Turn off your ads today and your results disappear tomorrow. Invest in your brand and the returns keep compounding long after the work is done. That distinction matters more than most businesses realise, and it’s one we’ve watched play out across every client engagement we’ve had at Milkman.

Brand has a measurement problem. Not because the impact isn’t there, but because it operates on a longer timeline than most marketing budgets are willing to account for. We build businesses with strategies for 5-10 years but marketing is rarely measured on that timeline.

Performance channels are seductive because the feedback is immediate; a click, a conversion, a cost per acquisition. Brand work asks you to trust a process that pays out over months and years, and in a world of quarterly reporting that can feel like a hard sell. But the data is unambiguous, and we’ve seen it hold true again and again for the clients we work with.

The research keeps landing in the same place

This isn’t a new debate. In 1992 a large US marketing database was analysed to find that companies splitting spend roughly equally between brand and performance outperformed those leaning heavily into promotions. The IPA reached the same conclusion in 2013; the optimal mix was 60% brand, 40% performance [source]. More recently, Analytic Partners ran the same analysis across thousands of companies globally, and the finding held. Half and half wins. Every time someone has the data to look at this question, the answer is consistent.

What makes this a generalised pattern rather than a one-off finding is that it holds across different industries, different datasets, different researchers and different eras of marketing. That kind of consistency is rare. When we see it, we should pay attention.

Funnily enough up until 2025 ~70% of marketers were intending to invest in performance over branding. That’s really an indication of where leadership’s mindsets are at, which is largely a reflection of an uncertain economic environment. However, that poses an opportunity to stand out even more in your market by investing in brand.

Most of your buyers aren’t looking yet

Here’s the structural reality every business needs to understand before touching a marketing budget. At any given moment, a small percentage of your potential customers are actively in-market and ready to buy. In a national US survey, about 15% of people intended to buy a new mobile phone in the next month. For air travel it was around 19%. Even for something as everyday as beer, only about 37% of drinkers were buying in a given week [source].

Performance marketing almost exclusively reaches the first group. The people already searching, already comparing, already close to a decision. That’s valuable work and capitalising on your active market. But if it’s all you’re doing, you’re fighting hard for a small slice while doing nothing to influence the much larger group who will enter the market later.

Brand marketing shapes what happens when those future buyers eventually arrive. And the research from WPP Media and Oxford University, which tracked 1.2 million purchase journeys, is striking on this point; 84% of the time, people chose a brand they were already predisposed to before they even entered the market [source]. The decision was largely made before the search began… brand work is how you earn that predisposition.

Familiarity does more work than persuasion

There’s a tendency to think advertising works by making a compelling argument at the right moment. The evidence doesn’t really support this. Conversion rates on advertising have sat between 1% and 15% for the better part of a century, and that figure hasn’t shifted meaningfully despite better targeting, better creative, better strategy. With all of the optimisations to advertising platforms we’ve got it pretty much as good as we can; but what makes the difference to a higher conversion rate? Advertising isn’t persuading most people to do something they wouldn’t have done otherwise; it’s capturing people who were already warm.

What creates that warmth is familiarity. The behavioural science term is the mere exposure effect; we gravitate toward things we recognise. Coke puts its logo on every convenience store on the planet not to trigger an immediate sale, but to stay constantly present in people’s peripheral awareness so that when a purchase moment arrives, Coke already feels like the only choice, in fact it’s not a choice at all, you want a Coke. That’s familiarity infrastructure, and it’s built through brand.

We’ve seen this dynamic play out across our clients. The brands that invest consistently in who they are and how they’re perceived tend to find that their performance channels work harder over time. That’s a direct outcome of brand investment.

Brand awareness is your conversion rate multiplier

A study combining Tracksuit brand data with TikTok performance data made this relationship visible (would recommend reading their report [source]). There was zero correlation between brand awareness and click-through rate; a well-known brand and an unknown brand can both generate clicks if the content is good enough. But conversion rate told a completely different story. Brands with 40% awareness converted at roughly 1.5 times the rate of low-awareness brands. Brands with 60% awareness converted at around three times the rate.

Your conversion rate is downstream of your brand investment. If your performance marketing feels inefficient, the fix is rarely better targeting or a different bidding strategy. It’s more investment in making people familiar with you before they need you.

The value of ads disappears when you turn them off

This is the compounding argument for brand that we think more businesses need to hear plainly. Paid media is a tap; open it and water flows, close it and it stops. Brand equity doesn’t work that way. The recognition you build, the associations you create, the emotional familiarity you earn over time; those persist. A client we’ve worked with for years doesn’t just benefit from the campaign we ran last quarter. They benefit from the brand foundation we helped them build, which quietly informs every purchase decision their customers make from here forward. Especially when you operate in competitive markets, brand can be the difference between your business and your competitor’s.

The practical implication

The goal here isn’t to cut performance spend. It’s to stop treating brand as the thing you do with leftover budget after the performance channels are funded.

About half of your marketing investment should be actively building familiarity and emotional connection with people who aren’t ready to buy yet. The other half should be converting the people who are. That balance improves the efficiency of your entire marketing operation because better brand awareness makes performance channels work harder, not the other way around.

The brands that consistently win category share aren’t doing it because their ads are more persuasive. They’re doing it because their brands are so deeply familiar that choosing them feels obvious. It’s the outcome of treating brand as the long-term asset it actually is and securing the future of your business.

If you’re ready to build something that compounds, we’d love to work with you. Start a project with Milkman.