Everyone loves brand until it’s time to open the spreadsheet. Most brand campaigns flop because they’re not tied to revenue. Here’s how to change the narrative...and get the “yes.”
Most Marketers think their brand is fine... until they see this chart.
Growth feels a little sluggish.
Discounting becomes the default.
Paid channels stop performing as they had.
You can’t quite put your finger on it. But, something’s off. Way off.
Then you see this post from Preston Sutherland (co-founder of Chubbies), and it all clicks.
👇 The chart that explains why your brand feels stuck:
🚨 Why “Brand Marketing” Gets a Bad Rap
Brand Marketing has become a punchline at a lot of companies.
Not because people hate creativity. But, because brand has been sold the wrong way for years. Instead of tying brand work to business outcomes, Marketers mistakenly pitch feelings. Instead of talking revenue, they talk the immeasurable.
And, when it doesn’t immediately move a KPI, the whole effort gets written off as a loss. Because even if you don't assign outcomes to your work at the front, they'll be assigned for you in the end.
The cycle looks like this:
- Brand team pitches a big campaign - Agency gets hired - Creative is beautiful - Campaign launches - Nobody knows what it actually did
And, just like that, future brand efforts get met with hesitation. Or, likely and much worse, it's going to now be met with flat-out rejection.
Here’s the truth:
Brand Marketing isn’t broken. But, the way it’s communicated, sold, and measured usually is. LET'S FIX THAT.
Flip the Script: Brand = Business Outcomes
Preston Sutherland (again, of Chubbies) nailed this in a recent mock-convo he shared between a CEO and a new CMO.
The CMO didn’t try to defend brand.
He reframed it.
Instead of talking about brand in vague terms, he tied it directly to the metrics that actually move the business forward. And once the CEO saw that, it CLICKED.
Because Brand Marketing doesn’t have to be this soft, unmeasurable thing.
It can (and should) do things like:
- Help you discount less without losing customers
- Drive branded organic traffic that converts at higher margins
- Make your retail and wholesale presence stronger so you can scale profitably
These are BRAND outcomes. But they’re also BUSINESS outcomes. This is what we need.
The best Brand Marketers don’t talk about “awareness.”
- They talk about increasing revenue-per-session. - They talk about expanding channels. - They talk about margin.
When you do that, brand isn’t a bet. It’s a business lever.
The Feedback Loop Fix
Here’s what separates brand campaigns that WORK from the 1's that flop:
Feedback loops.
Performance marketers live and die by them. Brand marketers? Not as often.
But if you want brand to be taken seriously, you need to treat it like performance. Just on a longer time horizon.
That means:
- Setting clear business goals up front!!!
- Defining how success will be measured
- Creating consistently, not just once
Reviewing what worked and doubling down. When brand work doesn’t have a feedback loop, it turns into a 1-shot swing.
A big spend. A big hope. And no clear path forward.
But when you commit to iteration, and when you treat brand like a system instead of a stunt, that’s when it starts to compound. It becomes unstoppable.
The same way performance did when you 1st started optimizing creative, landing pages, and audiences.
Brand deserves the same rigor.
How to Pitch Brand Internally (and Get a Yes)
If you want brand to be taken seriously, pitch it like a growth lever.
Here’s a 5-step framework that earns internal trust:
1. Lead with the business goal. “We need to increase margins by reducing our dependency on discounting.”
2. Make the brand connection obvious. “Our current positioning doesn’t justify full price. We need to shift perception.”
3. Quantify the upside. “If we improve branded search and organic conversion, we increase revenue-per-session and lower CAC.”
4. Set up a feedback loop. “We’ll track branded traffic, search volume, and post-campaign margin improvements.”
5. Keep creative execution flexible, but outcome-obsessed. “We don’t need a viral ad. We need brand perception that drives measurable behavior change.”
This is how you move from “let’s make something cool” to “here’s how we grow.”
TLDR - Brand Is Performance (Zoomed Out)
If you take 1 thing from this:
Brand isn’t separate from growth. It IS growth. Just on a different timeline.
The companies that win aren’t the 1's with the funniest ad or the absolute sickest creative.
They’re the 1's who know how to connect creativity to cash flow. And build feedback loops that make brand work compound over time.
That’s how you make brand work impossible to cut. That’s how you win.
