Brand or performance? The 60/40 rule and your budget split

Binet and Field worked from the IPA Databank, the pool of cases entered into the IPA Effectiveness Awards, the UK's advertising effectiveness competition. The first study covered 996 campaigns entered between 1980 and 2010¹. The core finding: brand building and sales activation work on different time scales, and the best long-term results come from combining both, with more weight on brand.

Brand building creates memory structures that make buyers prefer the brand and accept paying more for it. Sales activation is the nudge to buy now: promotions, offers, occasion-based reminders. Activation produces fast sales spikes but has little effect on long-term growth or pricing power³.

The ratio held when the authors reran the analysis with data from the digital era. Effectiveness in Context analyzed 18 years of IPA Databank data, from 1998 to 2016³. According to the IPA itself, the sweet spot there came out at 62:38 in favor of brand; the original study has since been cited in more than 70 studies and textbooks⁴.

There is a limit you should know about. IPA cases are award entries, many of them from large UK consumer brands. It is a sample of documented, successful campaigns, not of the whole market. The rule describes an average of that dataset; it is not a law.

Binet and Field never presented 60/40¹ as a single universal number. In Effectiveness in Context, the general principle is to spend more where the effect is harder to get: when brand building is hard, the budget tilts toward brand; when activation is less responsive, it tilts toward activation³. Heavily researched categories, where activation comes easily, need more brand.

Two situations call for a big adjustment. For a brand-new launch, the authors recommend 35:65 in favor of activation early on, then a return to the normal ratio once the launch phase is over; in not-for-profit sectors, where brand effects are easier to achieve, the optimum shifts to 44:56³. System1's write-up of the same study sums up the extremes: optimal brand investment went as high as 80%, and recommended activation spend never topped 56%⁵.

The mistake does not cost the same in both directions. According to Binet and Field, shifting your entire budget to brand costs 20% of effectiveness; shifting it all to sales costs over 50% and is much harder to reverse⁵.

In B2B, The Five Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, which Binet and Field produced for the LinkedIn B2B Institute using IPA data, found that businesses grow best when they allocate 46% of budget to brand building and 54% to activation aimed at an immediate response². Activation weighs a little more than in consumer categories, but brand still gets close to half.

The most common explanation for keeping brand at that level is the B2B Institute's 95-5 rule: 95% of your potential buyers are not ready to buy today⁶. John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute got there through supplier switching: if companies change service providers once every five years on average, only 20% of business buyers are in the market over a full year, and something like 5% in a quarter⁷.

In practice, activation talks to the small group that is already buying; brand primes everyone else for the day they enter the market. Cutting brand to fund lead generation improves this quarter at the expense of the buyers who will purchase later.

The same study offers a rule for sizing the total budget, not just the split. In B2B, 10% extra share of voice (ESOV), meaning share of voice above your share of market, translates into 0.7% of market share growth². You can use that relationship to make the case for budget size with finance.

In Brazil, the split companies actually run is close to the reverse of the recommended one. A survey by Conversion for its 2025 Marketing Trends Report found that the Brazilian market puts 74% of the marketing budget into short-term performance and 26% into brand building⁸. In the previous report, the short-term share was 71%⁸.

For the United States, Conversion cites The CMO Survey: 68.8% of the marketing budget goes to short-term activity and 31.2% to brand building⁸.

The overall pie is not growing either. In Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, a global study of 401 marketers in the U.S. and Europe, the average budget came in at 7.8% of revenue, versus 7.7% in 2025, and it sits 18% below the average of four years earlier⁹.

The same survey shows where media money goes: awareness and conversion account for 62.6% of media spend, while loyalty and retention fell 29% since 2024 to less than 15%¹⁰. Gartner's categories do not split brand and activation the way Binet and Field do, so they cannot be compared with 60/40¹ directly. What they do show is the pressure on brand budgets.

Start from the benchmark that matches your situation, not the overall average, and adjust with four questions. The goal is a split that is written down, justified and scheduled for review, instead of a ratio inherited from last year or set by whichever team pushes hardest in the budget meeting. This is the process we recommend.

1. 01
   Pick your benchmark. Consumer: start from 60% brand¹. B2B: start from 46%². Online-native brand: consider up to 74%³.
2. 02
   Adjust for difficulty. If activation is easy in your category (heavily researched purchases, high-intent search), tilt the split toward brand. If the brand is already well known and conversion is the bottleneck, give activation more weight.
3. 03
   Adjust for stage. A new brand gets more activation during launch, then returns to the benchmark. A declining category also calls for more activation.
4. 04
   Check share of voice. Compare your share of voice with your share of market. If the first is below the second, the brand will tend to shrink regardless of the split.
5. 05
   Decide how you will measure each side. Activation is measured in weeks: cost per lead, conversion rate. Brand is measured in quarters and years: branded search, unaided recall, average price achieved. Schedule the review up front, and do not cut brand mid-cycle for lack of immediate return.

Before debating the ideal ratio, find out what yours actually is. Open the media plan for the last twelve months and tag every line as brand or activation based on the objective of the asset, not the channel. A YouTube video with an offer and a deadline is activation; a brand film running on social is brand; a branded search ad is activation.

Add up both columns and compare the result with the benchmark for your category in the table above. If your brand share falls short, the proposal for the next cycle is to move budget in stages, with brand metrics defined before the change. If it runs above, check whether activation is converting the demand the brand creates.