Every quarter, the same fight breaks out in the same meeting. The performance team can prove its number to two decimal places: spend went in, sales came out, here is the dashboard. The brand team asks for money to run ads that won't sell anything this month, and can't draw a clean line from spend to sale. Guess who wins when the budget gets cut. Now guess which company is quietly shrinking three years later.

The quick version

  • Two different jobs. Brand building creates future demand and works slowly; sales activation converts existing demand and works fast. You need both, and they can't substitute for each other.
  • The 60/40 rule. Across roughly 1,000 case studies, Binet & Field found that splitting budget about 60% to brand and 40% to activation maximises long-term profit growth. It's an average, not a law.
  • Share of voice predicts share of market. Spend a bigger share of your category's advertising than your market share, and you tend to grow; spend less, and you tend to shrink.
  • The move: stop scoring brand spend on this month's sales. Judge activation on short-term return and brand on share of voice and market-share trend, measured over years.

The idea in depth

The starting point is that "marketing" is really two jobs wearing one coat, and they run on different clocks. Sales activation is the short game: discount codes, retargeting, paid search, the "buy now" email. It converts people who are already in the market today. The effect is large and immediate, and then it fades, usually within weeks. Brand building is the long game: broad, emotional, memorable advertising that makes people feel something about you long before they're ready to buy. Its effect is small at first and builds over months and years.

This is the central finding of The Long and the Short of It, published by Les Binet and Peter Field for the UK's Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) in 2013, and extended in their 2017 follow-up Media in Focus. They analysed the IPA Databank, close to a thousand documented advertising-effectiveness case studies built up since 1980, and asked a blunt question: what spending pattern actually grows a business over the long run? The answer was a ratio. The campaigns that delivered the most long-term profit growth put, on average, about 60% of budget into brand building and 40% into activation.

The useful reframe is to stop treating the two as rivals for the same pound and run them as a portfolio with two return profiles. Activation is your short-dated bond: reliable, fast, modest. Brand is your equity, volatile in the short run, the bigger compounding return over time. Buy only the bond and you look efficient on a quarterly dashboard while you starve the asset that makes next year's activation cheaper.

flowchart LR
  A(["Brand building
~60% of budget"]) -->|"slow, builds future demand"| C(["More people primed
to buy you"])
  B(["Sales activation
~40% of budget"]) -->|"fast, converts demand now"| D(["Sales this quarter"])
  C -->|"warmer market = cheaper conversion"| B
  D -->|"funds reinvestment"| A
The two jobs run on different clocks, and feed each other. Leaders Loop

Why brand building works slowly: mental availability

The reason brand spend can't be scored on this month's sales is that most people you reach aren't buying this month. At any moment, only a small slice of any category is "in market." Brand advertising works by lodging memories that surface when someone enters the market, what marketing scientists call mental availability, the ease with which a brand comes to mind in a buying situation. Binet and Field found that broad-reach, emotional campaigns are what build this; narrowly targeted, rational, promotional messages do not. That is also why the most effective brand-building ads lean on emotion and fame rather than feature lists.

So set the success metric before the campaign runs, and set a different one for each job. Activation gets a short-term efficiency number, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, this campaign, this month. Brand should be spared those metrics on principle; judge it instead on the measures that move first, prompted and unprompted awareness, and ultimately on category market share over rolling years.

Share of voice: the closest thing to a growth lever

If brand building is hard to measure on sales, what can you steer by? The most durable answer in the evidence is share of voice (SOV), your share of all the advertising spend in your category. The link to growth predates Binet and Field: in 1990, John Philip Jones, then a professor at Syracuse University, set out the relationship between advertising share and market share in Harvard Business Review ("Ad Spending: Maintaining Market Share," Jan–Feb 1990). Binet and Field quantified it with the IPA data and gave it a usable name: excess share of voice (ESOV), your share of voice minus your share of market.

Their rule of thumb: brands with positive ESOV (shouting louder than their size) tend to grow; brands with negative ESOV tend to shrink. The headline number is that, on average, every 10 points of ESOV is associated with about 0.5 points of market-share growth per year, with strong creative able to multiply that return. It is one of the steadier predictive relationships in marketing.

Which means brand budgets should be planned against the category, not just your own P&L. Estimate total category ad spend, work out your share of it, and push spend deliberately above your market share when you want to grow. Hold flat against a heavy-spending rival and you are not standing still, you are retreating slowly.

"60/40 is not an iron rule.", Les Binet

Where the rule breaks down

Treat 60/40 as a starting hypothesis, not a setting. Binet himself has said plainly that "60/40 is not an iron rule"; the right split shifts with brand size, price point, category and growth ambition. A new challenger with everything to prove may tilt far harder to brand; a mature brand defending share may sit closer to even. In B2B, Binet and Field's own work for the LinkedIn-funded B2B Institute put the optimum nearer 46% brand / 54% activation, still a heavy brand commitment, but not the consumer figure.

There is also a live academic argument worth knowing. Byron Sharp and colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute accept that brand building and reach matter enormously, but dispute the precision of a fixed 60/40 quota and the idea that "brand" and "activation" are cleanly separable categories of spend, arguing that the same broad, well-branded advertising often does both jobs at once. The honest reading: the direction (don't starve brand; chase reach; SOV predicts growth) is well supported; the exact ratio is a useful prior to be tested in your own category, not a constant of nature.

A worked example

Take "Meridian," an invented mid-market software firm doing £10m a year. (Figures below are illustrative, chosen to show the mechanics, not Meridian's real numbers, because Meridian isn't real.) Their marketing is 90% performance: paid search, retargeting, a relentless promotional calendar. The dashboard looks healthy, every pound is "trackable", but growth has flattened and customer-acquisition costs creep up every quarter, because they're bidding for the same small pool of people already searching for their category.

They reframe the budget as a portfolio. Of a £1m spend, they move toward roughly £550k brand and £450k activation, short of textbook 60/40, because as a smaller B2B player they lean on the ~46/54 benchmark and their own caution. The brand money buys broad, well-branded reach across their buyer category rather than narrow bottom-funnel ads. Crucially, they change the scorecard: activation is still judged on cost per acquisition this quarter; brand is judged on share of voice and prompted awareness, reviewed over years.

They also do the SOV sum. Category advertising runs at, say, £20m a year, so Meridian's £550k brand spend is roughly a 2.75% share of voice against a market share near 1.5%, positive ESOV of about 1.25 points, the "shout louder than your size" position the data ties to growth. The first two quarters look worse on the old dashboard, which is exactly what the theory predicts and exactly when most firms lose their nerve and cut the brand line. The discipline is holding the split long enough for the slow asset to compound, and watching the right meter while you wait.

flowchart TB
  A(["Set growth ambition"]) --> B(["Estimate category ad spend
→ your share of voice"])
  B --> C{"SOV above
market share?"}
  C -->|"Yes (positive ESOV)"| D(["Hold/extend brand spend
judge on share + awareness"])
  C -->|"No (negative ESOV)"| E(["Underfunding brand
→ raise it or expect decline"])
  D --> F(["Run activation alongside
judge on short-term ROI"])
  E --> F
A budgeting loop: set the split against the category, then meter each job on its own clock. Leaders Loop

Frequently asked questions

Is the 60/40 split a hard rule?

No. It's the average of what worked best across a large case-study base, and even its authors call it a guideline rather than a law. The right number for you depends on category, brand size, price and how aggressively you're trying to grow, B2B, for instance, benchmarks closer to 46/54. Use 60/40 as a default to argue from, then test it.

We're a startup with no money. Should we skip brand and do pure performance?

Early on, with a tiny budget and a product still finding fit, leaning heavily on activation is reasonable, you need sales and learning now. The trap is staying there. Pure performance buys diminishing returns as you exhaust the in-market pool, and it leaves no memory structure to make future conversion cheaper. As you scale, the evidence says shift budget toward brand, not away from it.

How do I justify brand spend to a finance-minded board?

Change the metric, not the volume of your argument. Don't promise brand spend will lift this quarter's sales, it won't, and promising it loses you credibility. Commit instead to share-of-voice and awareness targets, plus market-share trend over rolling years, and frame the spend as buying a compounding asset. The portfolio framing, short-dated activation plus long-dated brand equity, is one a CFO already understands.

Isn't share of voice just "spend more than rivals"? How is that a strategy?

Partly, yes, and that's the uncomfortable part: advertising weight relative to competitors genuinely matters. But ESOV isn't only about money. Strong creative can earn the same effect at lower spend, effectively buying "share of voice" through fame and memorability rather than raw budget. So the lever has two handles: how much you spend against the category, and how good the work is.

Does this apply to digital and direct-response businesses?

It applies more than those businesses usually admit. Channels that are easy to attribute (search, retargeting) are mostly harvesting demand someone else's brand building created. A business that only does what's measurable optimises the harvest while letting the field go fallow. The Binet and Field principle is channel-agnostic: it's about the jobs, not the media.

Related in the Toolkit

Where to go next