Misaligned metrics and the drawbacks of short-term thinking

Watch the full Brand x Performance: Nailing the 2025 Growth Formula webinar here, featuring Carly Griffin (Head of Growth, Eucalyptus).

Brand often gets neglected - not because it's ineffective, but because it doesn’t pay off by end of month. That's a problem.

Why? The finance team wants numbers. Sales wants leads. The CEO wants growth yesterday. And performance marketing offers a sugar rush that looks like results: clicks, conversions, revenue. Brand? That’s the spinach you’re meant to eat for long-term health.

But as the Nike example showed, when you cut brand, the sugar rush wears off—and the business experiences an unwanted downturn.

The problem: not investing in the right balance of brand and performance

Nike spent years overinvesting in performance and underinvesting in brand. The result? Sales have plummeted. Revenue has been down 10% year-on-year, and fell to $11.59 billion for the first fiscal quarter of 2025 (it was $12.94 billion the year prior). Stock prices have also been on a tumultuous rollercoaster – notably, on June 28 2024, Nike’s stock value fell 21%.

Tracksuit’s brand tracking shows that this lines up, with data reflecting the fact that consumers have been pulling away from Nike as a brand.

From April ‘24 to Sep ‘24, all of its funnel metrics have decreased. Usage has gone down 4% from 81% to 77%; Consideration down 6% from 79% to 73%; and Preference down 6% from 39% to 33%. In terms of human numbers, this means ~5.7M less people consider Nike when purchasing sportswear, and ~8M less people now prefer the Nike brand.

That’s what happens when you optimize the bottom of the funnel and ignore the top.

The right measurement tools and metrics are key

Carly Griffin (Head of Growth, Eucalyptus) shared in the webinar how they measure the effectiveness of its marketing. "We really rallied our team around creative efficiency metrics… hook rates, hold rates, CTRs, top of funnel conversion."

And for brand? Tracksuit became their tool of choice. "It quantifies the unquantifiable," Carly said.

The fix: measure what matters

1. Define your metrics: Not all KPIs are created equal. Different types of demand require different forms of measurement. Short-term = CTRs, CVRs, CAC. Long-term = awareness, consideration, salience, LTV. Measure both. Report both. Balance both.
2. Ask your customers: Eucalyptus implemented a survey that asked, "How did you hear about us?" Carly admits it's imperfect, but crucial: "It allows us to pair that with a spend metric and understand efficiency in terms of a performance channel."
3. Make brand commercially fluent: Talking about brand without talking about revenue is a one-way ticket to getting your budget slashed. Use language CFOs care about. For example: "Brand equity isn't just a marketing nice-to-have, it is a strategic asset that drives commercial growth."

Takeaway: If you only feed the bottom of the funnel, it collapses

The illusion of performance is seductive. It shows you numbers. It offers control. But it only works because brand did the heavy lifting years ago.

When brand and performance work together, you build future demand and harvest existing interest. When they don’t? You chase diminishing returns until the budget dries up.