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2 beliefs on BRAND VS PERFORMANCE, written by Mahesh Murthy.
Brand versus performance is the most damaging false choice in marketing. Finance likes performance because it produces a number every week. So brand budgets get cut first in every downturn, in every region, and the damage shows up two years later as rising acquisition costs that nobody connects back to the cut.
The evidence has been public for years. Long-term brand building and short-term activation work together, and starving either one makes the other more expensive. The problem is not that marketers don't know this. It is that quarterly incentives reward the person who can point to a cost-per-acquisition figure this week over the person protecting baseline sales two years out.
The essays below are about that gap between what marketers know and what they do, and who profits from it.
Every recession, every tariff scare, every war, every bad quarter, the same thing happens. The brand budget gets cut. And every time, someone acts like this is the right thing to do.
Read more →57% say brand-building drives long-term growth. But 72% admit they're still chasing short-term numbers. This isn't a knowledge problem. It's a strength-of-backbone problem.
Read more →Related reading