Notes · November 10, 2026

Performance rents attention. Brand owns it.

Anyone can generate seven ads before lunch now.

Nobody can generate why the thing exists. Copy got cheap. What happened didn't.

Three symptoms. One problem.

30% off, sitewide, again. Plenty of the people using the code were going to buy anyway. You paid them to do it on a Friday. The discount isn't the problem. Not knowing who it moved is.

The ad wins. Nobody remembers it. Great month, blank memory. You keep renting the sale and never build the thing people recall.

CAC climbs. The answer is more. Same ad, higher bill, same few people who were already about to buy. The auction didn't get harder. You stopped being the obvious choice.

You're buying demand you haven't earned.

Belief is a multiplier.

When people already trust you, the same ad gets clicked more and the same page converts more. They come back without a coupon. Each of those makes the click cheaper and the customer worth more.

The best-known evidence is Binet and Field for the IPA: the strongest results came from roughly 60% brand building and 40% activation. Activation is fast. It does little for long-term growth and pricing power.1 The IPA's follow-up found the short-term share of campaigns kept growing while very large business effects got rarer.

Then it reaches the valuation.

Revenue is what you earned. The multiple is what a buyer believes about next year. Revenue bought with promotions and paid media has to be bought again every year. Revenue from a brand people ask for is easier to believe. Buyers pay more for the second kind.

Kantar's BrandZ puts brand at around 30% of business value, on average, for the world's most valuable brands. Those are enormous public companies, so it won't map to a $20M brand. The direction does.2

$10M to $100M. Same order every time.

Around $10M: earn the click. Be specific about who you're for, and who you're not. Find the channel that works. Make it boring.

$10M to $30M: make the click cheaper. Build belief on purpose. Proof. A point of view. A face. The right shelves. A look that's still you on a bad day. Stop treating the sale as the finish line. Watch new-customer cost, repeat and full-price share.

$30M to $100M: own your slot. People ask for you by name. Shelves pull instead of being pushed. Every extra dollar lands on warm ground, and scaling stops feeling like a bet.

The numbers are rough. The order isn't.

What's the hardest part of building your brand right now?

Say it on the wall. Or find out whether you're rented or owned.

Sources

  1. Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It (IPA, 2013), and the follow-up Effectiveness in Context (IPA, 2018), which refines the split to 62:38. IPA summary and report (PDF).
  2. Kantar, BrandZ Most Valuable Global Brands 2024. Report (PDF).