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Brand Fuels Performance; Performance Rarely Builds Brand

It's often said that "brand drives performance, and performance builds brand", but in many cases only the first half of that statement is true. Which is problematic when you have a program whose budget heavily favors performance marketing. Brand definitely should drive performance, and should make existing performance work better, since it's ideally creating more and better awareness of the solution to a broader group of people with at least some of them in-market now or very soon. And performance marketing is a critical part of a healthy program, activating on people who are in-market and ensuring those hard-build brand memories get activated. But, performance marketing often has little brand benefit since it's so volatile and opportunistic. An ad trying to get you to take action on something you're not currently looking for is usually either totally ignored or very temporarily remembered. Our brains simply don't waste valuable cognitive energy and space on things that aren't relevant to us. Much of performance marketing is about a moment-in-time ask - sometimes it's a price discount, sometimes just a request to take a demo. There is little about creative like that that is remembered, if it's ever even paid attention to at all by people who aren't in-market. It's not to say performance marketing isn't valuable - it's a critical part of an efficient program - but on its own it frequently doesn't have any lasting memory value at all. And, when you have programs where 70-80% of the budget is trying to nudge people to take action, you can end up with a program that is failing to build any real brand value, no matter how many logo impressions get served. Marketing does all work together in a complex and integrated way, but it doesn't mean one type of creative is a good substitute for the other. And when that nuance is missed, we can end up with a very ineffective and inefficient program even with a very healthy budget.