Cutting Brand Budget Is the Most Expensive Decision You Can Make
Scott Schnaars
Every time things get tight, it happens. The board wants optimization. The CFO wants efficiency. And somehow, the first thing to go is the work that is hardest to defend in a spreadsheet: the brand.
It is the most predictable mistake in B2B marketing. And it costs more than it saves.
Devon Shaw, who runs LinkedIn's marketing solutions business and spent 17 years at Google before that, put it plainly: brand and performance are not two distinct things. They are intricately connected. The more you try to pull them apart, the less successful brands tend to become.
Here is the mechanics of why that is true. 95% of your buyers are not in market at any given time. Only 5% are ready to buy in any given window. If you only run performance marketing, you are optimizing entirely for that 5%. The other 95%, the ones who will need what you sell in three, six, twelve months, never hear from you. When they are ready, you are not on the shortlist. And if you are not on day-one of the consideration list, your probability of winning drops dramatically.
The companies that figure this out are the ones that stop treating brand and performance as a budget allocation debate and start treating them as two parts of the same engine. Brand builds the runway. Performance is the takeoff. Cut the runway, and the plane still needs to take off.
The data is not subtle about this. Shaw referenced his own team's experience: two years ago, LinkedIn's marketing team increased ad spend on LinkedIn. When they mapped that spend over time against branded search, direct traffic, and profile views, the correlation was obvious. Not perfect, but obvious. The brand investment was generating signals downstream that showed up in performance metrics.
Most marketing orgs cannot make that case because they are not measuring the relationship between brand and performance. They are measuring each separately, at the point of conversion, and then wondering why the performance numbers look thin when brand is cut.
The CFO conversation changes when you can show that the awareness work from Q2 shows up in the pipeline velocity numbers in Q4. That requires different measurement, not different marketing.
Strong beliefs, loosely held. But the data on this one is pretty hard to argue with.
If you are rethinking your measurement approach, reach out. Scott.
