Tracksuit CEO and co-founder Connor Archbold on why the brand versus performance marketing debate is really a boardroom literacy problem – and how marketers can stop losing a winnable argument.
It's hard being the person walking into the boardroom to fight what feels like a losing battle for brand investment. Demoralising, even. As a marketer, you’re being held accountable for every dollar you spend, often in the pursuit of just two things: clicks and sales.
Effective marketing is more than that though. You know that. But it's near impossible to convince people otherwise if you don't have a common language to rally around.
The digital marketing revolution of the last 15 to 20 years saw the pendulum swing too far. There was a time when it was really smart to build a business by focusing on performance marketing; you could put one dollar into the Google and Meta slot machine and get three dollars back. Cha-ching! It was a great way to generate revenue, but with the cookie apocalypse, attribution has become more expensive and brand marketing is back in vogue.
In too many companies, brand literacy is seen as a marketing responsibility, when really it’s a leadership skill that determines whether a business becomes stagnant or scales.
From day one at Tracksuit, we made a deliberate decision to invest in brand. The reason we exist is to give marketers credibility in boardrooms to invest in long-term brand building. We’re roughly 80-20 brand to performance; we've fully drunk the Kool-Aid. That's not an easy position to hold when you've raised venture capital. Consistency with our message has resulted in Tracksuit being the fastest growing company to ever come out of New Zealand.
To me, brand literacy is when someone understands that brand is a growth lever for a business. It’s not a vibe or an inkling; it’s marketing science. It’s also the secret weapon for marketers in a fight.
If your commercial stakeholders aren’t brand believers, then they aren’t literate. And it’s your job to educate them.
The brand literacy toolkit
What you say and what people hear can be two different things. If you can convince a CFO that brand spend is like an investment in future revenue then you're speaking their language.
1. Change the word ‘brand’ to ‘future demand’
Firstly, read the book Future Demand by James Hurman… then let your CFO borrow your copy. Hurman’s book clearly articulates the idea of building future demand and capturing existing demand – those being two main jobs of marketers. It’s a super effective way to communicate the reframe of brand marketing versus performance marketing to your execs. Because everyone believes in demand.
Whether you’re a marketer or a CFO, you know that the more demand there is, the more likely that company is to succeed long-term. Talking in economic model terms is a reframe they can get behind.
2. Reference the GOAT
Introduce your C-suite to external sources, because going head to head is tough – they're trying to save money and you're trying to spend money. But what you're both trying to do is make more money for the company.
I always point to Warren Buffett. He's one of the most successful resource allocators of our time and the way he invests is simple: commoditised categories, outstanding brands. Look at Geico Insurance. Geico went from a mid-tier insurer to one of the biggest in America, and that's purely down to brand. Everyone knows their Super Bowl ads. They're effective, consistent, creative. They hit every marketing effectiveness principle on the head and it's created immense growth.
Buffett is someone who everyone in your boardroom admires. He’s not a marketer but a legendary investor, and he cares about brand first and foremost.
“The most effective brand marketing is consistent, it's creative and it happens over years, not months. You're day trading your performance marketing, and you're Warren Buffett-ing your brand spend – placing one bet and making that bet over and over again.”
3. Own brand metrics that matter
A mistake marketers often make is saying, “This is the brand budget – we can’t be held accountable to it.” But you can. You just have to find the right metrics.
With performance marketing, the metrics are already familiar – ROAS, cost per acquisition, conversion rate. On the brand side, you're measuring mental availability: unaided and aided awareness, consideration, preference, brand sentiment, whether people trust you, whether they see you as quality. If you're moving the needle on all those things, then customers are more likely to choose your brand when they're ready to purchase. That’s not unaccountable spend – that’s investing in future demand and being able to prove it.
Proof that great brands build great businesses
The example I go to is the hand sanitiser business, Touchland. When they launched in the US around seven years ago, they led by investing in brand. They thought about their packaging, their colours, how to turn a hand sanitiser into an aspirational product – an accessory people wanted on their bags. Now they're a top-selling product at Sephora and the founders recently exited for $700 million.
Think about how many hand sanitiser businesses launched in the last seven years – the pandemic happened, there would have been thousands, tens of thousands. The one that's been acquired for hundreds of millions is the one that leaned into brand.
You can see it in the numbers at Tracksuit too: 70% of customers come to us inbound, either referred by other customers, partners, our community, or simply through word of mouth. That is the result of building a brand.
Build capability
You can now enrol in Tracksuit University. It’s an evidence-backed course taught by James Hurman. 8 modules, about 12 minutes long each, totally digestible. And because it’s digestible, you can share it with your C-suite. So it's not just you having that battle – you can point to someone else saying the same thing. It covers all the key tenets of marketing science, but uses studies and data to prove it.
Where to from here?
Despite the shifts, marketing science principles haven't actually changed. Brand is and always has been the emotional connective tissue between customers and companies. If you want your business to grow long-term and sustainably, focus on how people feel about it.
Don’t lose a winnable argument. Brand literacy is how you flip the script.
Go deeper on how to translate brand performance into business value by watching our webinar, 'Brand, Translated for the Boardroom', featuring Caitlin Choate, CMO of Boatsetter, and Sam Brough, Head of Brand at Tracksuit.
