When Growth Becomes the Strategy, Brand Pays the Price: Why Performance-Led Thinking Creates Fragile Growth
Most leadership teams today are navigating a familiar tension. Growth targets continue to rise, while customer acquisition becomes more expensive and harder to sustain. Performance marketing commands increasing investment because it offers clarity, attribution and a sense of control that boards and CFOs can stand behind. At the same time, brand is expected to deliver impact within compressed timeframes, often judged against measures that reflect activity rather than long-term value.
This friction is not abstract. It surfaces in board discussions, budget allocations and planning cycles across sectors, often without being named directly. Businesses are asked to deliver immediate results while also building something that endures, yet the way success is judged tends to reward speed and visibility over durability. Over time, this imbalance weakens the foundations growth relies on, usually only becoming apparent once costs rise and resilience is tested.
The tension shaping modern growth decisions
Performance marketing has earned its place within modern growth strategies. It captures existing demand and converts intent efficiently. It provides metrics leadership teams can interrogate and align with forecasts, which makes it easier to prioritise in moments of pressure.
Yet performance operates at the point of decision, not at the point of belief. It assumes interest already exists. When that interest is weak or fragmented, performance activity must work harder to compensate. As channels become more competitive, this pressure shows up in rising acquisition costs and diminishing efficiency.
What begins as a sensible focus on accountability can quietly become an overreliance on activity that delivers short-term momentum rather than long-term value.
When visibility replaces value
As visibility becomes the dominant signal of progress, longer-term value becomes harder to defend. Short-term indicators crowd out broader measures of brand health, and activity begins to substitute for strategy. Brand, which works upstream of attribution and over longer time frames, is placed at a structural disadvantage.
This is not because brand lacks impact, but because the systems used to judge progress struggle to account for it. Over time, this narrows decision-making. Investment follows what can be seen quickly, while the work that compounds more slowly is deprioritised.
The result is growth that appears healthy in the near term, becomes increasingly fragile underneath.
Understanding the role performance is meant to play
The tension between brand and performance is often framed as a choice. This misses the point. Both are essential for growth. The issue lies in how their roles are understood and ordered.
Performance marketing is highly effective at converting demand. Used well, it accelerates growth when customers are ready to act. Used as a substitute for brand, it becomes a dependency. This is not a failure of performance marketing, but a consequence of asking it to do work it was never designed to do.
One of the most persistent mistakes businesses make is treating brand as a downstream outcome of performance, rather than the context within which performance operates. When brand follows growth strategy, or is shaped primarily by what converts fastest, it loses its ability to guide decisions. Performance marketing is execution. Brand sets direction. Reversing this order does not create efficiency. It creates confusion, higher costs and a business increasingly dependent on tactics rather than belief.
Brand works differently. It shapes perception before the moment of purchase. It builds familiarity, trust and relevance over time, reducing uncertainty and making future choices easier.
“Brand sets direction. Performance is execution.”
Nkuku Interiors
Brand is harder to track than performance activity, particularly in the short term. Its impact builds over time and is rarely captured in weekly reports. But harder to track does not mean unmeasurable. Consistent brand tracking, measures of awareness, consideration and preference, and longer-term effectiveness analysis can indicate whether brand investment is strengthening demand. Over time, this tends to show up in performance activity as well, through improved efficiency, lower acquisition costs and reduced reliance on paid channels.
This distinction matters, because it explains why performance can appear effective early on, yet become increasingly expensive when brand investment is deprioritised.
The hidden cost of renting market share
When performance becomes the primary engine of growth, market share is effectively rented. Investment secures visibility for as long as spend continues. When budgets reduce or competition intensifies, that visibility fades. As more brands compete for the same audiences, acquisition costs rise and efficiency declines.
This pattern is well documented in long-term effectiveness research by Les Binet and Peter Field, drawing on decades of evidence from the IPA Effectiveness Databank. Their work shows that while short-term activation drives immediate sales, sustained brand investment is the primary driver of long-term growth, profit and preference. Brands that underinvest in brand building tend to see performance efficiency erode over time, even as spend increases.
For CFOs and boards, rising CPAs and growing reliance on paid channels should be understood as signals, not anomalies. They point to increasing dependency, margin pressure and exposure to forces outside the business’s control.
“Rising acquisition costs are often a symptom of underinvestment in brand.”
What brand investment actually means
Brand investment is often misunderstood because it is defined by what is most visible. Campaigns, content and creative expression are easy to point to, but they represent only a small part of where brand value is created.
At its core, brand investment establishes clarity. It defines what the business stands for, who it is for, and how it chooses to compete. This work sits upstream of marketing and informs decisions across product, experience, pricing and growth. It gives leadership teams a framework for acting with consistency and intent.
This investment does not generate immediate returns in isolation, but it reduces risk over time. It lowers the cost of growth by increasing preference and trust. It supports margin by reducing price sensitivity. It creates resilience by reducing dependence on paid channels.
Creative and campaign activity sit on top of this foundation. Their role is to express strategy, not replace it. When the foundation is strong, execution works harder. When it is weak, performance activity must compensate, often at increasing cost.
Why brand and business strategy cannot be separated
One of the most limiting assumptions in organisations is that brand strategy sits alongside business strategy rather than within it. In practice, every strategic decision shapes the brand, whether it is labelled that way or not.
Pricing communicates value. Product decisions communicate intent. The experience a brand creates signals whether it can be trusted. Partnerships communicate alignment.
When brand thinking is embedded into these decisions, it creates coherence. It helps leadership teams prioritise opportunities and apply restraint where necessary. When it is excluded, short-term tactics fill the space, leading to fragmentation and inefficiency.
This is particularly relevant in considered categories such as home and lifestyle, where trust, taste and emotional connection play a central role in choice. These brands are built through consistency and clarity over time, not frequency alone.
Growing with intention, not urgency
Sustainable growth requires ambition, but also restraint. It demands a clear sense of direction and a willingness to invest in foundations that may not deliver immediate returns, but which compound in value over time.
Brands that grow with intention understand the role performance marketing plays. They use it to convert demand, not to manufacture it. Performance executes against a clear brand direction. Brand sets the context within which growth decisions are made.
When this balance is in place, growth becomes more stable. Acquisition costs begin to normalise. Loyalty strengthens. The business becomes better equipped to build long-term value.
True Story’s perspective
The pressure to grow is not new, but the way growth is pursued has shifted. Short-term performance has come to dominate conversations that should be about long-term health.
Brand should never sit downstream of performance. It is not a creative output shaped by what converts fastest. It is a strategic discipline that provides clarity, coherence and intent. When brand strategy is embedded at the heart of the business, performance becomes more effective, not less.
At True Story, we believe the strongest brands are built when growth is guided by clarity rather than urgency. This is how brands reduce risk, stabilise performance and build lasting value, creating growth that is owned rather than rented.
This is where your True Story begins.
FAQ
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Brand marketing focuses on building long-term preference, trust and familiarity, shaping how people perceive a brand before they are ready to buy. Performance marketing focuses on converting existing demand, capturing intent and driving measurable action in the short term. Both are essential, but they play different roles. Brand creates the conditions for demand to exist, while performance activates that demand when the moment is right.
Long-term effectiveness research by Les Binet and Peter Field consistently shows that sustainable growth depends on investing in both, with brand providing the foundation that makes performance more efficient over time.
https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/effectiveness-research-analysis/les-binet-peter-field -
Rising cost per acquisition is often treated as a signal to optimise channels or increase spend, but it can also indicate weakening brand strength. When a brand lacks familiarity or preference, performance activity has to work harder to persuade people, which increases costs. Strong brands tend to convert more efficiently because customers already recognise and trust them.
Over time, underinvestment in brand typically leads to greater reliance on paid channels and reduced resilience when budgets tighten.
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Brand is harder to track than performance activity in the short term, but it is not unmeasurable. Consistent brand tracking, including awareness, consideration and preference metrics, provides clear indicators of brand strength over time. These measures help leadership teams understand whether brand investment is building momentum beyond immediate sales.
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As brand strength increases, performance marketing tends to become more efficient. Higher familiarity and preference reduce friction at the point of decision, leading to improved conversion rates, lower acquisition costs and less dependence on paid media. This relationship is well established in long-term effectiveness research and is one of the clearest commercial signals of successful brand investment.
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There is no fixed formula that works for every business, but evidence consistently shows that over-indexing on short-term activation can undermine long-term growth. Research exploring the balance between brand building and activation highlights that the order matters as much as the split. Brand should set direction, with performance executing against that direction.
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Brand strategy shapes how a business is understood, trusted and chosen. Decisions about pricing, product development, partnerships and customer experience all communicate brand intent, whether they are framed that way or not. When brand thinking is embedded into business strategy, it creates coherence, reduces risk and supports more consistent decision-making at leadership level.
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Growing with intention means pursuing growth that is guided by clarity and long-term value rather than short-term pressure alone. It involves investing in the foundations that build trust, relevance and preference over time, even when those investments take longer to show results. Brands that grow with intention are typically more resilient, more efficient and better equipped to sustain growth as conditions change.