Brand building ought to be at the bedrock of all the marketing activity you are planning in 2026

During the last couple of months, I was able to have a proper sit down with advertising specialist Ged Carroll who has worked with some of the leading technology and consumer brands over a very successful career of more than 30 years to date.

It was interesting to explore how some advertising theory around brand building and brand activation (more commonly known as performance marketing) maps onto PR or Earned Media as a whole.

To get the heart of the success of advertising, or perhaps any communication, you have to understand psychology, how the brain works, how we remember and connect with brands and how we are persuaded to buy, Ged says.

What Ged Carroll alerted me to is that brand activation is currently commanding the lion's share of marketing (especially advertising) budgets. It sounds logical. Brand activation is the marketing activity associated with engaging prospects, stimulating them to take action to buy. In B2B marketing we talk about Performance Marketing rather than Brand Activation. Again it's the bottom of that notional sales funnel activity which gets you to sign up to your new service. It is also more measurable as you can track that click through to that specific subscription-purchase, for example.

So while Brand Activation captures current demand, this activity only converts the 5 per cent  of buyers looking to purchase right now and is therefore highly efficient in the short term, it offers zero 'residual awareness' once the Brand Activation (possibly PPC ad spend) stops, the sales stop! By contrast, Brand Building helps in many areas which makes sales much easier and cheaper longer term.

Brand building helps:

Lower Acquisition Costs: Strong brands significantly reduce Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). A recognised brand can achieve results 3-5 times superior to an unknown one with the same activation budget.

Increase Price Resilience: Brand building reduces price sensitivity, allowing a company to maintain premium pricing and higher margins even during economic downturns.

The 'Snowball Effect': Brand Activation effects decay quickly (often within 3 months), while brand effects are cumulative, growing slowly 'burning in' over 6-18 months and lasting for years.

AI-Saturation Defense: In 2026, AI has flooded the market with generic content. A strong brand identity is the only 'human' differentiator that can cut through automated noise to build genuine trust.

70/30 Rule needs re-establishing in favour of brand building

Ged Carroll’s view therefore , and he is not alone, is that typical subscription-based businesses including cloud-based SaaS businesses, ought to be investing as much as 70 per cent of their marketing budgets in brand building, and the remainder (30 per cent) on brand activation, although very often today those budgets are the other way round.

The summary table below helps explain why brand building activity deserves much more attention and budget for subscription-based businesses today that are trying to grow sustainably, managing their cost of new customer acqusitions, and holding onto existing customers for longer as they scale.

So, why the obsession on Brand Activation to grab the 5% of prospects which are in the market for your products or services right now when we should be devoting more time to the other 95% who are not in market right now but could be your future customers. Some of this is about shorter term thinking which is currently dominating in business. Some of it runs deeper still....

Left brain tends towards narrow focus

Ged and I spoke in particular about some of the left-brain versus right-brain thinking which took centre stage from the early 1990s. The theory goes that the left hemisphere of the brain has a narrower attentional field. It abstracts things from context, breaks them up into smaller parts, categorises them - making them easier to manipulate.

The result is that the left hemisphere’s view tends to be limited, fixed and rigid - preferring what is already known to it. Left to its own devices it tends towards paranoia, dogmatism and self-consciousness - shutting off anything outside its model of the world.

The left hemisphere shows little real concern for others, their feelings, their wishes and expectations, and seeks to dominate them. It prizes power, utility and control. It cannot tolerate ambiguity or nuance – preferring certainty and clarity. Pretty important then that the left hemisphere of the brain keeps in constant dialogue with the right side….

Right-brain recognises the complexity and interconnectedness of things

The right-brain’s tendency by contrast, is to see and recognise the complexity of individuals, their faces, voices, and all that makes them unique. It understands the world as a set of complex connections and relationships.

The right hemisphere reportedly understands the implicit – everything that wraps around the word, the intonation of the words and their implication. It is more intimately connected with our experience of emotion and episodic memory. Understanding how the right-brain works and its attentional preferences is critical for successful brand-building in advertising.

An excellent book which captures all this, entitled Look Out, is written by Orlando Wood, Chief Innovation Officer of System1 Group.

Look Out indicates that the world of advertising has tended towards appealing to left-brain, rather than right-brain, thinking in its quest to garner budgets for selling more chocolate bars, washing powder or cloud storage space over the last 20 year or so.

Ged argued that the reason for this is that the left-brain thinkers have won the power battles in the boardroom. The CFO is pushing the CMO out of the exec suite. CMO roles are disappearing from boardrooms at a rate of knots. Not surprisingly, according to Forrester Research’s study on ‘The Representation and Tenure of Fortune 500 CMOs in 2025’, Business-to-business (B2B) companies are leading the decline, with executive-level marketing presence dropping significantly from B2B Fortune 500 companies from 48% in 2024, to 42% last year.

The traditional CMO title is being replaced by much more sales-orientated titles including Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, or Chief Customer Officer. CMOs tenures also continue to shorten relative to other C-suite roles. So, that today a Fortune 500 CMO stays in post for an average of 3.9 years, compared to roughly 5 years for other C-suite roles.

In Orlando Wood’s previous book Lemon, he conducted an historical analysis of TV advertising by studying adverts which appear in the long running UK TV soap Coronation Street over a 30 year period. Features of advertising which might be associated with left-or right-hemisphere preferences were coded up across all ads (with no knowledge of the date of advert known to the coder). Some of the key features are laid out below:

Left Brain Features	Right-Brain Features
Abstracted product, feature, ingredient	A clear sense of place
Abstracted body part (hands, eyes, mouth, face)	One scene unfolding with progression
Voiceover	Characters with agency (voice, movement, flow and expression)
Monologue (e.g. testimonial)	Implicit, unspoken communication (e.g. knowing glances)
Adjectives used as nouns	Dialogue
Freeze-frame effect	Distinctive accents
Audio repetition (metered prose, sound effects)	Play on words or subversion of language
Highly rhythmic sound track	Set in the past (costumes or sets)
Words obtrude during ad	Music with discernible melody

Lemon reported a discernible move away from right-brain features in ads from 2006 onwards. Apparently, the number of left-brain features in TV advertising today is at its highest ever level.

However, Look out also indicates that as ads have shifted towards dominance of Right Brain features they have also become less effective! Or as Sir John Hegarty, one of the most influential figures in global advertising, with a career spanning over six decades, co-founder of the agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), the agency which created some of the industry’s most enduring brand identities from the Audi ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ ads to the Levi’s Laundrette advert in 1985, and ‘The Lynx Effect’ ads for Lynx deodorant brand:

“[The industry] has to understand that there are two factors [at work in advertising]: persuasion and promotion. What we’ve become obsessed with over the last 20 years is promotion.”

In other words, we risk failing to emotionally connect our customers and prospects with the products or services we are trying to sell if we focus only on promotion of our brand’s products and features. Without that emotional connection, prospects are ultimately unlikely to remember your brand at the vital point of them considering what it is you are selling, and what expertise you have which underpins your products and services.

Ged was powerful on the importance of brand building:

“People aren’t in the market to buy your product 95% of the time. So, unless you build those long-term memory structures and you are continually in front of them, you are not even going to be considered when they are finally in the market to buy your product”.

However, as right-brain, goal-orientated thinking increasingly dominates, and digital marketing gains dominance of our ad consumption time, the AdTech stacks have been built around some error-prone assumptions that increasing engagement leads on naturally to a sale, if only we keep pushing prospects down that notional sales funnel.

However, this thinking assumes perfect memory and recall, logical sorting of competitors and much else besides. The reality is that the consideration and selection process shrinks considerably if you have invested in memorable brand building and the associations it confers, consistently over several years. This investment should not be hanging on a quarter by quarter fiscal outlook.

Or as Ged says:

“Regularity is the key. You want to reach people the 95% of the time when they are not ready to buy, as well as the 5% when they are.”

Finally, the key for all good content is to inject some story telling into it. There should be evidence of a quest or challenge, ideally a hero, perhaps an enemy, points of tension etc. In B2C this is easier to create, but in B2B, case studies can be written with a narrative arc in mind, for example.

It leaves this question hanging: will there ever be a swing back towards the longer term thinking of brand building which helps lay down those vital long term memory structurtes linked to your brand? Or have too many businesses, as well as their corporate and investment structures, skewed demand irretrievably towards the instant dopamine hit of ‘hot lead’ generation today (or ideally yesterday!), rather than taking a little longer to build brand purposefully so that you can win more loyal, sustainable and therefore valuable customers long into the future? Perhaps we'll try to answer that one next time I speak to Ged.

I hope you enjoy my latest conversation with Ged Carroll which you can view in full below: