By Kasia flood
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July 6, 2026
“Claude can write copy, but it can’t take customers to dinner.”
This was a line I heard recently justifying why marketing roles were amongst the easiest to cut in today’s AI era.
I see this thinking reflected online constantly right now: In the mass layoff announcements, Linkedin posts on recession budget cuts and experts claiming they replaced their marketing team entirely with a handful of clever prompts.
The further a function sits from revenue generation, the easier it can be to lose sight of its ROI and the harder it can be to justify when times are tight. Marketing is further than sales. Within Marketing, Branding is further than Performance… At least in terms of how many teams are structured today.
A recent study by ACM Digital highlighted the rising pressure to justify brand investment with CEO and CFO support for long-term brand initiatives dropping 11% in the last two years. Research suggests the average marketing budget brand/performance split is 20/80 despite researchers suggesting a 60/40 being the ideal for most (SOURCE).
The problem is, just because a business may struggle to measure something, doesn’t mean the impact isn’t there. Your brand lives on, regardless of if there’s someone deliberately managing it or not. And good or bad, it likely impacts your revenue much more than you think.
Too often, “branding” is dismissed in boardrooms as a cost-center subject crafted in a soft, dream land of moodboards and macbooks. It’s a flashier logo, a catchy headline and a nice-to-have headcount when sales are strong.
While those assumptions make my stomach squirm, as an industry, we reinforce them constantly. Aligning your message to your audience is Marketing 101 and yet, we’ve routinely failed to follow our own playbook when it comes to advocating for value internally. I can practically hear the budget hitting the floor every time a report on vanity metrics like follower count is sent up to executives or a MarTech reps pitches Share of Voice or sentiment monitoring to a SME founder focused on their bottom line.
And yet it happens. Over and over again.
We live through the consequences of this every day: Brand becomes siloed from demand and performance marketing, related budgets are trimmed (if it ever existed) and the roles serving it are undervalued. This leaves branding ripe for the reaping in an era of tightened belts and AI-driven savings.
How we talk about brand matters because once undervalued, it becomes significantly harder to manage effectively. So how does brand impact revenue?
Well my friend, I’m so glad you asked. Let’s dig in…
Inbound revenue is like a fire… It warms our souls, lights the office and keeps us all employed. And much like a fire, it takes three things to keep it burning: a spark, fuel and oxygen. Branding supports them all.
Everything starts with a good product. That’s your spark and despite common belief, no amount of marketing “spin” can sustainably hide lacking one. Properly managed, a brand has three key outcomes: Awareness, trust and dialogue, all of which carry an important impact on your business.
Awareness is your fuel. It’s how many people are aware your business exists (reach) and how familiar they are with your offering (depth). You can have the world’s best product and most optimized funnel, but none of it matters if no one can find it. That’s what awareness does. It brings potential buyers to your bonfire and warms them up until they’re ready.
Trust is your oxygen. It’s the feeling your business gives off through its personality, values and general customer experience. Nothing smothers a flame like bad faith or a negative review. This is the element that’s earned. That lives through the opinions of others. Trust tells buyers that they’re not going to get burned— that it’s okay to bring a friend, get close and warm their hands.
The best part is, when you’ve got a good group gathering around your fire, they talk. They share ideas, feedback and what they need next. The most successful brands don’t just broadcast what they do. They listen. They take all that insight back to the fire and build a better product. And the bonfire rages on.
Performance marketing or lead generation focuses on attracting and converting buyers. Tactics like AdWords or comparative landing pages all look to spark discovery amongst those actively searching for a solution and convince them yours is the one. It’s important… but incomplete on its own.
Why is that? Because as few as 5% of your market is actually ready to buy (Binet & Field). They aren’t Googling vendors or demoing your competitors. Hell, they may not even have a pain point… yet. Dedicating all your efforts here is like fishing in a tank rather than the ocean.
When “demand generation” gained popularity in the mid 2010s it seemed like the industry was finally getting it right. It was the prophesized pairing of brand and performance. It acknowledged the opportunities that lead gen ignored and brought proactive content, networking and long-term channel creation to the mix... But we never changed the performance indicators it was measured by. Short-term, lagging metrics like CAC and MQLs persisted and so the activities that drove them were prioritized. I can’t count the Demand Gen roles I’ve seen posted recently that focus exclusively on weekly lead targets and paid ads. And so, here we are. Ten years later and for most businesses it’s just a new, trendier title for a very old game.
It doesn’t really matter what you call it, the best marketing funnels bring brand to the mix— and it saves them in the long run. When companies invest in the infrastructure to truly track brand ROI, it pays off in spades. Within the B2B SaaS space:
None of these are soft or small wins. They’re the cold hard evidence of deal velocity and referral volume. It’s a CFO pipeline forecast looking larger and more reliable over time.
Your field team already knows the impact. They feel the difference of cold calling compared to pitching to a CEO who came to your event because their direct report couldn’t stop talking about how great you were.
Your marketers certainly know. Ipsos found 94% believed trust to be the single most important driver of business success. But like I said—Trust is earned. Dialogue takes trust and awareness. Awareness takes time.
So you're convinced. But how do you convert those amongst your executive team looking for short-term ROI?
How we measure matters. Despite 83% CMOs believing deeper investment is needed into their brand building efforts, 84% use ROI as their primary marketing performance metric. But brand strategy is a long-term game. On average, it takes 6-12 months for the impact of brand initiatives to reach demand reporting and 2-3 years until it generates meaningful revenue lift (Binet & Field). That’s a tough sell amongst those eager for strong annual or quarterly returns.
Successful marketers build sustainable pipeline infrastructure with two reporting tracks:
Capturing the full value of brand building will differ from business to business, but often contains a mix of:
Earning executive buy-in for brand metrics lends a strong competitive advantage: Since these metrics precede financial reporting, they offer proactive businesses early indicators for faster pivots. Businesses actively monitoring their direct traffic or stage conversion will notice spikes or dips long before their fiscal year ends.
Whether it’s a squeeze to the budget for events, pulling back on zero-click thought-leadership or offloading marketing planning to AI, businesses pulling back from long-term brand investments risk silence and sameness. The absence of a strong; recognized brand means every lead comes at a premium and drooping conversion. But that erosion is slow. It won’t be felt in this quarter’s numbers. It might not even be felt by year’s end.
We’re living a paradox. As AI becomes the justification behind record cuts to overall brand spend, that same investment is becoming a stronger differentiator than ever.
As consumers continue to gravitate to AI tools, more searches than ever are ending without a single click and Gartner anticipates traditional search volume will drop by 25% throughout 2026. Those leaning exclusively on traditional lead generation tactics face a reckoning.
The great flattening is here, with INSERT STUDY FINDING ON MAJOR STUDY. Amid the humdrum of “it’s not X, it’s Y”, those building bonfires that breed human connection burn brighter than ever.