The Basics
Performance marketing produces results you can measure this week. Brand marketing produces results that compound for years. Both are necessary. Most companies do only one — usually the one that is easier to justify in a spreadsheet. Understanding the difference, and why the tension between them is a feature rather than a problem, is one of the most important things a marketer can internalise.
The definitions
Performance marketing is marketing designed to produce a measurable, immediate response. A click, a form fill, a booked call, a purchase. You spend money, you get activity, you can trace the line between the two. Google Ads, LinkedIn lead generation campaigns, retargeting, cold email — these are all performance marketing. The feedback loop is short. The ROI is visible. The results stop the moment you stop spending.
Brand marketing is marketing designed to build awareness, recognition, trust, and preference over time. Content, thought leadership, PR, sponsorships, creative advertising — these shape how people think and feel about your company before they are in a buying moment. The feedback loop is long. The ROI is harder to attribute. The results accumulate and compound — and they persist long after the last piece of content was published or the last campaign ran.
The distinction that matters most: performance marketing captures existing demand. Brand marketing creates future demand. If no one has heard of you and no one is searching for what you sell, performance marketing has nothing to capture. Brand marketing is what fills that pipeline.
Effect on revenue over time
The core asymmetry
Performance marketing effects appear quickly and disappear quickly. Brand marketing effects appear slowly and persist. Over-investing in performance at the expense of brand produces short-term results and long-term fragility. Over-investing in brand at the expense of performance produces long-term positioning and short-term starvation. Both extremes fail.
The research
In 2013, Les Binet and Peter Field published "The Long and the Short of It" — a landmark analysis drawing on nearly 1,000 advertising effectiveness case studies across 700 brands and 83 sectors, spanning more than 30 years of IPA Effectiveness data. It remains the most rigorous, large-scale study of how brand and performance marketing interact to drive business outcomes.
The finding that changed how serious marketers think about budget allocation was stark: long-term brand effects and short-term performance effects are produced by fundamentally different mechanisms. Short-term performance produces some short-term sales. But short-term sales do not accumulate into long-term brand strength. The reverse is true — long-term brand investment consistently amplifies the effectiveness of short-term performance activity. A company with a strong brand gets more return from every pound spent on performance than a company without one.
The paper's headline recommendation was the 60:40 rule — devoting roughly 60% of marketing budget to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term sales activation. Binet and Field were careful to frame this as a starting point rather than a fixed prescription: the ideal split varies by sector, company size, and competitive position. But the directional finding is robust: most companies, especially in B2B, are significantly underinvesting in brand relative to the optimal.
The Binet & Field recommended starting split
Source: Binet & Field, "The Long and the Short of It", IPA, 2013. Widely replicated and extended since.
In B2B specifically
B2B companies are disproportionately likely to favour performance marketing. The reasons are understandable: longer sales cycles make attribution harder, procurement decisions appear rational, and CFOs are more comfortable approving spend they can directly trace to revenue. Brand marketing requires patience and tolerance for ambiguity that quarterly reporting cycles rarely allow.
Subsequent LinkedIn and Binet & Field research specifically on B2B markets found that a very similar principle applies — and that B2B marketers are, on average, even more skewed toward performance at the expense of brand than their B2C counterparts. The research found that B2B marketers who outperformed their competition over two years were twice as likely to think long-term — investing in awareness and trust-building before the buying moment arrives.
A 2025 report from EMARKETER and StackAdapt found that 40% of B2B marketers are planning to increase brand-building budgets — a meaningful signal that the pendulum is beginning to shift back. The realisation is spreading that performance marketing captures demand that brand marketing created — and that when brand investment stops, performance efficiency degrades over time.
The attribution trap
The most persistent reason companies over-invest in performance and under-invest in brand is attribution. Performance marketing produces clicks, forms, and pipeline that appear in your CRM with a source attached. Brand marketing produces the conditions that made those clicks more likely — the familiarity, trust, and preference that meant the prospect picked up the phone rather than ignoring the ad.
Most attribution models capture the last touchpoint before conversion and credit it with the sale. The LinkedIn article someone read three months ago, the founder's post they shared with a colleague, the case study they bookmarked and returned to — these rarely appear in the attribution data. The result is that brand marketing looks like it does nothing, and performance marketing looks like it does everything. Neither is accurate.
Les Binet has been direct about this: short-term metrics do not predict long-term success. A company that optimises entirely for attributable, short-term ROI will systematically underinvest in brand — and over time, its performance campaigns will become less effective as the brand that amplified them erodes.
The practical test for over-indexing on performance
Stop all paid spend for 30 days. What happens? If organic traffic, direct visits, and inbound enquiries continue at a meaningful level — your brand is doing work. If everything goes quiet the moment you stop spending — you have built a pipeline that depends entirely on rented attention, with no owned audience and no brand momentum to fall back on. The goal is a business where the brand brings people in and performance closes them. Both legs need to be standing.
Where to start
If you have been running purely performance campaigns and are seeing diminishing returns or rising CPCs, the answer is rarely to spend more on performance. It is more often to invest in brand — content, thought leadership, consistent presence — so that your performance campaigns are amplified by familiarity rather than fighting against indifference. The most important word in Binet and Field's title is "and". The long AND the short. Not one or the other.