It’s Time for Some Course Correction
Somewhere along the way, vast numbers of executives and marketers lost their damn minds and forgot what marketing is supposed to do. The mid to late 2010s gave rise to the idea that being able to measure something means we understand it completely and can control it. From this, the idea of performance marketing was born. Sleek name that sounds like it brings accountability (and to a degree it can), I get why it took off.
The problem is, if you’re running your entire marketing strategy like it's one giant performance campaign, you're not just missing the point—your growth potential is at risk.
For years, companies have been hypnotized by this very catchy song. To be fair, it’s got some HOOKS: Click-through rates, conversion percentages, cost per acquisition, ROAS—all those beautiful, measurable things that give spreadsheets a spit shine and make executives feel warm inside. It created an environment where marketing was viewed in a vacuum, and every little thing could have simple-to-understand, immediate ROI. It officially brought the instant gratification plague to marketing.
Here's what should be keeping you up at night (rather than the one month of LinkedIn advertising you scraped together and greenlit with unrealistic expectations behind it):
This obsession with performance marketing as everything marketing is supposed to be is disconnected from reality, and that’s usually not good.
The Real Split: Mental Availability vs. Closing an Opportunity
In the simplest terms, marketing has two jobs. First, it needs to embed your brand into the brains of as many potential category buyers as possible. This creates what smart people started calling "mental availability." Second, it needs to activate buyers who are currently in their buying cycle and actively making a purchase decision. The first is brand building. The second is performance marketing. It’s relatively straightforward, but we’ve twisted it into a complex pretzel.
And here’s the pretzel’s origin story: companies measure everything against performance marketing metrics, even though these two responsibilities operate in completely different universes. In addition to the metrics laid out above, we're talking about conversions, MQLs, pipeline health, opportunities won and lost, closed revenue—metrics that have absolutely nothing to do with whether people know who you are, feel good about your product set, or would consider you when they're ready to buy.
The way we approach marketing hasn’t just become misguided; it's also mathematically ridiculous when you understand the market reality we operate in.
The 95/5 Rule: Why Your Strategy Is Backwards
The 95/5 rule is something I thought was common knowledge. Yet, every day, I see organizations operate the opposite way and expect things from marketing that don’t make sense. If you aren’t familiar, it should reshape how you think about everything:
At any given moment, only about 5% of your potential market is ready to buy what you're selling.
Just 5%. And you're not going to close all of them, even if you've built a performance marketing machine that makes CFOs weep.
That leaves 95% of your market who aren't buying, regardless of the brilliant campaign you throw at them. They're not ready, they don't have budget, they're not in pain, or they simply don't need what you're selling right now. That shouldn’t hurt and it shouldn’t make you think you’re doing something wrong. It’s just how it is. And quite frankly, if you were marketed to, like you’re probably marketing to the 95%, it would frustrate you deeply. Because it’s annoying, and it’s not relevant.
No one would mistake me for someone good at math, but let's do some math-like thinking on this insanity anyway:
We’ve somehow gotten to a point where we built our entire measurement framework around what's happening with 5% of the market, tried to apply it everywhere, and thus completely ignored strategies that could influence the other 95%. Does that sound like a winning approach to you? It shouldn't.
Layer in the reality of long, dynamic sales cycles where decisions get made over months or years, and that 5% window can seem even smaller. Yet most companies are doubling down on tactics designed to capture immediate action from people who aren't ready to do anything. Or worse, they are challenging marketing teams to “do more with less” WHILE still geared towards only performance marketing approaches. It’s already a narrow window of opportunity, and “do more with less” basically closes it.
The Performance Marketing Ceiling
Here's where recent, conventional wisdom gets super twisted. Establishing well-run performance marketing ops is still essential. This is not a call to eliminate it. But companies hit their stride with paid search, social advertising, email campaigns, everyone gets super high and caught up in the idea that measuring it means we can control it. And I get it, I lived through the advent of this, it’s nice to feel that in control.
Here's the catch that nobody talks about—performance marketing puts a ceiling on how big you can become, if it’s all you do.
Think about it logically. Performance marketing works best with people who are already somewhat aware of you and somewhat ready to buy. The company that’s willing to take a risk on a brand they don't know? That's a specific slice of the market—inexperienced buyers, highly price-sensitive shoppers, people with high risk tolerance, or some other outlier variable that makes them willing to convert quickly. You can’t build your entire marketing strategy around these things.
The vast majority of the market? They make decisions based on brands they already know and trust. They buy from companies that have earned a place in their minds long before they ever entered a buying cycle. All those buyer research studies consistently show that most deals go to brands already in a decision maker’s consideration set.
Most organizations have positioning issues, stagnant messaging, visual identities that lack juice, and content that doesn’t support their distinctiveness. These are all brand-level problems, yet we see everyone try to solve them through performance marketing. That’s why so many are stuck.
Why the Traditional Funnel Was Always Fiction
For decades, we've worshipped at the altar of the funnel. Awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, decision at the bottom. Nice, neat, linear. The only problem? It was never real.
Our obsession, fueled by martech, with making buyer journeys controllable, a straight line, and managed by the magic of technology, has only gotten worse. Some models claim people aren't ready to buy until they've received a "sufficient number of touches,” as if that makes sense? As if all “touches” are created equal?
There’s attribution modeling that gives a wildly outsized amount of credit to the last tactic that was in front of someone. And of course, how many martech vendors claim you need things like a specific number of impressions before someone becomes a qualified lead? Is an impression the same as a touch? Are all impressions the same?
Does any of this feel remotely connected to how human beings make decisions?
Are you telling me that organizational politics, budget cycles, seasonality, varied business needs, and market dynamics can all be overcome by hitting some magical threshold of emails opened, ad impressions delivered, whitepapers downloaded, and webinars attended?
Get outta here with that, please.
That kind of logic suggests that whichever marketing team reaches the required touchpoint score first will win, as if the buyers themselves have no autonomy. It implies that a LinkedIn ad impression somehow carries exponentially more weight than recommendations from trusted peers, or a video review of a product, simply because you can measure it.
The reality is messier and more human. B2B consideration sets are formed in buyers' minds before they even begin a buying cycle. As people go about their lives, they gather information about solutions through varied sources, they see products/services being used in the wild, and yes, even from advertising!
It's not sequential. It's not linear. It's dynamic and unpredictable.
Brand Building: The Actual Growth Engine You're Ignoring
Here's the part that should be obvious, but somehow isn’t. Brand and performance are two sides of the same coin (that coin is called…marketing). Performance marketing is impossible to be great at over time without brand building.
We buy from brands we trust. We consider brands we remember. We choose brands that feel familiar. Without that legwork, the expectations and the thresholds for performance marketers will just become more and more unrealistic and require more and more money to be spent to have a shot at meeting targets. That’s not sustainable.
Brand building is about being known and building memory structures. If you focus significant effort on creating that mental real estate when buyers are in the 95% (not actively shopping), don't you think you'll have a much better shot at activating them when they join the 5%?
That's the leverage most companies are missing. Brand building isn't something you do once you're “big enough”—it's the single biggest factor that determines if you get to grow up and be big.
But brand marketing requires a fundamentally different approach from performance marketing. It’s not just fluff campaigns that say nothing. It's about reach over precision. It's about creating awareness and the beginnings of trust well ahead of buying moments. It means wide-reaching efforts to develop and maintain mental availability in as many people as possible in your category.
And finally, it means messaging and content that aligns with people who are not ready to buy but might help anyway, even though you’re not getting something immediately.
This approach produces revenue distributed over time, as more and more of your reached audience eventually comes in-market. This will not map at all to the "dollar in, dollar out" model because it simply can't be proven with the same incremental ROI expectations that performance marketing sets.
The Investment vs. Expense Trap
Most organizations aren't treating marketing budgets as investments. When marketing is held entirely to short-term returns, it becomes just an activation expense on existing market opportunities. That’s the opposite of growth.
Often, this isn’t even bad work; it’s teams working to realize the potential deals that their existing market position gives them or ensure closes that probably would have happened anyway. It’s still important, but it isn’t EVERYTHING.
A brand with 20% existing market share is likely going to receive about 20% of the potential buyers in any given quarter, assuming everything stays balanced between competitors. Performance marketing helps you win that 20% more effectively, but growing requires investment that reaches more of the market. It's an intentional act that requires long-term thinking—a currency that seems quite scarce lately.
The Context Marketing Operates In
Marketing isn't a closed system where experiments can be replicated with predictable results. We're participating in a highly dynamic environment where external variables often massively outweigh our tactical efforts.
Want a 10% lift in new customer revenue? Well, is the market you’re in growing by 10%? If it's not, that growth has to come from competitors' market share—a massively different level of effort and timeline, and one that is impossible without well-executed brand building within that larger timeline.
Planning to increase ad spend by 10% and expecting 10% better results? What if your biggest competitor simultaneously increases theirs by 30%? Or a new market entrant shows up with crazy funding and a 4x ad spend budget vs. what you’ve allocated?
We frequently over-attribute success to performance marketing because our tools don't capture underlying brand and market conditions.
Is your brand as visible as it was previously? How much effort went into getting into consideration sets compared to activating on existing awareness and consideration?
Too much of modern marketing tries to repeat what worked in the past without accounting for current conditions. But those conditions, both brand health and market dynamics, usually matter most of all.
Building the Case for Balance
The hardest part of fixing this isn't understanding the problem, I think a lot of marketers do, but they’re all very tired. The hurdle is making an internal case for change.
Showing declining pipeline numbers and pointing to them as reasons to invest in brand marketing feels indirect to leadership focused on immediate performance metrics. And somewhere along the way, CMO became a position that wasn’t sharing the table with other executives, with their own pile of expertise and perspective, but rather beholden to them and having to irrationally prove that marketing is worthy of basic investment and expectations? How does that add up?
That's why insights need to come from external context more often. Is category demand moving in the same direction as your sales pipeline? Are competitors taking up more market share of voice? Are you as visible as you were previously? This is harder to measure, but it’s not impossible by any stretch.
Often, the wake-up call comes from direct sales feedback about brand awareness challenges and consideration set shortcomings. But by the time it reaches sales, you’re already way behind, and it's going to be quite a while before brand investment can turn things around.
Marketing should have eyes on the market and the ability to pulse-check how things are shifting. The insights from that external, macro view give brand arguments solid grounding, because brand marketing is fundamentally about visibility and memorability in a crowded market.
The Path Forward: Integration, Not Opposition
This isn't about choosing brand building over performance marketing, but rather about understanding how they work together and measuring each appropriately for what it's designed to do.
Performance marketing remains crucial for capturing demand and converting intent. But it works exponentially better when it operates on a foundation of brand awareness and mental availability that was built over time through consistent, compelling, put the prospective buyer first, broad-reach efforts.
The companies that crack this code understand that marketing operates on two different time horizons with two different measurement frameworks. They invest in both systematically, measure each with appropriate KPIs, and resist the temptation to judge long-term brand building by short-term performance metrics.
Your growth ceiling isn't determined by how efficiently you can convert the 5% who are ready to buy today. It's determined by how effectively you can influence the 95% who will be ready to buy tomorrow, next quarter, or next year.
Stop acting like performance marketing is all marketing. Start building a brand that makes your performance marketing perform the best it possibly can. The paradigm we’re currently in isn’t fair to prospects, customers, or marketers anywhere.
If this rant resonated with you, please reach out. We always love meeting new people.