Brand isn't about where you spend your money

Stop thinking of brand as a channel

Thinking of brand as a channel is like thinking fitness magically comes from just having a gym membership.

The access isn’t what gets you results — the work does. 

Brand works the same way. You don’t build it by buying placements. You build it through the day-in, day-out signals that teach people who you are and why you matter. Just buying a billboard, even if ten thousand people see it, doesn’t build your brand. Just like you’re not getting anywhere if you don’t actually put in time at the gym.

This is where so many businesses go wrong. They treat “brand” as a tactic to switch on when performance slows, instead of recognising it as the foundation that makes performance efficient in the first place. Performance can only convert the demand that already exists; brand is what grows that pool over time.

Where this misconception came from

For decades, traditional media had a monopoly on reach. If you wanted scale, you bought TV or outdoor, so “brand” became synonymous with big budgets and big productions.

Then digital arrived and everyone treated it like a performance machine. Not because it can’t build brand, but because marketers used it only for short-term wins. Cheap clicks trained the industry to prioritise tactics over strategy, badges over ideas.

This is how the myth stuck:

• Brand = traditional
• Performance = digital

Which is just completely false.

Brand building comes from creative, message and consistency. Traditional media hosts bad brand ads every day. Digital channels host great brand building every day. The medium is just distribution. The brand is the meaning.

Let us show you what we mean here.

Example 1: This is not brand building

Picture the classic Facebook ad: a stock image, a bright red banner, and “10% OFF THIS WEEKEND” slapped across the top. It does a decent job of nudging someone who was already thinking about buying, but that’s as far as it goes.

There’s nothing about who you are, what makes you recognisable, or why someone should remember you tomorrow. It’s a quick nudge and not a lasting impression.

Example 2: This is brand building

Now picture a six-second YouTube bumper that reinforces something unmistakably yours. This could be the green van, the two founders, the safety guarantee, the signature line, or even the sound they associate with you.

These are distinctive cues that build memory, making you easier to recognise the next time someone sees you.

What makes something ‘brand-building’?

If the second example showed anything, it’s that brand building has nothing to do with how “big” an ad is. It’s about what it leaves behind in people’s minds.

Brand building is the work of creating memory structures that make future sales easier. It reaches people before they’re ready to buy, shaping how they think about you long before they ever hit your website or speak to your sales team.

The strongest brand work creates an emotional connection. Not sentimentality, but the kind of feeling that makes you easier to recall when a buying situation appears. Emotion builds salience. Salience builds preference. Preference becomes future demand.

Learn more about how these memory preferences get shaped in our blog on why brand vs performance isn’t a choice.

The dangerous assumption you need to avoid

One of the most common traps we see is the belief that brand is something you “get to later”. Once you’re bigger, once the cashflow settles, once performance stops working. It sounds reasonable, but it’s the mindset that quietly caps your business’s growth.

But unfortunately, without a brand strategy you become a price taker. Your performance campaigns hit ceilings faster. Competitors start looking interchangeable. And you end up spending more just to win the same customers.

Brand isn’t something you switch on at a certain revenue milestone.

It’s something you maintain from day one because brand is the work that makes tomorrow’s sales easier, cheaper and more predictable.