Question 1

What is the difference between brand and performance marketing?

Accepted Answer

**Performance marketing** aims to produce a measurable action now. **Brand marketing** aims to build memory and preference that makes future actions more likely and cheaper.

**Performance marketing** is search ads, paid social conversion campaigns, affiliate and retargeting. It is measurable, attributable, and can be switched on and off. Spend more, get more, within limits.

**Brand marketing** is broad reach advertising, sponsorship, distinctive assets, and consistent creative. Its effects are delayed, diffuse and hard to attribute to any specific sale.

**Why the distinction became contentious.** Digital measurement made performance marketing appear obviously superior — you can see the return. Brand spend showed nothing comparable, so budgets shifted toward performance for a decade.

**What the evidence says.** The most influential work here is by **Les Binet and Peter Field**, analysing the IPA databank of marketing effectiveness cases. Their central finding is that long-term business effects come predominantly from **brand building**, while short-term sales activation drives immediate response — and that the two operate on different timescales through different mechanisms.

Their widely cited conclusion is roughly a **60:40 split** — around 60% of budget to brand, 40% to activation — varying by category and business model.

**The mechanism.** Brand building creates **mental availability**: being remembered at the moment someone has a need. Performance marketing captures demand that already exists. Capture without creation eventually exhausts the available demand, which is why pure-performance businesses often see rising CAC over time — they are competing harder for a pool nobody is refilling.

**The measurement asymmetry is the trap.** Brand effects are real but poorly captured by attribution models, so the measurable channel looks better than it is. This is a **measurement artefact**, not a finding.

**What to use instead:** geographic holdout tests, incrementality experiments, marketing mix modelling, and brand tracking surveys measuring awareness and consideration.

**Both are necessary**, and the split depends on how established the brand already is.

Question 2

What is brand lift measurement?

Accepted Answer

Measuring whether advertising changed what people think — awareness, recall, consideration, favourability — rather than what they immediately bought. It exists because a great deal of advertising

Question 3

What is brand architecture, and when does a rebrand actually make sense?

Accepted Answer

Brand architecture is how a company organises the relationship between its brands — the corporate name, product brands, sub-brands and endorsements — and it is the decision that determines whether

Question 4

Why do marketing and sales teams disagree about leads?

Accepted Answer

Because they are measured on different things and, almost always, have never agreed a written definition of what a qualified lead is — so each is optimising honestly against incompatible targets. The

Question 5

Does demographic targeting actually work?

Accepted Answer

Less well than the industry's reliance on it suggests. Demographic categories are weak predictors of purchasing behaviour, and the evidence for this has been accumulating for years without changing

Question 6

What is in-housing, and why do brands keep changing their minds about it?

Accepted Answer

Moving marketing capability from agencies to employed teams — and the reason it cycles is that the trade-offs are genuine on both sides, so the correct answer changes as a company's circumstances

Question 7

What is incrementality testing?

Accepted Answer

Measuring whether marketing actually caused additional sales — as opposed to taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway, which is what most attribution does. The problem it solves.

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