Long-term brand building is the discipline most quarterly dashboards quietly punish — and the discipline that separates the brands still standing in ten years from the ones whose growth chart looks impressive right up until it doesn't. This is a working guide to the research, the frameworks, and the institutional defense it takes to keep brand-building alive inside a performance-obsessed culture.
The Research That Settled the Debate
Les Binet and Peter Field's work for the IPA, drawing on decades of effectiveness award data, found a consistent pattern: marketing investment split roughly 60% to long-term brand-building and 40% to short-term sales activation produced the strongest long-run commercial results. The exact ratio varies by category, business stage, and buying cycle, but the principle is robust. Brands that under-invest in long-term brand work to chase short-term performance eventually run out of pricing power, organic demand, and the kind of mental availability that makes performance marketing cheap.
The finding sounds obvious in the abstract and is constantly violated in practice. The reason is institutional, not intellectual. Performance metrics report weekly. Brand metrics compound over years. The quarterly review favors whichever line moved this quarter, regardless of what it cost the next ten.
60/40
The IPA effectiveness finding
Marketing investment split roughly 60% to long-term brand-building and 40% to short-term sales activation produced the strongest long-run commercial results across decades of effectiveness award data.
— Binet & Field, IPA — The Long and the Short of It
Where the budget split should sit
The exact ratio varies by category, business stage, and buying cycle — but the principle is robust. Brands under-investing in long-term brand work eventually run out of pricing power, organic demand, and the mental availability that makes performance marketing cheap.
60% brand
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Byron Sharp's work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reframed brand-building around a simple, hard-to-argue-with idea: brands grow by being thought of by more people, in more buying situations, more of the time. This is mental availability — the probability that your brand comes to mind when a relevant buying need shows up. It's built through consistent reach over time, not through brilliant single campaigns or precision targeting.
The companion concept is distinctive brand assets — the colors, characters, sounds, shapes, and verbal cues that let buyers recognize the brand instantly, often before they consciously process the message. The discipline is to identify the assets that already work, codify them, and use them with relentless consistency across every touchpoint over a long period. Most brands fail at this not because they don't have distinctive assets but because every new marketing leader wants to refresh them.
Share of Voice vs Share of Market
The third building block of the long-term framework is share of voice (SOV) — the proportion of category advertising spend that belongs to your brand. The pattern repeated across categories is that brands whose SOV exceeds their share of market (SOM) tend to grow, while brands whose SOV falls below their SOM tend to shrink. The gap between SOV and SOM is called excess share of voice, and it's one of the most reliable predictors of future market share movement that brand measurement offers.
This is a hard sell in environments where the spend question is framed as "what's the attributable return on this campaign." The honest answer is that brand-building spend builds the next several years of demand, most of which won't show up in last-click attribution. The brands that protect their excess SOV through downturns — when competitors retreat and voice gets cheap — tend to come out on the other side with meaningfully larger market share.
Measuring What Compounds
Long-term brand-building requires its own measurement layer because performance-marketing dashboards can't see it. The core instruments are:
Brand awareness tracking. Unprompted and prompted awareness, measured consistently against the same audience definition, quarter after quarter, year after year. The trend line matters more than any single quarter's number.
Consideration and preference. Among the buyers aware of you, who's willing to consider you for the next purchase, and who actively prefers you over the alternatives? Movement here is the leading indicator that mental availability is translating into commercial outcomes.
Distinctive asset attribution. When buyers are shown your distinctive assets stripped of brand identifiers, do they correctly attribute them to your brand? Asset attribution is the cleanest measure of whether your brand investment is actually building the recognition you're paying for.
Pricing power. The premium your brand can sustain over a generic equivalent is one of the most honest measures of brand equity. Erosion of pricing power is often the first commercial signal that brand-building has been under-invested in.
The Institutional Defense of Brand Spend
Defending long-term brand investment inside a quarterly-pressure environment is the actual job, more than the strategy work itself. A few patterns help.
Separate the budgets, separate the metrics. Don't let brand spend and performance spend live in the same line item with the same KPIs. Brand spend should be accountable to brand metrics on the timeline brand metrics actually move.
Bring the longitudinal data. The IPA research, the Ehrenberg-Bass work, the case studies of brands that cut brand spend during downturns and lost the decade. Decision-makers respond to evidence, not assertion.
Tie brand metrics to commercial outcomes the CFO cares about. Pricing power, customer acquisition cost, organic demand, lifetime value. The brand metrics that matter to a finance leader are the ones that show up in the unit economics.
Ringfence the brand budget through downturns. The temptation to cut brand spend first is universal and almost always wrong. The brands that hold the line through a downturn come out with a structurally stronger competitive position than the ones that didn't.
Calibrating Your Own Split
The 60/40 figure is a starting point, not a law. Binet and Field themselves were clear that the optimal balance moves with context, and the practical job is to work out where your business sits before defaulting to the headline number. A few variables do most of the work.
Buying cycle length. The longer the gap between purchases, the more your commercial fate depends on being remembered between them — which argues for a heavier brand weighting. A B2B firm whose buyers enter the market once every few years is almost entirely dependent on the memory structures it built before the buying window opened. A convenience product bought weekly can afford more activation, because the next purchase occasion is always close.
Business stage. An early-stage company with no distribution and no cash runway legitimately needs activation to survive long enough to build anything. The mistake isn't starting activation-heavy — it's staying there. As revenue stabilizes, the split should migrate toward brand, deliberately and on a schedule, rather than waiting for the moment performance economics break down. By then the cheap years of brand-building have already been lost.
Category emotionality and price premium. Categories where the purchase carries identity, trust, or social meaning reward brand investment more steeply than commodity categories bought on price and availability. If your strategy depends on sustaining a premium, you are structurally committed to the brand-heavy end of the spectrum whether the dashboard likes it or not.
The honest way to set the number is to write down your buying cycle, your stage, and your pricing ambition, pick a split you can defend from those three facts, and then — critically — hold it for long enough to learn something. A split renegotiated every quarter is just activation with extra steps.
A Working Cadence for Long-Term Brand Building
Long-term brand building fails more often from lack of operating structure than lack of belief. The strategy deck gets approved; the weekly reality reverts to whatever the performance dashboard rewards. A cadence that actually holds looks something like this:
Codify the distinctive assets once, in writing. Audit which colors, marks, phrases, and visual devices buyers already attribute to you, then lock them into guidelines that survive personnel changes. This is the constitution of the program — everything else in the cadence assumes it exists and is enforced.
Set the budget split annually, at board level. The brand/activation ratio is a strategic decision with multi-year consequences. Decide it once a year, with the longitudinal evidence on the table, and make changing it mid-year require the same seniority it took to set.
Run the brand tracker on a fixed schedule. Same questions, same audience definition, same methodology, every wave. The single most common measurement failure is changing the instrument and destroying the trend line — which is the only part of the data that matters.
Review creative for consistency, not novelty. The quarterly creative review should ask one question first: is this recognizably us before the logo appears? Reward the team for compounding the existing assets, because every incentive in the building points the other way.
Report brand and activation in separate sections, on separate timelines. Activation reports monthly against revenue. Brand reports quarterly or biannually against awareness, consideration, asset attribution, and pricing power. The moment they share a slide, the shorter timeline wins.
None of this is glamorous. That's rather the point. The brands that compound are the ones that made consistency an operating system instead of a personality trait.
Where Long-Term Brand Building Goes Wrong
The failure modes are predictable enough to list, which means they're avoidable.
Treating brand as a campaign instead of a system. A quarter of brand advertising followed by a return to full activation isn't brand building — it's an expensive pause. Mental availability is built by continuous presence over years. A burst that ends simply decays, and the budget that funded it gets cited as proof that "brand doesn't work for us."
Using "brand" as a label for unaccountable spend. The opposite failure. Brand investment is not exempt from measurement; it's accountable to different instruments on a different timeline. Teams that can't show movement in awareness, consideration, or asset attribution after sustained investment don't have a measurement problem — they have a strategy problem hiding behind a vocabulary.
Letting targeting efficiency strangle reach. Precision targeting feels rigorous, but mental availability is built across the whole category of future buyers — including the large majority not in-market today. Narrowing reach to the audience most likely to convert this month optimizes for the buyers you'd have won anyway and starves the memory-building that wins the rest.
Judging brand work on activation timelines. Reviewing a brand investment at ninety days against revenue is a category error, and it always returns the same verdict: cut it. If the organization can't commit to evaluating brand work on a multi-year horizon, it should be honest that it isn't doing brand building at all.
Planning long-term with quarterly exit ramps. A three-year brand strategy that gets relitigated at every quarterly review is a one-quarter strategy with good production values. The institutional defenses described above exist precisely to remove the exits.
Brand Building Is Bigger Than Advertising
The research tradition behind the 60/40 split is an advertising literature, but mental availability doesn't care where the memory came from. Every encounter a buyer has with the brand either reinforces the memory structures or muddies them: the product experience, the packaging, the support reply, the founder's writing, the way the brand behaves when something goes wrong. For smaller brands without media budgets to defend a share of voice, these owned touchpoints are the primary brand-building channel — which is why consistency systems like brand guidelines matter as much as media plans.
Two adjacent disciplines carry particular weight here. The first is community building — a community that genuinely belongs to its members produces the kind of repeated, voluntary brand encounters that paid reach can only rent. The second is values-driven branding: when a brand's stated values show up in its actual behavior over years, the consistency itself becomes a distinctive asset, and the trust it earns shows up directly in consumer trust and pricing power. Long-term brand building, done properly, is less a media strategy than a decision about how the whole business presents itself over time.
The Barakah Lens on Brand-Building
The reason this pillar is called Barakah is the same reason the 60/40 framework matters. Marketing that compounds — that builds something durable rather than chasing the next spike — operates on a different time horizon than the dashboards reward. The discipline is the discipline of patience: investing in things whose return won't show up for years, and trusting the underlying mechanism enough to keep investing when the quarterly pressure says don't.
The companion read is compounding brand equity, which covers what's actually being built when you do this work well — and how to measure, value, and protect it. For the cross-pillar view on how to keep performance work honest about its own limits, marketing attribution is the most useful complement.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the 60/40 split apply to startups and small budgets?
Not literally, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. A company fighting for survival needs sales this quarter, and activation is how it gets them. What does apply from day one is the cheap half of brand building: pick distinctive assets early, use them with total consistency, and resist the urge to redesign every six months. Then, as the business stabilizes, shift the split toward brand deliberately rather than waiting for acquisition costs to force the conversation.
How long before brand investment shows up in results?
Binet and Field's data puts the crossover where long-term strategies overtake short-term ones at roughly the six-month mark, with effects that keep compounding for years afterward. In practice you should expect leading indicators — awareness, consideration, asset attribution — to move before commercial ones, and you should be suspicious of anyone promising brand effects inside a quarter. If the organization can't hold its nerve for at least a year, the money is better spent on activation it will actually let finish.
Can performance marketing build a brand on its own?
It contributes — every impression carries the brand somewhere — but it's built to do a different job. Performance creative is optimized for immediate response from in-market buyers, which systematically under-serves the much larger group of future buyers whose memories decide your demand three years out. Brands that rely on performance alone tend to discover the limits when acquisition costs climb and there's no organic demand underneath. The two disciplines are complements, not substitutes.
What's the difference between brand awareness and mental availability?
Awareness asks whether buyers know you exist. Mental availability asks whether you come to mind in an actual buying situation — late on a deadline, standing in the aisle, drafting the vendor shortlist. A brand can score well on prompted awareness and still never surface at the moment of choice. That's why serious trackers measure brand linkage to specific category entry points, not just name recognition in the abstract.
How do we defend brand spend without last-click attribution?
Stop arguing on attribution's terms. Bring the longitudinal evidence, agree the brand metrics and the timeline upfront with finance, and connect them to numbers a CFO already watches: blended acquisition cost, the share of demand arriving through branded search and direct, win rates, and the price premium the brand sustains. The case for brand spend is an economic case made over years — not a campaign report, and not a leap of faith either.
How this fits the bigger picture
Long-Term Brand is one of six topics inside our Barakah hub. Barakah is the Arabic concept of beneficial abundance — where a little goes a long way. Marketing built on these principles compounds. Read the hub for the full perspective, or use the sidebar to jump into any sibling topic.
We help mission-led brands turn ideas like the ones on this page into systems that ship — strategy, execution, measurement, the lot.
References:
Binet, L., & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).
Binet, L., & Field, P. (2017). Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).
Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know. Oxford University Press.
Sharp, B., & Romaniuk, J. (2016). How Brands Grow Part 2: Including Emerging Markets, Services, Durables, B2B and Luxury Brands. Oxford University Press.
Romaniuk, J. (2018). Building Distinctive Brand Assets. Oxford University Press.
Heath, R. (2012). Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising. Wiley-Blackwell.
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia — ongoing research on buyer behavior, mental availability, and brand growth.
