Brand and performance aren't a versus — they're an AND

Walk into most ecommerce businesses and you’ll find a quiet civil war. The performance side thinks brand spend is a vanity project. The brand side thinks performance is mortgaging the future for this month’s number.

Both are wrong. And the argument itself is the thing holding the business back.

What the evidence actually says

The most-cited work here is Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of hundreds of campaigns. Their finding, stated simply: the long-run effective split is roughly 60% brand, 40% activation.

Brand building works slowly. It compounds. It makes every future pound of performance spend cheaper, because warm audiences convert better and cost less. Activation works fast and fades fast — it harvests demand but doesn’t create it.

Run only activation and you’re harvesting a field nobody’s planting. The numbers look fine for a while. Then your cost per acquisition starts climbing and never stops, because you’re competing for a pool of in-market buyers that you yourself are doing nothing to refill.

Share of voice is the quiet lever

There’s a second idea worth knowing: Excess Share of Voice. Brands whose share of voice exceeds their share of market tend to grow. Brands whose share of voice trails their market share tend to shrink.

It’s not glamorous and it’s not fast. But it reframes brand spend from “luxury” to “the mechanism by which next year is easier than this year.”

Why the split persists anyway

If the evidence is this clear, why does the versus survive?

Because of how the work is bought. A performance agency is measured on ROAS, so it argues for activation. A brand agency is measured on awareness, so it argues for brand. Each is incentivised to win the argument, not resolve it.

Nobody in the room is paid to own the blend.

That’s the structural fix. Not a better performance agency or a better brand agency — a growth partner who owns the whole engine and can hold brand and performance as an AND, because they’re measured on the business outcome, not on either silo’s favourite metric.

Stop refereeing the civil war. Put one person in charge of the result, and the question stops being “brand or performance” and becomes “what’s the right blend, this quarter, for this business.” Which is the only question that was ever worth asking.