seeking to exempt American businesses. Deputy Binet has also faced tough conversations with the Council of Ministers. He explains: "It's not all easy going because every department wants money but I made the point that it's not my health service, it's the island's. "I'd just ask everybody in the Assembly what type of system they want for their own family. "People need some hope and that's what we're trying to produce."
Campaign ME
13-06-2025
- Campaign ME
The tug-of-war between brand and performance in an AI-driven world
There's a perennial tension that underpins many marketing leadership debates: The tug-of-war between long-term brand building and short-term performance marketing. We've all been there … watching passionate chief marketing officers (CMOs), performance directors and agency leaders fiercely defend their positions on conference panels, each armed with data, frameworks and conviction. I've always leaned toward the Binet and Field school of thought. That neat 'steps' chart showing how brand drives performance? It's been a mainstay in my stakeholder conversations, quietly tucked in my back pocket for years. But recently, I felt that familiar framework beginning to fray. HSBC recently hosted the first Financial Services Marketers Leaders Conference in Dubai. At the event, a London-based video and content agency, Casey Wishart, presented a provocative idea that large language models (LLMs) are not just tools or enablers. They're now a channel. More radically, they are also an audience. That took me a minute to fully register. We're all adapting to a media landscape where younger audiences increasingly bypass traditional discovery channels. They don't browse; they ask. Why scroll through pages of blue links when a single prompt to a chatbot can deliver context, options and a decision pathway? In that world, LLMs act as gatekeepers. They shape perceptions. They synthesise information. They may well decide which brand gets mentioned and which gets forgotten. So then, is the question we should be asking: What influences the influencer… when the influencer is an algorithm? This is where the debate about brand versus performance begins to get a bit knottier. Because if LLMs are to be understood as a new type of 'media', we have to play by a very different set of rules. You don't buy your way into their favour through paid impressions or carefully calibrated bidding strategies. Instead, you go old school. Editorial content, white papers, thought leadership – the unsexy stuff we scorned in the early 2000s because it didn't generate clicks fast enough – are now some of the most influential materials in an LLM's diet. Casey Wishart noted that Gartner predicts brands' organic search traffic will decrease by 50 per cent by 2028, which is right around the corner, as people embrace AI powered search. PR suddenly matters again. Authority matters. Citations, credibility, clarity of purpose are the signals LLMs are tuned to absorb. That means brand marketers might be better placed to influence LLMs than performance teams – at least in their current form. And here's the real kicker: while we can't yet track 'conversions' from an LLM response, we all know that change is coming fast. It's only a matter of time before those answers are embedded with shoppable actions and transactional pathways, or logged in first-party data ecosystems. There's a whole new 'Page 1' battle commencing, and I'm not sure that many marketers are fully armed. To be clear, this isn't an argument against performance marketing. But let's be honest: it's in the middle of an identity crisis. The obsession with click-through rates, attribution models and return on ad spend (ROAS) dashboards is starting to look a little brittle in the face of cookie deprecation, regulatory shifts and rising consumer cynicism. The way we operate has to evolve, bringing together performance with brand authority, speed with credibility. And as some of the big tech platforms lose relevance or battle credibility issues, performance teams are being forced to rethink what success really looks like. Increasingly, the answer is: trust. As marketers, we've always believed in the power of storytelling. Now we must learn to teach as well. These models learn by crawling, reading, indexing and summarising. So the question for every brand becomes: What are we teaching them about us? This is not a job for the data science team alone. It's not just a compliance issue. It's a brand issue. A trust issue. And that lies firmly within marketing's remit. We're entering a future where every brand interaction might be filtered through an AI lens – whether that's a customer asking ChatGPT about mortgage options, or a procurement team querying an enterprise LLM about environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials. If your brand isn't represented clearly and credibly in the data, you may simply vanish from the shortlist. So yes, brand still matters. performance still matters. But the battleground is shifting. The LLM layer adds complexity, but it also offers a new frontier – one where core principles such as consistency, clarity, credibility and trust come roaring back into relevance. We must be ready to meet that challenge, to reframe how we think about influence and to ensure that when someone, or something asks who we are, the answer is accurate, powerful and aligned with everything we've worked so hard to build. By Aimee Peters, Regional Head of Brand, Partnerships and Wholesale Marketing, MENAT, HSBC
Campaign ME
04-06-2025
- Campaign ME
Performance vs. brand: The tug of war that doesn't need to exist
There's a quiet standoff playing out in marketing departments everywhere. On one side: performance marketing, armed with dashboards, conversions and the intoxicating rush of real-time ROI. On the other: brand-building, with its slower burn, broader ambition, and that slightly smug aura of being in it for the long game. If 2025 has taught us anything so far, it's that this battle is exhausting and increasingly unhelpful. The smarter question is not 'Which one wins?' but 'How can we make them work better together?' Short-term sprints. Long-term vision. Both matter. There's no denying that performance marketing plays a vital role, especially in markets with organic demand on the table. When the customer is actively shopping, you'd better show up, and fast. Miss that moment, and you might lose them not just for the day, but for the entire customer lifetime. In categories like parenting, where brand trust builds early and sticks, this matters even more. But let's not forget: Brand isn't a soft concept floating above the numbers. It fuels demand. It makes performance marketing cheaper, more efficient and more effective. Which begs the question: what's stopping us? Performance is learning from brand and vice versa. The line between the two has already blurred. Great performance campaigns are now brand vehicles too, especially when they show up in high-visibility formats and sound like the brand they represent. Likewise, brand campaigns increasingly carry performance triggers – swipe-up CTAs, limited-time drops, product-led storytelling. Yet many organisations still plan and measure them in silos. The media team chases click-through rates while the brand team polishes a film. Agencies work off different briefs. Metrics clash. Timelines don't align. And somehow, we expect synergy. The brands that get it right? They collapse those walls. They look at the customer journey, not the org chart. They stop treating campaigns as either/or, and instead ask: How does this ad serve the now and the next? CFOs aren't anti-brand. They're pro-clarity. Now let's talk about the tension we all feel but rarely say out loud. It's easy to pin the blame on finance. We say brand budgets are under pressure, performance is taking over, and CMOs are losing ground in the boardroom. But here's a gentler truth: CFOs aren't allergic to brand. They're allergic to vagueness. And if brand marketers show up with slides full of sentiment scores and no commercial link, it's no surprise when the budget tips the other way. This is where bold marketing leadership comes in. Of course, building the case for brand isn't always straightforward, especially when you're balancing monthly performance targets and a CFO who needs numbers, not narratives. But this is where a strong CMO and CFO partnership matters. Ongoing conversations, shared learning from campaigns and transparent tracking of both short- and long-term results can build the trust needed to back brand investment. Tools such as Binet and Field's 60/40 rule, WARC's effectiveness studies, or even brand health metrics linked to commercial outcomes can help bridge the gap. The goal isn't just to justify brand, but to embed it in business thinking. Brand is everyone's job now. Especially yours. Here's something we don't talk about enough: brand-building is no longer just a creative or media challenge. It's an orchestration challenge. In 2025, your brand shows up in a hundred places at once – from search results to in-store displays to influencer shoutouts to that oddly specific push notification your CRM team just sent out. The old model where agencies handled the polish and internal teams handled the plumbing just doesn't cut it anymore. If your brand feels fragmented, inconsistent, or 'same-same' in a cluttered market, chances are the issue isn't the agency's ways of working. It's a lack of internal ownership. We've learned this first-hand. With multiple segments across different parenting life stages, precision matters. Segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP) is not just a framework – it's our operating system. But creative and media strategy alone won't save you. It's the marketing team's orchestration – the tone, the timing, the tenacity – that makes it land. CEOs, take note: this is not where you compromise on teams. The real magic? When both sides respect each other. At its best, marketing doesn't live in extremes. It thrives in balance. Performance without brand is a short-term sugar rush. Brand without performance is a beautiful film no one watches. But together? They can move markets and mindsets. So let's drop the tug of war. Let's build teams, tools and trust that allow both sides to do what they do best, with one shared goal: meaningful, measurable, sustainable growth. Not just now. But for the long run. By Mitin Chakraborty, Head of Marketing – Babyshop, Landmark Group.
