Why brand is back on the founder agenda.
After years of performance-only thinking, founders are reinvesting in brand. Here is what the evidence says, and where the split is uncertain.
By Brief & Butter · Oct 8, 2026
Founders spent years treating marketing as a switch. Turn on paid search and sales arrive. Turn it off and they stop. That logic is getting harder to defend as acquisition costs keep rising, and more of them are rediscovering brand.
The pressure is real. WARC reports that 62% of marketers face flat or declining budgets, and it argues this pushes teams toward short-term metrics that are easy to defend in a budget meeting. The same reporting says the answer is not to pick brand or performance, but to treat stronger brand equity as the thing that makes performance work better. The figure comes from a WARC and ANA poll of 209 marketers in the ANA's membership, so treat it as a directional signal rather than a precise measure.
The long-running evidence points the same way. Les Binet and Peter Field studied 996 IPA Effectiveness Awards case studies covering 700 brands and found that consumer brands which grew over the long term tended to spend around 60% of their marketing on brand building and around 40% on sales activation. The split is a median for consumer brands at scale, not a law, and longer purchase cycles and B2B businesses tend to need a different balance.
So what does a founder do with this? Start by asking what each channel is for. Performance can capture demand that already exists. Brand creates the demand that performance later collects, and it lowers the cost of every other channel because people already know the name. The companies winning in 2026 are the ones that treat brand as infrastructure, not decoration.
Sources: WARC via MediaNews4U (29 August 2026), "62% of marketers face flat or declining budgets"; Binet and Field, "The Long and the Short of It" (IPA, 2013), with the follow-up "Effectiveness in Context" refining the ratio to 62/38.