Brand and Demand | How Ambidextrous Brands Build Tomorrow While Selling Today

Why Long-Term Brand Building and Short-Term Demand Generation Work Better as One Growth System

Growth has two clocks…

• One ticks quickly. Leads arrive, campaigns convert, promotions shift stock, search captures intent, sales teams close opportunities and dashboards cheerfully turn green. This is the clock most organisations find reassuring because something happens today and, ideally, somebody can attach a number to it before the next management meeting.
• The other moves more slowly. Familiarity accumulates. Meaning settles. Distinctive assets become recognisable. Trust develops. People remember the company before they need it, understand what the brand stands for and gradually give it permission to enter their consideration set.

The first watch generates commercial momentum, whilst the second fosters brand recall, preference and future demand. Growth requires both.

The difficulty begins when organisations treat them as competing philosophies, split teams around them, assign different budgets, create incompatible KPIs and eventually ask the CMO to choose which child they love most.

Brand and demand have spent far too long on opposite sides of a spreadsheet.

An ambidextrous approach offers a more useful way to think about them: preserve and strengthen the brand assets, meaning and relationships that compound over time -creating conditions for choice-, while developing the capabilities required to identify, stimulate and convert demand today -turning choice into action-.

Growth Has Two Clocks

Much of the tension comes from timing. Demand marketing produces signals quickly. A campaign generates clicks, enquiries, subscriptions, visits and/or purchases. The relationship between activity and response appears visible, and contemporary marketing platforms have become extremely good at giving every movement a percentage, arrow and pleasing little chart.

Brand works over several time horizons. It can affect immediate choice, particularly when awareness and preference are already strong, while much of its commercial effect accumulates through memory, familiarity, trust, perceived difference and mental availability. These assets become particularly valuable when customers eventually enter a buying situation.

That distinction is especially evident in B2B markets, where the widely discussed 95:5 principle suggests that only a relatively small share of potential buyers may be actively in market at any one moment. The precise ratio varies by category, buying cycle and context, so it is best treated as a useful heuristic rather than something Moses brought down from the mountain.

The underlying point remains powerful: most future customers are future customers precisely because they are not buying today.

A business that concentrates every marketing resource on buyers showing immediate intent becomes highly efficient at competing for demand that already exists.

Its future pipeline has to come from somewhere… Brand building helps create that somewhere.

Company, Business and Brand Before Marketing

I find the debate becomes clearer when brand and demand are placed inside a broader system:

• The company defines what should endure: its purpose, values, principles, distinctive knowledge and broader ambition.
• The business turns that foundation into value creation and value capture. It decides where to compete, what to offer, which capabilities to develop, which customers to serve, which opportunities deserve investment and what growth should mean economically.
• The brand synthesises those choices into meaning that people can recognise, experience, remember and choose.

Marketing then helps that meaning travel through the market, creating attention, memory, interest and action across different moments of demand.

This sequence matters because brand building cannot be reduced to the advertising that happens near the top of a funnel, just as demand cannot be reduced to a button asking somebody to buy now.

Branding begins upstream.

Positioning influences what the business wants to be known and chosen for. Brand experience helps prove that positioning. Distinctive assets build recognition. Products and services create evidence. Culture affects delivery. Communication gives those actions meaning.

Demand generation becomes more effective when it activates something that already means something, otherwise, performance marketing can become extraordinarily sophisticated at directing people towards an offer they feel no particular reason to prefer.

The Attraction of What Can Be Measured Quickly

The organisational bias towards demand has an understandable source: it’s easier to defend.

Recent research into marketing effectiveness found that 71.7% of marketers allow ease of measurement to influence budget allocation, while 71.1% report that marketing and their CEO or CFO define success differently. That creates an obvious gravitational pull towards metrics that can be observed quickly, even when those metrics capture only part of the commercial effect.

A click appears today, brand salience takes longer… And a cost per acquisition fits neatly into a dashboard.

The economic value of being the company somebody remembers six months before entering the market requires rather more patience.

Boards are understandably fond of evidence. Marketing should become better at providing it. The challenge is ensuring that the availability of a metric does not determine the importance of the activity being measured.

Otherwise, the dashboard begins designing the strategy which it’s a rather ambitious promotion for a dashboard.

Brand Makes Demand Work Harder

The relationship becomes more interesting when we stop treating brand and performance as additive activities.

Recent effectiveness research describes a multiplier effect: stronger brand equity increases the efficiency of performance marketing, while performance activity can reinforce brand when both share meaning, creative assets and strategic direction. Analysis published through WARC suggests that moving from a performance-dominated model towards an integrated approach can increase total advertising revenue returns substantially, with a median uplift around 90% across the evidence examined.

The commercial logic is straightforward:

• A familiar brand earns attention more easily.
• A trusted brand reduces perceived risk.
• A distinctive brand is easier to recognise when somebody encounters a performance message.
• A clearly positioned brand makes the offer easier to understand.
• A preferred brand can reduce reliance on discounting because customers arrive with more than functional comparison in mind.

Performance therefore becomes more productive because brand has already done some of the work.

Demand activity can also strengthen the brand when its language, experience, visual assets and proposition reinforce what the organisation wants people to remember.

Every conversion is also a brand experience.

That is why the deepest integration happens when brand and demand share the same strategic logic rather than merely dividing a media budget politely between themselves.

The 60:40 Rule Is a Reference, Not a Recipe

The work of Les Binet and Peter Field has shaped this discussion for more than a decade. Their analysis of the IPA effectiveness database established the importance of combining long-term brand building with shorter-term activation and produced the frequently quoted 60:40 guideline in favour of brand investment.

It remains a valuable reference because it reminds organisations that growth needs two-time horizons. Later work has produced remarkably similar aggregate ratios, although context still determines the appropriate balance:

• A subscription business behaves differently from luxury.
• A new entrant has different needs from an established category leader.
• A B2B technology company with a two-year buying cycle faces different demand dynamics from a beauty brand launching through retailers and social commerce.
• An organisation entering a new geography may require substantial investment in familiarity before performance activity can operate efficiently.

The ambidextrous question therefore concerns the relationship between the two rather than the discovery of a universal percentage:

• What must the brand build for the future?
• What must the business convert today?
• How should each strengthen the other?

The answer should be designed around the company’s strategy, growth stage, category, brand strength and commercial reality.

Percentages are helpful, but judgement remains annoyingly necessary.

SAS: Brand as an Accelerator of Demand

SAS offers a particularly useful B2B example because the company deliberately moved from a performance-heavy marketing model towards a more integrated full-funnel approach.

The shift involved building brand awareness among future as well as current buyers, aligning brand and demand teams around shared outcomes and using distinctive brand assets more systematically. Its subsequent campaign work reached nine million new buyers on LinkedIn within six months, increased Lead Gen Form completion threefold, improved engagement by 31% and reduced cost per lead by around 28%. Sales teams also reported improvements in outreach.

The interesting point is the interaction; brand investment did not sit patiently at the top of the funnel waiting several years to justify its existence. It improved the conditions under which demand activity operated.

People exposed to the brand entered lower-funnel activity with greater familiarity and recognition.

The demand engine became more efficient because the brand had created a warmer market.

FitFlop: Escaping the Performance Plateau

FitFlop provides a consumer example with a similarly revealing starting point. The company had reached what its team described as a performance plateau. Continued digital performance activity was producing diminishing growth because the system concentrated too heavily on customers already showing signs of demand.

The response involved reallocating investment, building broader memory and connecting distinctive brand assets across both brand and performance activity. The reported results included a 30% increase in website revenue and a 68% rise in return on advertising spend, alongside improvements in conversion.

Again, brand investment strengthened performance rather than waiting patiently for some distant future payoff.

The case illustrates a common commercial problem. Performance marketing becomes progressively more expensive when competitors keep bidding for the same people who are already close to purchasing. Brand increases the pool of people predisposed to recognise, remember and consider the offer.

Demand capture becomes easier when demand creation has happened first.

Duolingo: Brand, Product and Performance in the Same Growth Loop

Duolingo offers a rather different example because brand building forms part of a wider growth system rather than operating as a discrete advertising layer.

Its annual reporting explicitly describes brand marketing, owned media and paid acquisition as complementary parts of its sales and marketing strategy. Brand activity drives awareness, conversation and word of mouth; owned channels keep users engaged; targeted paid acquisition accelerates growth among segments likely to retain or subscribe.

The company describes marketing as an accelerator of a product-led model, with organic brand building and efficient performance investment supporting each other. Duolingo passed 50 million daily active users and $1 billion in annual bookings during 2025, while continuing to prioritise user growth in 2026.

The famous green owl may occasionally behave online as though someone left it unsupervised after midnight, yet the underlying system is disciplined.

Product creates value. Brand creates memory and cultural visibility. Owned experience builds habit. Performance accelerates acquisition where it makes commercial sense.

The growth loop becomes stronger because the individual activities reinforce one another.

Zenziya: A Lesson Closer to Home

We have seen the same principle in our own work at Allegro 234.

Zenziya began as Efectivo Ya -Cash Now-, a highly functional Costa Rican online lending proposition. The business delivered speed and convenience, while its name and brand limited the company’s ability to build a broader financial relationship, support new products and create greater trust.

The work connected business proposition, positioning, naming, personality, identity, digital expression, activation, online marketing, remarketing and growth execution as one system.

Following launch, the company recorded 17% monthly customer growth, 15% monthly growth in borrowed capital per customer, more than 50% recurring customers, 95% stated recommendation and an NPS above 70.

Those results did not come from choosing between brand and growth. The brand created a clearer, more expandable and more trusted proposition. Demand activity turned that proposition into acquisition and recurrence. Customer experience gave people reasons to recommend it.

Branding became a practical growth asset because company ambition, business model, meaning and activation moved together.

Ambidextrous Growth Means Managing Two Horizons

This is where the relationship between brand and demand becomes distinctly ambidextrous.

Growth requires organisations to preserve and compound the assets that create value over time: meaning, trust, recognition, distinctive brand assets, customer relationships, reputation and the parts of positioning that provide continuity.

At the same time, companies need to develop new propositions, audiences, channels, experiences, technologies and commercial mechanisms capable of creating and converting emerging demand.

The two horizons operate simultaneously. While demand helps the business perform today, brand ensures that there will still be people predisposed to choose it tomorrow.

An ambidextrous strategy therefore resists the temptation to sacrifice future preference each time quarterly pressure increases, while remaining equally resistant to treating long-term brand building as a romantic exemption from commercial accountability.

This is central to us at Allegro 234 when talking about Ambidextrous Strategy: preserve what creates value while developing what will keep the company, business and brand relevant.

This principle translates naturally into the field of marketing, preserving and reinforcing memory, whilst developing and capitalising on opportunities. The art lies in ensuring that these two aspects feed into one another.

One Brand, One Meaning, Many Commercial Jobs

Organisational silos make this harder than it needs to be:

• Brand teams may optimise for awareness, salience and preference.
• Performance teams optimise for acquisition and conversion.
• Sales wants qualified opportunities.
• Finance wants returns.
• Digital teams optimise platforms.
• Agencies arrive with their own dashboards.

Before long, everybody is successfully achieving a different objective, and remember: customers have the decency to ignore the organisational chart, they experience one company -still better, one platform-, one brand.

This is another reason we use the idea of the Brand Operating System. A strong brand provides shared logic for different activities, allowing teams to pursue different commercial jobs while reinforcing common meaning:

• A performance ad can convert and build memory.
• A brand campaign can stimulate immediate demand.
• A customer experience can create retention and reinforce positioning.
• A sales conversation can close an opportunity and strengthen the brand.
• A product launch can generate revenue while expanding what the market believes the company has permission to do.

The useful distinction lies in objectives and time horizons rather than rigidly assigning brand and demand to different channels.

Recent work on marketing effectiveness arrives at a similar conclusion: integrated creative platforms can build equity over time while creating recognisable assets that make shorter-term activation more effective.

Measure Both Clocks

Integration also requires a more intelligent measurement system:

• Demand metrics matter: conversion, acquisition costs, incremental revenue, retention, pipeline velocity and commercial return give management essential information about current performance.
• Brand requires another layer: mental availability, consideration, preference, distinctive asset recognition, reputation, pricing power and the extent to which brand strength improves conversion and commercial efficiency over time.

The most advanced organisations connect the two.

Recent research suggests leading marketing teams are considerably more capable of managing short and long-term KPIs simultaneously, while current work on effectiveness continues to show how brand equity contributes to future demand, pricing power and lower commercial friction.

That means asking questions that cross the traditional divide:

• Does stronger awareness improve conversion?
• Do customers familiar with the brand have lower acquisition costs?
• Does brand preference affect price sensitivity?
• Does performance creative reinforce distinctive assets?
• Does short-term promotional activity weaken perceived value?
• Which customer experiences generate both immediate revenue and future recommendation?

These questions turn measurement into learning rather than merely scorekeeping and perhaps save the CMO from spending another afternoon explaining why an impression and a sale are not quite the same thing.

Growth Needs Memory and Momentum

Brand and demand are two clocks inside the same growth system:

• Demand gives the business momentum: It finds opportunity, captures intent, encourages action and converts value today.
• Brand builds memory: It creates familiarity before the buying moment, gives the business meaning beyond the transaction and helps people recognise, trust and prefer the company when choice eventually arrives.

Ambidextrous Strategy connects the time horizons.

It protects the brand assets and meaning that should compound while developing new sources of demand, new experiences and new routes to growth. Branding provides the shared logic, and activation turns that logic into commercial behaviour across the market.

This matters beyond marketing because the quality of demand is shaped further upstream by the company the organisation intends to become, the business it chooses to build and the meaning its brand earns around those choices.

A company needs commercial momentum, a business needs future demand, and a brand needs enough continuity to be remembered and enough movement to remain relevant.

Growth becomes considerably more interesting when all three move together.

Further Reading from Allegro 234

• Ambidextrous Strategy and Brand | Changing Without Ceasing to Be
• Brand-Led Growth for SMEs | Keeping What Matters While Building What Comes Next
• Purpose-to-Brand Alignment | Why Purpose, Business Strategy and Branding Must March in Step
• When Brands Must Prove Why They Deserve to Be Chosen
• Branding-Level Services

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• Victor Coutant, Pexels