As the head of marketing at Pavilion, I’ve watched the brand vs. demand generation debate play out in boardrooms, marketing forums and our own community of go-to-market leaders. The discussion around this topic has rightfully inspired strong emotions amongst marketers, many of whom are feeling anxious, exhausted, unappreciated, and under attack.
On one side, there’s the pressure for immediate leads and revenue; on the other, the less tangible pursuit of brand equity. It’s a real tension many B2B marketers feel. In fact, a 2023 Content Marketing Institute survey found 85% of B2B marketers prioritize lead generation, while only 65% focus on brand awareness.
The skew toward short-term results is understandable – CEOs and CFOs demand quarterly numbers - but it ignores the fact that investing in brand is not a “nice-to-have,” it’s a long-term growth engine and competitive moat that drives financial outcomes and complements demand gen.
This push and pull - and the constant pressure to drive greater results with fewer resources - has led many accomplished CMOs to throw in the towel and leave their full time, in-house roles to go fractional (where they can at least have full ownership over their quality of life), pursue less senior roles where they can just “do the job” without having to constantly justify marketing’s value, or change professions entirely.
It feels like the profession of marketing is at an inflection point, and marketers like myself have to take some ownership for where we are. As the people who are entrusted with conveying the value of products, companies, and brands through effective marketing, we have largely failed to effectively market marketing itself.
LinkedIn has been rife with posts complaining about the state of the marketing profession (including this one, this one, and this one by yours truly) and a quick glance at the number and nature of comments shows just how fired up marketers are.
We can rail all we want against the eroding belief that brand matters, or we can do something about it.
What's the best way to "market marketing"?
Any good marketing campaign has to start with a solid understanding of the audience and messaging that speaks to their needs, challenges, and pain points. In this case, CEOs, CFOs and boards are key constituents that hold the marketing purse strings and determine who gets hired, fired, and promoted.
Their language is data. So, let’s start by unpacking why brand matters, with data to back it up.
The Brand vs. Demand Generation Debate
First, let’s acknowledge the debate. Demand generation (performance marketing, lead gen, pipeline growth) is absolutely critical – no CMO survives without delivering tangible leads and ROI in the short run. But an over-reliance on chasing quick wins can starve the brand.
Marketing budgets have swung heavily to demand programs at the expense of brand-building. Over the last five years, brand marketing spend has dropped by more than 40%, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey.
When every dollar must show immediate ROI, brand often gets labeled a luxury or “fluff.” This mindset is shortsighted. Yes, turning up demand gen will boost leads now – but turning off brand investment undermines the very factors that make those leads easier to win and convert.
I’ve spoken with many CMOs through Pavilion’s community, and the tug-of-war between brand and demand is a hot topic. The truth is, it’s not either/or. It’s a balance.
Marketing thought leaders like Binet and Field have long advocated a 60/40 or 70/30 split (long-term brand building vs. short-term activation) for optimal results. In B2B, their research found that brand-building campaigns are significantly more effective at driving large business benefits than activation campaigns.
Short-term demand tactics (email blasts, promos, gated content) are like carbs – a quick energy spike that fades. Brand marketing is the protein – harder to cook but providing sustained strength. The companies that balance the two see both immediate wins and lasting growth.
Data is bearing this out, with research from Benchmarker revealing that B2B SaaS companies putting more emphasis on brand over lead-gen were more likely to hit or exceed their revenue goals.
In other words, brand investment isn’t at odds with revenue – it’s actually correlated with better revenue performance.
This makes sense: a strong brand makes all your demand efforts more effective. It’s easier to generate leads when buyers recognize and trust your name. It’s easier to convert opportunities when your reputation precedes you.
Brand and demand are symbiotic. Yet too often, brand gets de-prioritized because it’s harder to measure in the short term.
Owning Financial Outcomes and Speaking the CFO’s Language
One of my key responsibilities as Pavilion’s head of marketing is to translate marketing impact into CFO/CEO language. Building a beloved brand is great, but leadership wants to see business outcomes: revenue, pipeline, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value.
Historically, measuring brand value has been an industry-wide challenge for marketers, and the lack of a persuasive solution has fueled the skepticism around brand spend. In the past, we’d speak in terms of impressions, awareness lifts, or Net Promoter Scores – important, but not always convincing to a CFO focused on the bottom line.
Today, we have better data and models to connect brand to financial outcomes. I firmly believe CMOs must own those outcomes - and that means drawing a line from brand initiatives to metrics like CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), LTV (Customer Lifetime Value), win rates, and market share.
And we now have evidence to make that case. For example, when your brand is strong, buyers come to you – reducing reliance on expensive outbound marketing and lowering your CAC. According to one marketing attribution study, investing in brand will pay off by lowering your CAC “for eternity”, whereas if you neglect brand “you’ll always be struggling” with acquisition costs.
That’s a bold statement, but it rings true: every dollar put into brand building creates organic momentum that makes each new customer cheaper to acquire in the long run.
Consider the flip side: neglecting brand health drives up acquisition costs and even stalls growth. I’ve seen this firsthand throughout my years as an agency owner and CMO – when we dial back on brand campaigns, our funnel metrics eventually suffer. Fewer people search for our company by name, click-through rates drop, sales cycles stretch out.
There’s a lag, but it’s real. Financially, it shows up as a higher CAC and lower marketing efficiency. No CMO wants to tell the board that their CAC is rising because the brand isn’t resonating – so we need to get ahead of that.
The good news is that brand impact can be measured over time by tracking things like branded search volume, direct traffic, share of voice, and win rates in deals where your brand is the known player versus a no-name. All are proxy metrics for brand strength.
There’s a proven rule in advertising: if your Share of Voice is greater than your Share of Market, your business tends to grow. Strong brands maintain excess share of voice because they invest consistently, and that future-proofs their revenue.
We know this as marketers, but how do we persuade CFOs, CEOs and boards that this matters?
To do so, we must speak in the language of data by focusing on LTV:CAC and using this to demonstrate how strong brands deliver a healthy return on marketing investment.
Brand drives that in two ways: it lowers CAC (as discussed) and it can increase LTV.
How?
By improving retention, expansion, and pricing power.
Customers stick around longer and spend more with companies they trust and feel loyal to. A trusted brand can even charge a price premium – consumers (and business buyers) often pay more for the assurance of a well-known name. One study found 35% of consumers prefer to buy from established brands with premium prices over cheaper alternatives. In B2B, where purchases are career-critical, decision makers will pay a premium for the safe, reputable choice (thus the old adage, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”). This directly boosts margin and LTV per customer.
Ultimately, tying brand to financial metrics converts skeptics. When a marketing leader can show that last quarter’s brand campaign led to a statistically significant lift in web traffic and lead quality, which in turn is lowering blended CAC, that gets the CFO nodding. When they demonstrate that above-industry customer retention (LTV) is partly due to brand loyalty and community, the investment in brand suddenly appears on the balance sheet as reduced churn and increased upsell.
As CMOs, we have to continually educate our stakeholders that brand is a long-term asset – one that appreciates and yields returns, even if it doesn’t show up in the pipeline report immediately.
Demand Gen Brings Leads, But Brand Builds a Moat (Especially in the AI Era)
Make no mistake: I am a huge proponent of demand generation. Although I'm a classically trained marketer (by which I mean, I got my MBA in Marketing), I cut my teeth for the first decade of my marketing career focused on demand gen.
In B2B, with long sales cycles and revenue targets, you absolutely need robust demand-gen engines to generate and accelerate pipeline. But I often frame it this way to my team and fellow executives: demand gen wins quarters, brand wins decades.
Demand gen might get a prospect in the door, but brand is why they stay, why they advocate for you internally, and why they choose you in the first place.
This long-term view is more important than ever in today’s environment. We’re in a world where AI is rapidly commoditizing content creation, sales outreach, even aspects of product development. What happens when every competitor can pump out dozens of SEO blog posts or personalized email campaigns at the push of a button? The noise increases and the playing field levels. Tactics that used to give an edge – clever content, fast-follow feature development, automated sales cadences – are becoming table stakes as generative AI makes them faster and cheaper for everyone.
In this landscape, brand becomes the ultimate moat.
Your brand – the genuine trust and emotional connection you’ve built with your audience – cannot be copied overnight by an algorithm. It’s the sum of your reputation, customer experiences, and identity.
As AI drives the cost of producing content toward zero, the value of authentic brand authority skyrockets. We see this in content marketing: generic blog posts are everywhere now, so buyers tune them out. What breaks through is distinctive, trusted branding and thought leadership.
A recent analysis put it well: with AI flooding the internet with “good enough” content, undifferentiated content is now a commodity. To stand out, you need a moat of brand-specific value and creativity that AI alone can’t replicate.
The same goes for sales.
AI can help reps send more emails, but if prospects’ inboxes are bombarded by similar-sounding pitches, having a recognized brand name in the subject line can cut through the noise.
Think about it: if you get two cold emails, one from a startup you’ve never heard of and one from, say, Salesforce or HubSpot, which are you more likely to respond to?
Familiarity breeds trust. Strong brand serves as risk cover for buyers. In a complex B2B purchase, where multiple stakeholders are involved, going with the known brand feels safer. In fact, research shows 81% of B2B decision-makers cite brand trust as a crucial factor in purchase decisions. Buyers will actively avoid engaging with vendors they don’t know – one study found 81% of B2B buyers won’t even consider a business if the group of decision-makers hasn’t heard of the company at the start of the process.
That’s stunning.
You could have the best product, but if your brand is invisible, you’re simply not in the running for 8 out of 10 buyers. On the flip side, strong brand awareness literally gets you a seat at the table, increasing your chance of making the shortlist of considered suppliers.
Brand trust reduces perceived risk, which accelerates deals.
B2B purchases are not just rational evaluations; they’re emotional decisions about whom to bet on. Buyers choose known, trusted brands to minimize personal career risk. It’s easy to defend a choice internally when it’s a brand everyone knows (“Our CFO has heard of you, so she’s comfortable signing off”). Conversely, advocating for an unknown vendor is a career gamble. No wonder 43% of buyers opt for the lowest-risk option the majority of the time.
A strong brand makes the decision easier for all stakeholders, aligning them faster. This translates into shorter sales cycles and larger deals, outcomes any CEO or CRO loves.
In essence, brand creates a halo of credibility that smooths the entire revenue process.
To put it bluntly: in a world where products can be cloned and tactics can be outsourced to AI, your brand is one of the few truly unique assets you have. It’s your long-term moat.
Competitors might match your features or copy your latest campaign, but they can’t copy the years of trust, goodwill, and identity you’ve built with customers. That moat shows up in many ways – customers giving you the benefit of the doubt, prospects coming to you first, and even talent wanting to work for your company.
All of these are strategic advantages that pay dividends well beyond the next quarter.
How Brand Investment Drives Demand, Lowers CAC, and Boosts LTV (Data Included)
Let’s get specific about the data-backed benefits of brand investment for B2B tech companies. We’ve talked conceptually; now here are the concrete effects, with numbers:
- Higher Demand and Pipeline Generation: Strong brand awareness fills the funnel organically. You become a default choice buyers think of when a need arises. Evidence? B2B brands with greater “mental availability” (being top-of-mind) are 30% more likely to be shortlisted by buyers. Additionally, 81% of B2B buyers say they will not even consider providers that lack a familiar brand. That means a trusted brand dramatically increases your pool of potential leads and RFP invitations. Companies investing in brand also see more consistent inbound traffic – for example, Slack’s huge brand buzz led to 91% of its 108 million monthly website visitors coming directly (typing in slack.com), an incredible indicator of organic demand driven by brand recognition. More inbound interest and shortlist inclusion equals a fuller pipeline without heavy paid push.
- Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Brand marketing makes every lead cheaper to acquire. When buyers already know who you are, you spend less convincing them. One scenario analysis showed that by reallocating budget into brand-building, a firm could improve conversion rates (from 5% to 6.5%) and reduce CAC by 10% (from $6,000 to $5,400 per customer). Even a modest bump in conversion and efficiency yields big savings at scale. Another industry expert put it succinctly: invest in your brand and it will lower your CAC perpetually. We see this at Pavilion with referral and word-of-mouth leads (fueled by brand advocacy) which have near-zero acquisition cost. Strong brands also enjoy higher click-through rates and quality scores in digital campaigns, further lowering paid media costs. All told, companies with well-known brands spend significantly less on marketing to acquire each customer. (And as mentioned, skipping brand spend entirely will raise CAC – you’re essentially paying a “tax” to make up for lack of awareness.)
- Improved Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and Loyalty: Brand doesn’t stop at acquisition; it influences the lifetime value of a customer. A positive brand reputation builds trust and loyalty that translate to repeat business, upsells, and long-term relationships. Customers of strong brands tend to stick around longer and spend more – in part because they feel confident they made the right choice and continue to see the brand deliver on its promise. A distinctive brand also allows for premium pricing, which directly increases LTV via higher average revenue per customer. Research shows 71% of customers will buy (and stay) with brands they trust. In B2B tech, trust is paramount: enterprises often sign multi-year contracts and expand usage only with vendors they have faith in. Moreover, a loyal customer base fed by brand affinity turns into advocates, driving new referrals (which circle back to lower CAC). One case study calculation found that additional brand investment yielded a staggering 2400% ROI in LTV – for every $1 spent on brand marketing, the firm realized $24 in increased lifetime customer value. Even if that was a modeled scenario, it illustrates the outsized impact on the LTV/CAC ratio when brand boosts retention and spend.
In short, brand investment pays off across the entire funnel. It fills the top of funnel with more and better leads, improves throughput and conversion by making your company the trusted choice, lowers acquisition costs by creating pull (not just push), and extends customer value through loyalty and pricing power.
These are exactly the levers any CFO or CEO wants to optimize.
Crucially, these benefits compound over time. A dollar spent on demand gen might get you an MQL today (and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow), but a dollar spent on brand can continue to deliver returns in many forms – tomorrow, next quarter, and years from now.
As Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle, nicely summarized, brand investment is a gift that keeps on giving, whereas if you under-invest, “you'll always be struggling” to keep customer acquisition efficient.
Real B2B Case Studies: Brand as a Long-Term Growth Driver
Still not convinced? Let’s look at a few well-known B2B tech companies that have reaped the rewards of brand investment:
- Salesforce: The cloud CRM giant is a textbook example of balancing brand and demand. Salesforce is legendary for its brand marketing: from the high-profile Dreamforce event, to thought leadership on the “future of work,” to its bold No Software logo campaign in early days. As a result, Salesforce’s name is virtually synonymous with CRM. They consistently allocate a large portion of budget to brand-building – about 50% of their marketing budget goes to brand – and it shows in their brand equity. Salesforce’s brand value surged 13% year-over-year to $23.8 billion in 2023 (as calculated by Brand Finance). This brand strength has helped Salesforce dominate market share while spending less on reactive sales than competitors. A strong brand presence means Salesforce is on every enterprise shortlist (no one gets fired for choosing Salesforce, either!), enabling them to close massive deals and expand customers into multi-cloud offerings (boosting LTV). The takeaway: even as a B2B company, Salesforce treats brand like an asset – and it translates into being #1 in their category with resilient growth.
- Slack: In the startup SaaS world, Slack is often cited for its explosive growth without traditional advertising early on. Slack focused on building a fun, human brand that users loved – with a distinctive tone, design, and customer experience. That brand affinity fueled word-of-mouth that money can’t buy. The result: Slack acquired customers at astonishing speed while spending very little on demand gen in the beginning. In its first year, 8,000 people signed up on Slack’s very first day due largely to buzz around its brand and product. Over time, Slack did invest in marketing, but it remained heavily skewed to organic brand-driven growth. As noted in an analysis by OpenView, Slack “relies heavily on word-of-mouth marketing and brand building to generate organic traffic”. By the time it was a few years old, Slack’s website was getting over 100 million visits per month, ~91% of which came directly (people typing the URL or using bookmarks). That is an incredible metric – it means an enormous user base was coming in through pure brand recall, not paid ads. Slack’s strong brand not only lowered their customer acquisition costs, it also created a loyal community of users who championed the product to others (further amplifying demand). Even with competitors aplenty, Slack’s brand helped it become verbified (“Slack me this”) and enabled a $27 billion acquisition by Salesforce. The Slack story shows how, especially in a crowded tech market, brand can be the differentiator that propels you to the front of the pack.
- IBM: An old guard example, but worth mentioning because IBM’s story epitomizes the value of brand in B2B. IBM has reinvented itself multiple times (from hardware to services to AI) and sustained over a century in tech – a feat few companies can claim. A major reason IBM retained enterprise customers through transitions is the immense trust in the IBM brand. Decades ago, IBM became known as the safe, reliable choice for IT solutions, giving rise to the phrase “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” That sentiment persists in various forms today. IBM’s brand equity has been valued at tens of billions of dollars, reflecting how it can charge premium prices and still win business because buyers feel secure with Big Blue. More concretely, IBM’s brand allows it to sell to the C-suite – CEOs view IBM as a strategic partner, not just a vendor. This opens doors for cross-selling and long-term contracts (huge LTV). It also cushions IBM during rough periods; clients are more forgiving of hiccups because of the underlying brand relationship. While not every company can be IBM, the lesson is that a strong brand creates resilience. It builds a reservoir of goodwill and credibility that can carry you through product cycles and competitive onslaughts. Modern analogues of this effect exist too – consider how Microsoft’s brand helped it enter cloud computing as a trusted enterprise player (even though AWS was first), or how Google’s brand enables it to win corporate clients for things beyond search. Brand paves the way for expansion and longevity.
- HubSpot: As a final example, HubSpot demonstrates brand-building through content and community. In its early days, HubSpot coined the term “Inbound Marketing” and invested heavily in educating the market with blogs, ebooks, webinars – effectively branding itself as the guru of modern marketing. This thought leadership and helpful content built massive awareness and trust among marketers. The payoff: HubSpot’s website became a magnet for millions of visitors seeking marketing advice, many of whom eventually became HubSpot customers. By establishing a strong brand in its domain (with a vibrant online community and the annual INBOUND conference), HubSpot achieved efficient growth with a relatively lower CAC – a large portion of their leads came to them organically via their content brand. Even in the product, HubSpot infused an approachable, friendly brand personality (“HubSpotty” as insiders call it) which drove high customer satisfaction and loyalty. HubSpot’s average LTV grew as they expanded their suite, and customers stuck around to keep learning from the brand they trusted. The company’s successful IPO and continued growth were built as much on brand as on product. HubSpot shows that brand-building through valuable content and thought leadership can create a self-sustaining demand machine. When you’re seen as the trusted source in your field, customers come to you pre-sold.
Each of these cases – whether a massive enterprise like IBM or a once-startup like Slack – underscores the central theme: brand is a long-term force-multiplier in B2B. It makes your marketing more efficient (lowering CAC), your sales more effective (higher win rates and faster closes), and your customer base more loyal (raising LTV). In a competitive environment, those advantages accumulate into a durable competitive moat.
Making Brand Investment Actionable for B2B CMOs
It’s one thing to acknowledge brand matters; it’s another to secure budget and execute on it. As a marketing leader accountable to CEOs and boards, I know we must be practical and data-driven about brand investments.
Here are a few actionable takeaways to ensure brand actually delivers business value:
- Balance Short and Long Term: Don’t let brand work come at the expense of quarterly targets – but do carve out a protected percentage of your budget (say 15-30% to start, scaling to the classic ~50/50 split as you grow) specifically for brand-building campaigns. This might include thought leadership content, PR, big awareness campaigns, community programs, and broad-reach advertising that isn’t tied to immediate lead gen. Communicate this strategy clearly to stakeholders: explain the 95-5 rule (that ~95% of your market isn’t buying at any given moment, so you must market to them before they’re in-market). This helps everyone understand why some marketing spend isn’t expected to convert next week – it’s planting seeds for future harvests.
- Set Brand Metrics and Track Them: To speak the language of the CFO, establish KPIs for brand health and link them to financial outcomes. Track surveys of brand awareness, consideration, and preference in your target market over time. Monitor share of search (how often your brand is searched relative to peers) as a leading indicator – it’s been called the “Brand Index” for the digital age because it often predicts market share. Keep an eye on direct traffic and branded keyword traffic to your site. These metrics show if your brand efforts are increasing your mindshare. Then connect the dots: for example, as brand awareness in a region rises, do you see lift in organic leads or win rates? Often you will. Showing those correlations builds credibility for brand spend. Modern analytics and attribution tools (while not perfect for brand) are getting better at multi-touch influence, so use them to attribute some portion of revenue to earlier-stage brand touches (e.g. someone heard your podcast or saw an eBook months before becoming a lead).
- Educate and Align Your Team: Ensure your marketing team and even sales team understand the dual mandate of marketing – demand and brand. It’s easy for performance marketers to get siloed on lead KPIs and for brand creatives to chase awards; both need a unifying strategy. Share data like the ones in this article with your team: for instance, that branding improves conversion rates down the line by building trust, or that brand-led buyers close faster and bigger. It reinforces that everyone is ultimately working toward revenue, just on different timelines. Also, involve sales leadership in brand initiatives – when Sales understands that marketing’s top-of-funnel brand work is warming up accounts, they appreciate it more. Some of the best alignment we’ve achieved at Pavilion came from showing our sales reps how brand initiatives like our Summits and Conference drove inbound leads and higher win rates.
- Stay Patient but Persistent: Building a B2B brand is a marathon, not a sprint. Set expectations with executives that while you will measure impact, some benefits accrue in longer cycles (6-12+ months). Les Binet’s research shows brand campaigns often take at least 6 months to show significant impact in B2B. Don’t let impatience kill the effort. I’ve often had to defend brand budget during tough quarters by pointing back to the evidence and our strategy – essentially reminding everyone that cutting brand spend is “eating the seed corn.” Conversely, when results do come, celebrate and publicize them. Did aided awareness in a new segment jump 20% after a campaign? Did organic web sign-ups hit a new high? Let the company know. Over time, these wins build a culture that values brand.
Brand is the bedrock for sustainable B2B marketing success. It’s the moat that protects you when competitors ramp up their ads, when AI floods the zone and makes certain channels or tactics less effective, or when algorithms change. It’s the trust factor that makes customers choose you and stick with you. And importantly, it’s a lever for financial performance – fueling demand, slashing CAC, and boosting LTV in ways that are now quantifiable.
A Call to Action for CMOs
As Pavilion’s head of marketing, I champion brand investment not out of nostalgia or vanity, but because the data convinces me that it delivers long-term ROI that any CFO would applaud.
The debate of brand vs. demand should really end in a truce: you need both, working hand-in-hand. Brand builds the reservoir of goodwill and awareness that makes demand generation dramatically more efficient.
My call to fellow B2B CMOs is this: be the voice in the room advocating for brand’s strategic importance. Bring the evidence to support it, speak in revenue terms, and don’t shy away from owning the outcomes.
In a B2B world increasingly crowded with content and lookalike solutions (especially as AI lowers the bar to entry), your brand might be the most defensible asset you have.
Nurture it.
In the long run, a strong brand is demand – it’s just demand that you don’t have to pay for anew each quarter. Invest wisely today, and your brand will compound in value, paying dividends for years in customer trust, preference, and growth.
That is a legacy any CMO would be proud of.
