Most companies treat brand building as the romantic half of marketing and sales activation as the serious half. Brand is the mood board and the sponsorship. Activation is the promotion, the discount, the number you can defend in the Monday meeting. One feels like spending, the other like investing.
For thirty years, Les Binet and Peter Field have been proving that this is backwards. Working through the IPA Databank, close to 1,200 case studies of what actually moved sales, profit and market share, they found that the long game is not the soft option. It is the harder-nosed one, because it is the only route to the single most profitable thing marketing can do: make your customers care less about price.
The short version. Brand building and sales activation do different jobs on different clocks. The durable split is about 60:40 in favour of brand. Its biggest payoff is not volume, it is pricing power: firmer prices, fatter margins, less reliance on discounts.
Les Binet’s 60:40 rule, and why it exists
The headline finding is now famous. The best long-run results come from splitting the budget roughly 60 percent to brand building and 40 percent to sales activation. Not because brand is nicer, but because that is the ratio the data keeps rewarding across category after category. In business-to-business the split shifts a little toward activation, to around 46 percent brand and 54 percent activation, reflecting longer, more considered buying. And counter-intuitively, in coldly rational categories like insurance it tilts even further toward brand, closer to 74:26, because brand building has to work harder to move a “sensible” purchase. The exact number moves with the category. The direction does not.
Source: Binet and Field, IPA; B2B split via the LinkedIn B2B Institute.
Binet is careful about why the two halves are not interchangeable:
“There’s a trade-off between these two jobs. The things you do to dial up the long-term brand effects tend to mute the short-term activation effects, and the things you do to dial up the short-term activation effects tend to mute the long-term brand effects… It tends to be better to have some of your campaign focused on long-term brand building and some primarily focused on short-term activation. These two things enhance each other, there’s synergy between them.”
Two jobs, two clocks. Activation produces a sharp spike that fades in weeks. Brand building produces a slower rise that compounds for years. You cannot reach the long by stacking up the short. And the long is where the pricing power lives.
The finding that matters for price
Here is the part most summaries skip. When Binet and Field looked at what brand building actually does to the business, the biggest prize was not volume. It was the ability to charge more and discount less.
Their own words on why emotional brand campaigns win over time:
“Emotional campaigns’ effects last longer than rational ones and so build more strongly over time. This is especially true of profitability, because of the multiplier effects of emotional campaigns, on both volume and pricing.”
On both volume and pricing. A rational message can win an argument about features and shift a unit this week. An emotional brand can command a premium for years, because the preference it builds is not a comparison the buyer re-runs every time. In the IPA data, emotional campaigns were almost twice as likely to deliver large profit growth as rational ones.
Asked what a company should actually measure to know whether its brand is strong, Binet does not reach for awareness scores. He reaches for the P&L, and specifically for price:
“The most important brand metrics are to do with sales, profit, price sensitivity and hard financial spend. What’s the base level of your sales when you’re not on promotion? What percentage of your sales are discounted? You want strong base sales and low reliance on discounts. What’s your price sensitivity? You want low price sensitivity so that you can have strong, firm prices and strong margins.”
Read that as a definition of a strong brand: high base sales, low reliance on discounts, low price sensitivity, firm prices, strong margins. Every one of those is a pricing outcome. The long game is a pricing strategy wearing a marketing coat.
The campaign that made price the message
The cleanest proof is a campaign that put the price on the poster and dared you to feel good about it.
For a quarter of a century, Stella Artois ran in the UK under three words: “Reassuringly Expensive.” It did not argue that the lager was cheaper, or list its brewing credentials in a promotion. It made the price itself the story, and told a generation that paying more was the point. Over years, not weeks, that built one of the great price premiums in the beer market. The brand did exactly what Binet describes: it lowered price sensitivity so it could hold a firm price and a strong margin.
Then it proved the same law in reverse. When the owner later chased volume through heavy discounting and wide distribution, the premium it had spent decades building came apart. The lager that had been “reassuringly expensive” became known for being cheap and everywhere, and the pricing power went with it. The long game built the premium. The short game spent it.
Apple is the same lesson without the fall. It never runs a mid-season sale and never justifies a price by pointing at its costs. That discipline is not vanity. It is the pricing power that thirty years of brand building buys, protected by the refusal to teach customers to wait for a discount.
The rule that tells you how much to spend
There is one more piece of Binet and Field’s evidence that turns all of this into a budget decision. It is the share-of-voice rule, borrowed from John Philip Jones and confirmed across their data:
“Brands that set their share of voice above the equilibrium level will tend to grow, and those that set it below will tend to shrink.”
The gap between your share of voice and your share of market is called excess share of voice, or ESOV. The data gives it a rough exchange rate: about 10 points of extra share of voice buys around half a point to three-quarters of a point of market share growth a year, and in business-to-business the effect is, if anything, stronger. Spend ahead of your size and you grow. Spend behind it and you fade. Quietly, invisibly, one quarter at a time, exactly the way pricing power erodes when you stop feeding the brand.
Binet even names the modern signal of a strong brand, and it should sound familiar to anyone thinking about how buyers now search:
“Look at inbound organic search queries for your company and brand, as opposed to paid search… If you’re a strong brand, people will actively seek you out.”
A brand people seek out is a brand that does not have to buy its way to every sale, or bribe it with a discount. That is pricing power, showing up in the one place everyone can now measure.
What to do with it
The short game is seductive precisely because it is easy to measure, and the long game is neglected precisely because it is not. Binet and Field’s later work showed the industry drifting further into short-termism year after year, and effectiveness falling as it did. The fix is not to abandon activation. It is to stop letting the measurable half starve the profitable half.
Three moves follow, and all three are about price.
Judge your brand by its prices, not its awareness. Track base sales when you are not on promotion, the share of sales that are discounted, and your price sensitivity. That is Binet’s own scorecard, and it is a pricing scorecard.
Hold something like 60:40. Protect a majority of the budget for the slow, emotional, broad work that builds preference, because that is the work that lets you charge more later. In a rational or B2B category, tilt it, but do not invert it.
Refuse to buy volume with your margin. Every discount that lifts this quarter’s number is a small withdrawal from the pricing power the long game built. Stella learned it. So did the brand in our last piece that lost 985 million dollars discovering its customers no longer valued anything but the sale.
The great adman Jeremy Bullmore said the best advertising sells “both immediately and forever.” The long game is the forever half. And forever, it turns out, is where the price premium lives.
Brave New, plainly
Brave New is the strategy-led growth partner for high-stakes B2B. We build brands that get found, remembered, believed and valued.
What we believe: strategy is the moat and story is the weapon. AI made sameness free, which makes distinctiveness the most expensive asset in your category and the only one that compounds. So the machine does the volume and the versions, never the thinking. As Google and BCG put it in 2026, AI is an engine for growth, not a replacement for talent. The strategy holds the reins.
And what we refuse to do. We don’t do boring. We don’t do vanilla. We don’t do borrowed voices, templated copy, safe work that reads like the category, or dashboards that flatter while the brand quietly fades. Dull is a tax. Our clients don’t pay it.
Insight, with no mercy for the dull. If your brand sounds like everyone else, that is the problem we exist to fix.
What is the 60:40 rule? Les Binet and Peter Field’s finding that brands get the best long-run results by spending roughly 60 percent of the budget on long-term brand building and 40 percent on short-term sales activation. In B2B it shifts to about 46:54.
Does brand building increase pricing power? Yes. Binet and Field’s data shows brand building’s largest payoff is reduced price sensitivity, which lets a brand hold firmer prices, discount less, and protect margin.
This piece pairs with “The 8% Trap”, on how promotion quietly kills brands. Next: how to tell, from your own reporting, whether your budget has already slipped toward the short.
Sources: Les Binet and Peter Field, “The Long and the Short of It” (IPA, 2013), “Media in Focus” (2017), and “Effectiveness in Context” (2018); Binet interview via WARC; the ESOV rule via John Philip Jones and the LinkedIn B2B Institute; Jeremy Bullmore via Tom Roach; Google/BCG “The New Era of Marketing Partnerships” (2026); campaign histories for Stella Artois and Apple as widely documented.
Anne leads content, strategy and SEO across the Brave New client roster.
