Unpopular Opinion – Performance Marketing DOES build Brand Equity (Just not efficiently)
Most articles that I have seen on the internet draw a clear distinction between Performance and Brand marketing.
However I have a slightly different view.
📌 Performance Marketing DOES build Brand Equity
Even the most “performance first” channels leave behind small deposits of brand memory.
Think about what actually happens when someone sees your ad on Meta, TikTok or YouTube:
– They see your brand name
– They see your offer / positioning
– They mentally register “this brand exists in this category”
Even if they don’t click or Even if they purchase in a purely transactional way, a small memory about the brand is registered in the minds.
📌 The ‘Impression Residue Effect’ and ‘Slipstream Effect’
Every performance impression leaves a faint trace. Not strong enough to be called brand building. But not completely zero either.
Over time, these small impressions accumulate leading to :
✅ Slightly higher recall
✅ Slightly higher trust vs an unknown brand
and most importantly
✅ Slightly lower friction on future clicks.
Sometime ago we wrote a post on ‘Slipstream Effect’, inspired by F1 racing of course 🙂
The beneficiary brand didn’t have to face the headwinds the mother brand faced. You can read more on this ( link in comments)
Similarly, the second or third ad (even if only performance marketing themed), has to work lesser harder than the first one.
Associated to this, we observed two things. Whenever you run performance campaigns:
▪️Retargeting perform better over time even without major creative changes
▪️Your branded search volume often increases even when you are only running “performance” campaigns
📌 Proof that Performance Marketing creates Brand Memory.
We worked with a DTC brand in 2024 that was almost entirely performance marketing driven. We built a weekly MMM using 1 year of data.
The estimated brand equity came out to be 25%.
Nothing surprising for a brand operating heavily at the lower funnel.
In 2025, the client paused MMM.
However, they had not changed their performance vs branding mix in any meaningful way.
Earlier this year, they came back to rebuild the MMM.
And something interesting showed up almost immediately:
We started detecting a noticeable carryover effect in digital channel Something that was barely visible in the first model.
Brand equity in latest model too moved from 25% -> 27%
There was a clear carryover beyond immediate conversions !
📌 Accidental memory build up vs Intentional
Based on the above, I would say Brand Marketing builds memory structures deliberately where as Performance Marketing leaves behind memory residue accidentally.
📌 The power of Brand + Performance
I came across an excellent article from Google feature Mark Ritson. Mark advocates ‘Bothism’. I agree. It can be both especially when brand does a bit of ‘performance marketing’ and ‘Performance marketing’ does a bit of brand building.
