Is brand marketing worth the investment relative to measurable demand generation?

Harry Stebbings · Jun 17, 2024

Founders neglect brand until far too late, and it's much harder to build a brand once you're halfway through

31:24 20VC: Index's Danny Rimer on Investing Lessons from Hits like Figma, Discord and Etsy to Missing Snapchat, Airbnb, Facebook & Spotify | Why Valuation is a Trap and Market Sizing, Signalling and Sector/Geo-Specific Funds are all Noise

Harry Stebbings · Jan 31, 2026

Brand and brand marketing are the most important thing in growth, a lesson learned only after years of ignoring it

32:15 20Growth: How Wix Built a $100M Marketing Machine | Why LTV is BS and Why Time Return On Investment is the Most Important Metric | How to 10x Your Growth: What is the Next Great Channel with Omer Shai, CMO @ Wix

Harry Stebbings · Apr 4, 2026

Nick at Revolut said brand marketing was the single biggest thing he changed his mind on over the journey of building Revolut

33:00 20VC: Hims & Hers: $4.3BN Market Cap on $2.3BN of Revenue: The Comeback | Why Being Public is 10x Better | The Death of the "Strategy" Hire | Why Performance Marketing is Worse than Brand Marketing with Andrew Dudum

Adam Foroughi · Apr 27, 2026 · hedged

Not investing in brand marketing and brand awareness earlier may have been a mistake, though it is easy to say that only in hindsight.

The company was growing extremely fast with a lean organization and heads down on execution.

Scope: hindsight judgment; excused by speed of growth and lean team

48:12 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi

Harry Stebbings · May 11, 2026

Nick from Revolut said that brand awareness, which he had assumed was fluffy, turned out to be one of the most powerful drivers of the business

18:12 20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora

Mike Salguero · Apr 5, 2023

Brand marketing spend is not defensible because it cannot be tied back to dollars and it wrecks your customer acquisition cost to lifetime value ratio

They spent $8.5M on brand marketing and the only answer to 'how do we measure this' was vague 'lift' with no payback back to revenue

Scope: based on ButcherBox's own $8.5M brand spend last year; framed from the perspective of a highly measurement-driven operator

45:47 20VC: The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding, The Most In Detail Breakdown of Consumer Subscription Unit Economics & Why D2C and Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backable Model with Mike Salguero, Founder @ ButcherBox

Mike Salguero · Apr 5, 2023

Brand marketing was ButcherBox's biggest resource allocation mistake, and marketing dollars now have to be defensible with a traceable line to revenue

Hope-for-the-best spend can't be justified; every dollar deployed needs to show how it turns into something better

49:22 20VC: The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding, The Most In Detail Breakdown of Consumer Subscription Unit Economics & Why D2C and Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backable Model with Mike Salguero, Founder @ ButcherBox

Harry Stebbings · Sep 27, 2024 · hedged

Brand marketing is largely BS because companies can turn it off for a month with no revenue impact, though high-visibility sponsorships like Expensify's race car or HubSpot's Wimbledon placement are genuinely good brand marketing

When companies switch brand spend off, revenue is not impacted, and the defence is always that it will pay off years later

Scope: admits he provokes for a reaction; concedes sustained high-visibility sponsorships are effective

38:55 20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

Brand marketing is one of the hardest things to run despite being very important, because the benefit is indirect and you can't measure its CAC

You can spend unlimited amounts without observing conversion, so there's no measurable CAC to optimize against

37:13 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

Harry Stebbings · Sep 5, 2025

Revolut's Nik said his single biggest mindset shift over his time at Revolut was coming to believe brand marketing matters, having previously dismissed anything unmeasurable as useless

43:08 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader

Raaz Herzberg · Dec 12, 2025

Brand is massively underrated and pipeline numbers are overrated as a marketing focus

Every company measures attribution differently so pipeline numbers are hard to interpret; the things hardest to quantify are often what matter most, and enterprise purchases are ultimately made by people who buy on brand the way they buy a phone without comparing specs

Scope: defines brand as any effort that makes your company seem knowledgeable/expert to your audience, not billboards

17:29 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Alex Bouaziz · Oct 22, 2025

Brand marketing is now essential for Deel, though it did not matter two or three years ago

The only path for Deel to become a $100B+ company that changes how HR and payroll are perceived requires the brand to be aligned and far better known

29:54 Brand marketing becomes necessary only once pursuing massive scale

Alex Bouaziz · Oct 22, 2025 · hedged

There is real value in sports brand marketing for Deel — F1, football, golf — because such assets can serve both B2B customers and end users

Owning B2B assets lets you bring customers to events and invest in them, while also getting end users excited creates long-term brand alignment

32:22 Sports sponsorship serves both b2b customers and consumer brand simultaneously

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

The real measure of social success is becoming part of culture — people referencing your brand unprompted in group chats and applying for jobs because of it — more than view or conversion metrics

Those signals mark an iconic brand and actual difference-making; formal metrics like 1M views and how-did-you-hear-about-us surveys exist but matter less to her

26:02 Cultural reference not views or conversion is the real metric

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

ElevenLabs is not easy to sell despite the product's pull

The environment is hard; a strong brand like OpenAI, Anthropic or ElevenLabs only makes it marginally easier

18:51 Strong brand only marginally eases selling

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

You can and should measure a return on large brand events, using influenced revenue alongside directly closed revenue

There are multiple variations of attribution you can plan for; the London Summit also proved a European company can run a big show that people get passionate about

52:16 Brand events are measurable via influenced revenue

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

Growth investment should be layered: product-driven growth first because it is scalable and measurable, then performance marketing which is similar but scales with budget, and brand marketing last because it is neither measurable nor scalable

A product change that lifts conversion 5% keeps working indefinitely and scales by adding team; paid channels scale with spend; brand has a longer and more speculative return

16:46 Layer growth investment product first then paid then brand by scalability and measurability

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Brand marketing is worth doing even though its value is nearly impossible to measure

People need to hear about your product three to seven times before giving it an honest trial, and unmeasurable does not mean useless

35:51 Brand marketing is worth it despite being nearly unmeasurable since repeated exposure drives trial

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

The metric that matters in brand marketing is incremental impressions beyond what you paid for — whether the moment goes viral

Anyone will quote you an expected impression count for a TV campaign or jersey sponsorship; the interesting upside is the extra impressions from people reposting and sharing

36:14 Incremental impressions beyond what was paid for is the real brand marketing metric

Chris Degnan · Oct 10, 2025

For an early-stage company, the highest-leverage marketing spend is building customer case studies and getting them into prospects' hands, not brand spending like paying a famous athlete for endorsement

Egos grow to the point people misattribute company success to themselves; he sees his own role as fortunate timing and good mentors

14:12 Customer case studies beat celebrity brand endorsement for early stage spend

Harry Stebbings · Aug 18, 2025

The right sequence for a company is brand and mindshare first, then rigorous performance optimization of the CAC-to-LTV funnel, and then brand again at scale — brand matters most at both ends of the curve

Once performance marketing is executed as well as it can be, brand becomes the marginal lever again, which is why Revolut now sponsors race cars

15:56 Brand first then performance optimization then brand again at scale

Matteo Franceschetti · Nov 20, 2023

For considered purchases you need roughly seven brand touch points before a customer buys, so you should surround them across channels

A ~$2,000 purchase is not impulsive, so customers must see or hear about the brand about seven times, including through friends, before pulling the trigger

15:28 Considered purchases require about seven brand touchpoints before conversion

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

Brand marketing is hard to attribute and low priority early on, but it does make a difference for enterprise segments and new geographies where buyers won't discover you through content

A large-company CIO evaluating solutions pays attention to brand presence rather than finding you via content; HubSpot's logo on a Wimbledon semifinalist generated widespread awareness pings

39:23 Brand pays off in enterprise and new geographies

Will Quist · Sep 12, 2022 · hedged

The industry has over-rotated away from branding toward performance marketing — branding is more important than he previously thought

After an era of overspending on brand identity too early, the hard pivot to purely performance-oriented SEM made sense at the time but went too far; once a company has enough case studies verifying it creates real market value, further performance marketing has diminishing returns and brand awareness becomes the higher operating leverage spend

40:32 Industry over corrected to performance marketing brand value grows once value proposition is verified

Carlos Delatorre · Jan 24, 2025

Brand is highly important and probably always has been; challengers without brand need a higher caliber of salesperson, while a bigger brand makes great reps more productive and lets you hire more junior or less talented ones.

62:26 Brand strength determines required seller caliber

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Even offline brand channels can be made measurable if you engineer an attribution mechanism into them — what matters is how you manage attribution

Revolut pairs jet-bridge airport advertising with vending machines dispensing unlinked cards that users activate via QR code, which links the activity directly to signups and shows a huge ROI

18:43 Engineer attribution mechanisms into offline brand channels to make them measurable

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Mid-funnel activity is uniquely valuable because it generates revenue immediately while also creating brand halo and deeper content, unlike pure performance marketing which builds no product awareness or brand consideration, and unlike pure brand which drives no revenue

Performance marketing is banners and six-second videos, too short to build awareness or consideration, while mid-funnel gets high reach plus some attribution

20:19 Mid funnel content uniquely combines immediate revenue and brand halo

Harry Stebbings · Jun 27, 2026

CAC also falls through brand proliferation — once you're the default or number one provider you acquire users simply by being number one

Brand marketing kicks in at scale and pulls in users without direct acquisition spend

36:49 Default brand status lowers acquisition cost

Harry Stebbings · Aug 10, 2022

Proactively investing in community connections is very hard to justify for budget owners, especially at public companies, because there is no payback period or correlation to revenue.

It's a big spend against intangible, questionable returns that a public-company budget owner has to defend

40:54 Community connection investment is hard to justify since it has no payback period or revenue correlation

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Companies should run a portfolio across short-term measurable initiatives and long-term unmeasurable ones, which requires a founder with deep conviction who won't kill things for lacking direct revenue attribution.

If everything is tied to revenue everyone does the same stuff, and it's hard to build something differentiated when everyone measures themselves the same way

41:23 Run a portfolio of measurable short term and unmeasurable long term initiatives requiring founder conviction

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Performance channels should be judged by whether CAC is below predicted LTV, but organic social and enterprise marketing require longer time horizons and deliberately fuzzy attribution

The relationship between organic or enterprise activity and revenue is much harder to gauge, so you measure campaign-level lift — e.g. relative lead lift in a target geo versus comparable cities — rather than any single channel in isolation

34:19 Performance channels use cac vs ltv organic and enterprise need longer horizons and fuzzy attribution

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Brand marketing should start from day one, beginning with the founder authentically engaging the community rather than paid awareness campaigns

If you're building a massive company you want people to join you for the mission, and early brand is built by the founder being relatable and putting themselves out there

41:16 Founder led authentic community engagement not paid spend builds early brand

Andrew Dudum · Apr 4, 2026 · hedged

A Ferrari F1 sponsorship would probably not be net positive for Hims today, but global sponsorships like the World Cup will make sense in the coming years

Hims isn't yet live with enough penetration in enough markets for a global footprint to pay off, though the international commitment this year changes that trajectory

27:37 Global sponsorship value gated by market footprint

Raaz Herzberg · Dec 12, 2025

The real measure of marketing is whether you walk into warm rooms or cold rooms with prospects

In a cold room you start from zero explaining who you are and where you came from; a warm room means your audience has already heard your name, and you can feel this from the ground and from the sales team

19:04 Warm room versus cold room is the real marketing measure

Ryan Petersen · Jun 20, 2026

Fame from repeated media appearances compounds invisibly — you can't attribute it to any single appearance until suddenly you're famous

Steve Martin did every late night show and still went unrecognized in Hollywood, then five years later was the most famous comedian in America without being able to point to one cause

69:13 Repeated media appearances compound invisibly until they dont

Patrick Forquer · May 11, 2026

You must build the demand-gen plumbing — inbound lead scoring, data enrichment, routing, territory assignment, response SLAs and staffing — before running a big brand campaign.

Without the infrastructure and headcount you can't follow up on the leads in a timely way; even last year they had more SMB leads than they could work.

14:40 Brand spend requires lead routing plumbing first

Patrick Forquer · May 11, 2026

Brand efficacy can be scored and tracked by market and should be reported to the board like any other metric.

Their marketing team built a framework to score it, and they're measuring real progress against it.

18:24 Brand efficacy is scoreable and board reportable

Alex Schultz · Sep 5, 2025

The distinction between brand marketing and performance/direct-response marketing is false — all marketing is performance marketing

Brand work still has to perform; he wouldn't have taken the CMO job if he thought brand didn't matter

0:04 Brand and performance are not distinct all marketing must perform

Alex Schultz · Sep 5, 2025 · hedged

Meta is under-indexed on brand spend and should expand its brand budget

Meta spends the lowest percentage of operating income on disclosed media of the big tech 10-Ks apart from Apple, and there are brand outcomes you can't achieve just by running a banner ad inside WhatsApp

61:13 Large tech firms remain under invested in brand spend

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

Media acquisitions should be judged as top-of-funnel awareness within a multi-touch attribution model, not on single-property conversion ROI.

No user listens to a podcast and immediately buys the product; brand awareness takes multiple touches before someone becomes curious enough to convert.

42:57 Judge media investments via multi touch attribution not single touch roi