We’ve Stopped Marketing: Why the Perceived Disconnect Between Brand and Demand is Bad for All Marketers
Pitting brand against performance is as futile as debating creative vs. media, art vs. science, or right brain vs. left brain. They are interdependent.
Marketing is facing a branding crisis. Ironically, the very function responsible for shaping perceptions and driving engagement has itself been pigeonholed into a false binary: brand marketing versus demand generation. This artificial divide not only weakens the strategic role of marketing but also leads to ineffective tactics that fail to create long-term business impact.
Brand is Suffering from "Bad Branding"
Brand marketing has been increasingly dismissed as vague, unactionable, and ineffective in driving revenue. It has been mislabeled as fluff, disconnected from measurable business outcomes, and overshadowed by performance marketing’s aggressive, results-driven approach. Demand generation, in contrast, has positioned itself as the revenue-centric alternative—focused on acquisition, pipeline progression, and quantifiable business impact.
But this shift comes at a cost. Performance without brand leads to spray and pray marketing, where fragmented, short-term tactics prioritize immediate conversions over sustainable growth. This approach often results in high churn rates, declining brand equity, and diminishing trust with customers. Without a strong brand foundation, demand marketing becomes transactional rather than transformational.
Marketing leaders must recognize that brand and demand are two legs of the same stool, with the third being product or service. Brand without performance is a message no one hears. Performance without brand is a fleeting win with no long-term impact. And a product without both? An innovation that never reaches its audience.
Why the Brand vs. Demand Debate is Misguided
Pitting brand against performance is as futile as debating creative vs. media, art vs. science, or right brain vs. left brain. They are interdependent.
Brand is the why—the promise, the reason to believe.
Performance is the how—the mechanism for reaching the right audience at the right time.
Product/service is the what—the actual fulfillment of the promise.
When aligned correctly, this triad creates business growth:
Brand + Performance = Acquisition
Brand + Product = Retention
Brand + Innovation = Expansion
In essence, strong brands drive more effective performance marketing. Without brand differentiation, performance marketing becomes a numbers game, reliant on massive budgets, high-frequency targeting, and ever-increasing cost-per-acquisition. The result? Diminishing returns and an unsustainable marketing model.
The Customer Journey: The Missing Link Between Brand and Demand
One of the most common questions marketing teams ask is: “How do you connect brand to demand?” The answer lies in a deep understanding of the customer journey.
For years, UX and design leaders have optimized digital experiences based on user behavior. Today, this same customer-centric approach must be applied across marketing, acquisition, web, product, retention, and customer success. This is not a B2B vs. B2C debate—it is a fundamental principle of customer experience.
A well-defined customer journey is the foundation for connecting brand and demand. It encompasses:
Discovery: How customers find you
Consideration: How they understand your value
Decision-making: What drives their purchase
Usage: How they experience your product/service
Retention & Advocacy: Their continued engagement and promotion of your brand
The customer’s perception of your brand is shaped by their actual experience at each stage of this journey. A fragmented approach—where brand, demand, and product teams operate in silos—creates a disjointed customer experience and weakens marketing impact.
Five Approaches to Overcome Marketing’s Perception Problem
To bridge the gap between brand and demand, marketing teams must adopt strategies that integrate both disciplines seamlessly. Here’s how:
1. Align Brand Strategy with Key Stages of the Customer Journey
Instead of treating brand and demand as separate functions, organizations should map brand efforts to the customer journey.
Early-stage brand efforts should focus on awareness and discovery—ensuring your company is visible in relevant channels (search, events, partnerships, content marketing).
Mid-funnel engagement should reinforce credibility through thought leadership, customer success stories, and comparison content.
Late-stage branding should support conversion and retention by emphasizing trust, proof, and long-term value.
How 216° Can Help: We help teams build comprehensive brand and demand strategies that map directly to customer journey stages, ensuring a seamless experience from awareness to advocacy.
2. Shift Marketing KPIs from Vanity Metrics to Business Impact
Marketing teams often struggle to prove impact because they measure in isolation. Instead of tracking brand awareness and demand metrics separately, organizations must create an integrated measurement model.
Customer journey-based KPIs should track movement across lead-to-revenue, acquisition-to-advocacy, or multi-touch attribution models.
Instead of “Did we drive brand awareness?” ask, “How did brand investments increase high-value engagement and conversion?”
How 216° Can Help: Our analytics and insights frameworks ensure that teams measure the right KPIs that link brand awareness to revenue impact.
3. Integrate Brand and Demand Strategies into Campaigns
Brand and performance marketing should not be executed in silos. Instead, organizations should create integrated campaigns that:
Build emotional engagement (brand storytelling)
Drive targeted demand (tactical outreach and lead generation)
Connect brand messaging to bottom-line results (multi-touch attribution analysis)
How 216° Can Help: We specialize in crafting high-impact, unified campaigns that seamlessly merge brand storytelling with demand-driven performance strategies.
4. Prioritize the First 7 Days of Customer Engagement
Many businesses focus so much on acquisition that they neglect the onboarding and early customer experience—leading to high churn. Marketing must play a proactive role in post-purchase engagement.
What happens after a customer converts?
How do they experience value in the first 7 days?
What brand reinforcements help drive long-term retention?
How 216° Can Help: We work with teams to design customer onboarding experiences that reinforce brand value and improve retention from day one.
5. Build Shared Success Metrics Across Teams
Brand, demand, product, and customer success teams must align on shared definitions of success. This means:
Centralizing brand strategy, messaging, and creative execution to ensure a consistent customer experience.
Cross-functional collaboration between marketing, sales, product, and CX to optimize customer touchpoints.
How 216° Can Help: We provide frameworks and playbooks that help teams unify marketing functions, ensuring cohesive brand storytelling across every touchpoint.
Conclusion: Reframing the Brand vs. Demand Debate
Instead of asking “How does brand drive demand?”, marketing teams should be focused on customer journey impact...
In today’s world, brand and demand are not opposing forces. They are interdependent levers that, when aligned, drive sustainable growth. Organizations that embrace this holistic approach will outperform those that continue to treat marketing as an either-or equation.
The marketing function hasn’t failed—it’s just been badly branded. It’s time to fix that, and 216° is here to help.