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The 60/40 rule: why brand-building beats another promotion

How to execute · From Module 12 · 7 min read · By Aneek Ahmed
There is a settled answer to the oldest argument in marketing — build the brand, or drive the sale — and most marketers are on the wrong side of it. Across the IPA Databank, the world's largest body of evidence on advertising effectiveness (more than 1,500 campaigns audited for ROI by independent econometricians), Les Binet and Peter Field found that the optimal split of communication investment is, on average, about 60% to brand-building and 40% to short-term activation in established categories.
Read your own week against that number. Most marketers spend nearly all of it on the 40% — the promotions, the tactical campaigns, the content calendar — and quietly starve the 60% that the evidence says actually compounds. That inversion is the corrective Module 12 exists to deliver.

The second number: outspend your share

There's a companion finding that turns the principle into a lever. "Share of voice" above "share of market" — what the field calls ESOV — predicts growth. Quantified by Jones in Harvard Business Review (1990) and replicated by Binet and Field, the rule of thumb is that roughly every 10 points of voice held above your market share buys about 0.5 points of market share growth. Brands that consistently sound bigger than they are, grow. Brands that go quiet to fund promotions, shrink — slowly enough that no single quarter sets off the alarm.
Activation harvests demand that already exists. Brand-building creates the demand you'll harvest next year. Do only the first and you slowly run out of things to harvest.

This is Module 12 of the programme

Brand & Communication closes the certification. Start with Module 1, free, and see how the whole arc connects.

What the 60% actually buys: a Core Creative Idea

Brand-building isn't a bigger budget for vaguer ads. The module's primary case is Dove "Real Beauty" — not a campaign but a Core Creative Idea: a single, emotionally-grounded thought that ran for two decades and compounded, rather than being replaced every planning cycle. Apple's "Think Different" and John Lewis's Christmas films work the same way — one durable idea, expressed consistently, becoming a distinctive asset the market recognises instantly.

That is where the 60% earns its return: not in more messages, but in a consistent, emotional idea that builds memory over years. The activation 40% then converts the demand that brand-building has already created. The two are partners, in roughly that ratio — not rivals fighting over the same budget line.

The question for your next plan

Pull up your last twelve months of spend and split it honestly into brand-building and activation. If you're closer to 20/80 than 60/40 — and most are — you're not being efficient, you're borrowing next year's growth to make this quarter's number. The fix isn't a clever campaign. It's a Core Creative Idea worth committing to, and the nerve to fund the 60% that compounds.

Become a growth creator

Twelve modules, CPD UK Accredited, built on marketing science. Start with Module 1 free.

Sources drawn from Module 12 of the Certified Strategic Marketer®: Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It (IPA, 2013) and Effectiveness in Context (IPA, 2018); Jones (1990), "Ad Spending: Maintaining Market Share," Harvard Business Review; Dove "Real Beauty," Apple "Think Different" and John Lewis Christmas cases as taught in the module.
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