Why the Best Growth Strategy Still Begins with Brand

Over the last decade, I have attended lots of boardroom marketing presentations. In almost all of them, the growth marketing team came armed with spreadsheets and the brand marketing team, which I was part of, came armed with intuition. One side had CAC, ROAS, CTR, MQLs, conversion rates, attribution windows, dashboards that refreshed every few minutes, and the smug confidence that comes from bringing numbers to a room full of anxious executives. The other side included language such as salience, distinctiveness, memory, trust, associations, and long-term demand. You can guess which side usually won the budget argument.

Yet this tension, for all its familiarity, rests on a false premise. It puts growth marketing and brand marketing as opposing sides with different ideologies. But the truth is they represent the two sides of the same coin: one captures demand. The other creates the conditions under which demand becomes easier, cheaper, stronger, and more durable.

It's very important to understand that because modern firms are under pressure from every angle. Marketing budgets have stagnated. Gartner says average marketing budgets remained flat at 7.7% of company revenue in 2025, the same level as in 2024. That means every rupee, dollar, and pound is being pushed harder, stretched thinner, and expected to prove itself faster. In that kind of climate, it becomes seductive to fund what can be measured instantly. The spreadsheet begins to look like a moral document. If paid search converts this quarter and brand film cannot be tied neatly to a last-click model, then the growth team looks disciplined while the brand team looks indulgent. This is how shortsightedness comes up as rigour. (Gartner)

History keeps warning us about this. Les Binet and Peter Field’s long-running IPA work exists because marketers have been making this mistake for years. Their research on balancing long-term brand building and short-term activation clearly framed the tension, and subsequent IPA updates continued to show that the best outcomes come from balance, with the famous sweet spot often around 60:40 in favour of brand building. More recent IPA material makes the point even more bluntly, arguing for complementary choices rather than binary ones. WARC pushes the same conclusion from another direction. Its recent work says that shifting from a performance-heavy approach to a more balanced one can lift revenue ROI by 25% to 100%, especially when brand and performance are integrated rather than funded as separate entities. (IPA)

What is striking is how many firms still behave as if growth happens in a vacuum. They talk about growth marketing as though it were a self-contained engine, a machine that can be tuned indefinitely through better targeting, tighter copy, sharper funnels, faster experiments, and more aggressive optimization. This works for a while. Then the costs rise. CAC inches upward. Click-through rates wobble. Conversions become more expensive. The audience starts feeling overfished. Leadership responds by asking for more optimization from the same channels. The team trims landing pages, rotates creatives, retests hooks, and squeezes another quarter out of the system. What they are actually doing is harvesting a field they forgot to reseed.

That is the best way to understand the relationship between brand and growth. Growth is the harvest. Brand is the soil.

A great performance campaign can pull demand forward. It cannot manufacture deep trust from scratch. It can convert existing intent. It struggles when intent is weak, indifference is high, and category sameness has set in. Brand works further upstream. It shapes memory, expectations, emotional ease, and the small, invisible bias that helps someone choose one company over another when product features blur together. The brand makes the ad easier to click. The brand makes the landing page more believable. A brand makes the sales call less defensive. Brand makes the price feel less painful. Brand makes retention less brittle.

Edelman’s 2025 special report on brands provides a useful lens here. It says trust is as much of a purchase consideration as quality and price. That single finding should change how growth leaders think about their dashboards. Trust is not a fluffy emotional afterthought. It functions like a conversion multiplier. If the market trusts you, your messaging lands with less resistance. If the market trusts you, the same paid campaign can work harder. If the market trusts you, small mistakes do less damage. If the market trusts you, your growth team is no longer carrying the whole burden alone. (Edelman)

This is why the phrase brand versus growth has always felt intellectually thin. It is like arguing whether the heart matters more than blood flow. The tension exists inside company structures, budgeting habits, measurement systems, and executive psychology. It does not exist in the customer's mind. The customer does not wake up and say, I am responding to brand investment today, but tomorrow I shall reward growth activation. The customer experiences a company as one thing. One name. One promise. One feeling. One memory structure. One level of trust. One accumulated sense of whether this company is worth attention.

The trouble is that modern marketing teams often split themselves in ways the customer never would. Brand teams chase campaigns, growth teams chase efficiency, product teams chase launches, sales teams chase pipeline, and leadership acts surprised when the company sounds like five different organisations in a trench coat. Then someone from finance asks which team is driving growth. The answer, usually, is none of them in full because the system is fragmented.

There is another reason this debate survives. Growth marketing flatters leadership by creating the appearance of control. Adjust a bid. Change a headline. Launch a test. Watch a number move. That feels managerial. Brand asks for patience, repetition, judgment, and a tolerance for effects that accumulate rather than flash. Many leaders say they believe in long-term thinking until the budget meeting begins. Then they become quarter-sized philosophers.

Yet the evidence keeps piling up in the same direction. IPA effectiveness work links brand building to stronger pricing power and profit outcomes. WARC argues that integration between brand and performance increases returns. Edelman shows trust functioning as a competitive variable in buying behaviour. This is the same story told three ways. The demand you capture tomorrow depends heavily on the meaning you built yesterday. (IPA)

A useful way to frame this for executives is through sequence. Growth marketing is brilliant at answering the question, how do we get this person to act now. Brand marketing answers the earlier and larger question: why would this person care in the first place? Firms obsessed with the first question alone eventually run into diminishing returns because they keep trying to accelerate decision-making in a market that has not been properly prepared. They want a lower CAC without stronger memory. They want better conversion without deeper trust. They want scale without symbolism. That is like asking a salesman to sell harder in a town that has never heard of the company.

This problem becomes even sharper in the AI era. As content becomes cheaper and more abundant, more firms will flood channels with optimized messages. More landing pages will look competent. More emails will feel polished. More ads will be generated at machine speed. In that environment, brand becomes more essential because it helps the market remember who you are after the assets blur together. Growth can buy exposure. Brand gives that exposure a place to land.

I sometimes think half of performance marketing’s success has come from brand marketing’s unpaid labour. The growth team gets the click because the brand team made the company feel familiar. The retargeting campaign converts because prior storytelling made the offer legible. The product launch was successful because years of positioning had reduced scepticism before the campaign even began. The spreadsheet records the harvest and quietly omits the season that made the harvest possible.

So what should companies do?

First, stop organizing the budget conversation as if brand and growth are fighting over the same oxygen. Treat them as linked investments with different time signatures. One compounds slowly. One converts quickly. Both matter.

Second, change the language inside the company. Growth should not be defined solely by channel efficiency. Growth should include trust, memory, pricing power, referral energy, and retention quality. Otherwise, the growth team ends up optimising for a smaller idea than growth itself.

Third, force integration at the message level. The ad copy, the homepage, the founder interviews, the product experience, the email nurture, the sales deck, all of it should come from the same narrative root. Growth without narrative coherence becomes clever noise. A brand without distribution becomes elegant obscurity.

Fourth, measure better. Keep tracking the hard metrics. Then add a few that capture the larger system. What do customers think we stand for? How quickly do people recognise us? What premium are they willing to pay? How often do they return? What words do they use for us when we are absent from the room? Those are not vanity questions but early signals of future growth quality.

There is growth because there is brand. Brand aids growth by reducing friction. Brand leads to growth because it makes the market more willing to choose, remember, trust, and return. The healthiest companies understand this instinctively. They do not ask which matters more: brand or growth. They ask whether the two are strengthening each other.

That is the real question.

And it is the only one worth funding.