The more time I spend in business, the more apparent virtually no one truly understands brand marketing.
Honestly how is there still a debate in 2025 about whether companies should invest in brand marketing or lead generation?
Budgets are divided. Boardrooms are split. And somehow, the cycle of short-term , instant gratification thinking continues.
Somewhere along the way, we trained ourselves to believe that if something doesn’t show up neatly on a dashboard and can be explained precisely by numbers, it must not be working.
That’s why brand marketing gets misunderstood — and undervalued — again and again.
We keep trying to measure it like performance marketing: immediate clicks, leads, conversions.
But brand marketing was never meant to fit inside a 30-day report.
It’s meant to shape memory, influence future buying behavior, and create emotional preference — things that compound quietly, not perform loudly immediately.
Let’s set the record straight:
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Brand marketing is not doing one splashy campaign and hoping you'll be "top of mind immediately."
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Brand marketing is not pushing 100 social posts and declaring victory against your top competitors.
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Brand marketing is not about measuring everything by CPLs and MQLs as if every marketing touchpoint should behave like a direct sales trigger.
Brand marketing is misunderstood because we keep asking it to perform like performance marketing. And when it doesn’t?
We blame brand instead of blaming our own impatience.
The False Binary of Lead Gen vs Brand Marketing
It’s not an either/or decision. It's a both decision.
WARC’s study, The Multiplier Effect, makes this painfully obvious:
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Brands that invest in both brand and performance marketing achieve a median 90% higher long-term business uplift.
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But companies needed to be patient enough to let those results build over at least 12 months.
Performance marketing captures today's in-market buyers. Brand marketing creates tomorrow's.
Neglect brand, and you're squeezing an ever-shrinking sponge — eventually drying up your customer pipeline because you did nothing to build future demand.
We’ve Trained Ourselves to Think Small
Marketing has been reduced to a glorified sales engine. Instead of marketing, what most teams are doing is actually sales enablement. Everything is judged by the fastest possible conversion:
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"How many leads?"
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"What's the CPL?"
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"Where's the immediate ROI?"
We have forgotten that marketing is bigger than just closing deals.
Marketing is meant to build memory structures. To shape future buying behavior. To create emotional moats that competitors can’t bulldoze overnight.
And no — having a strong brand is not a "nice to have" or a "vanity play."
Strong Brands = Stronger Businesses
The data is overwhelming on this. Advertising Partners found that strong brand marketing helps companies soften the impact of price increases. In other words, when you have brand equity, you can charge more without losing as many customers.
BERA.Ai’s research shows that brands with strong brand equity outperform at every stage of the purchase funnel:
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Awareness → Consideration
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Consideration → Usage
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Usage → Preference
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Preference → Advocacy
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When you have a strong brand:
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You spend less fighting over pennies in performance channels.
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You enjoy greater pricing power.
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You retain customers longer.
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You create compounding returns — not just quarter-to-quarter wins.
The Hard Pill to Swallow
If you're measuring brand marketing with the same KPIs you use for paid search, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
If you're expecting immediate ROI from brand [company or personal] investments, you don’t understand the assignment. And if you're still treating marketing as a pure sales function....you're leaving future market share, pricing power, and advocacy on the table.
The companies that win aren’t going after the immediate gratification.
They’re patiently building trust, memory, and preference for the buyers of tomorrow.
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