• by Dennis Cook , Yesterday

Long-term brand equity, not short-term clicks, drives sustainable growth.

Over the past decade, marketing has undergone a seismic shift toward performance-driven tactics. Armed with dashboards, attribution models, and AI-fueled targeting, CMOs have optimized for short-term wins. Performance marketing brought precision and accountability. But here's the hard truth: you can’t performance-market your way to $1B.

As the performance era matures, the winners won’t just optimize for clicks—they’ll build brands that compound value. The pendulum is swinging back toward balance. In an age of signal loss, AI, and rising CPMs, brand may be the last true competitive advantage.

The Fallacy of Full-Funnel Performance

Performance marketing excels in the mid and lower funnel—demand capture, retargeting, conversion. But it cannot create large-scale demand. Without building a strong brand foundation first, performance becomes a treadmill—fast, expensive, and exhausting.

The inverse is also true: at companies like Showtime, Disney, and PlayStation, we ran award-winning brand campaigns that lifted awareness, consideration, and—crucially—pricing power and customer lifetime value. When brand equity grows, performance gets easier, cheaper, and more profitable.

Signal Loss Is Real (And Brand Is the Antidote)

With third-party cookies fading, iOS privacy restrictions expanding, and new regulations reshaping digital marketing, performance alone is losing its edge. AI helps—but it can only work with the data it’s fed, and that data is getting thinner and more fragmented.

Brand transcends the click—building recall, preference, and emotional connection before customers even enter the buying cycle.

Warren Buffett—one of the most successful judges of business value in modern history—famously underscored the irreplaceable power of brand by saying:

Brand + Performance = Compounding Growth

Brand creates demand—and performance captures it. Smart CMOs treat brand like an asset class—investing in it, measuring it, and aligning it to business outcomes.

Here are three practical ways to do that:

1. Brand First Strategy: Lead with brand strategy before media buying. The message matters more than the algorithm.

2. Build Content with Depth: Invest in customer stories, founder perspectives, and product narratives that travel across platforms.

3. Link to Revenue: Use econometrics and analytics modeling to show how brand spend drives long-term organic sales lift—and higher profits—compared to short-term conversions.

What Got You to $100M Won’t Get You to $1B

Scaling a business requires customers to think, feel, and believe that your company or product is their top choice. Brand creates that emotional buy-in—internally and externally. It fuels recruiting, investor confidence, and customer loyalty.

CMOs who ignore brand are playing the game with one arm tied behind their back. The winners in the next decade will integrate brand into every layer of their go-to-market strategy—from demand generation to customer experience.

Those words were written in 1981—yet they’ve never felt more relevant. Decades later, the same challenge remains: how to be seen and remembered.

Brand is not a trade-off. It’s a multiplier.

The best way to cut through the clutter of today’s marketplace is to build a brand that’s memorable, meaningful, and attracts customers to you. When customers think of your category, they should think of your brand first—and tune out the rest.

With a powerful brand, you don’t have to pay customers to enter your store—you just have to graciously open the door.

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