The yin and yang of brand growth: Is there a better way to think about brand and sales marketing?
Too often marketers are forced to choose between brand and performance-driven marketing. Involved Media’s Dan Hojnik argues there’s a better way to view things.
In my 15 years of working with marketing leaders across Australia and globally, one consistent theme has emerged: the tension between brand and sales. It’s a tension that shapes budgets, strategies, agency relationships and ultimately, growth outcomes.
But only one CMO I’ve worked with has ever articulated this tension in a way that truly stuck with me. Frustrated by an agency planner trying to bend Binet and Fields, “The Long and the Short of It” to argue for more brand (at the expense of immediate sales focus), the CMO paused and said simply: “Everything must support the brand, but everything must sell.”
Although the statement was as black and white as the Yin and Yang itself that line has stayed with me. Because at the heart of this comment is a deeper truth: brand, sales are the Yin and Yang of growth. They are complementary forces. One doesn’t work to its full potential without the other.
Still today and too often, agencies and brands treat them as separate entities, as if we must choose between investing in brand or investing in sales. When really, the power is in how they work together, in harmony, to drive both immediate results and long-term brand growth.
Ironically, though the planner’s intent, more brand for long-term sustainable growth, wasn’t wrong, the way it was argued got this CMO’s back up. By creating artificial walls between “brand” and “sales,” rather than showing how they bring power to each other, the agency undermined their own argument. The result? Continued investment in disconnected silos, rising frustration, and eventually, a review and change in agency relationships.
Dan Hojnik
Mental availability: The ultimate outcome of effective brand building
As famously coined by Byron Sharp in How Brands Grow, mental availability, the likelihood that a brand comes to mind in buying situations is a critical driver of brand growth.
Mental availability is not something that requires brand and sales to work together; rather, it’s the result of effective brand-building. Brand drives mental availability, making your brand the first thing people think of when they’re ready to buy. Once that mental availability is established, it directly drives sales, making your brand the top choice when purchase decisions are made.
For challenger brands or those in lower-interest categories, building mental availability means using every tool available to stay top of mind. This includes both emotional brand-building campaigns and well-timed sales messages that work together to reinforce that mental connection.
This is why “everything brand, everything sales” matters. Every interaction — whether it’s explicitly branded or focused on driving sales, plays a role in building mental availability, which in turn fuels sales growth.
So rather than thinking of brand and sales as separate entities, we should think of them as intertwined forces that work together to create the mental shortcuts that lead to action.
Attention is part of the solution. But not the whole one.
The rising focus on attention metrics is encouraging. Finally, a way to value the quality of impressions, not just quantity. But if we stop at attention without connecting it to building salience and driving action, we fall short. Attention is the bridge between brand and sales. A means to create mental availability and convert that into growth.
Attention, in this case, plays the role of the yin, a necessary force to draw people in, but it only fulfills its purpose when combined with the yang of action-driving sales tactics. Both are needed to create a balanced, effective marketing strategy.
Multiple channels work better together. Always.
The IPA Databank has shown consistently that campaigns using five or more channels deliver short and long-term results greater than the sum of their parts. This is media synergy in action, and it doesn’t work if you’re running “brand” in one set of channels and “sales” in another without connection. Integrated planning across channels, where both brand and sales objectives are baked in, is what drives real impact.
This also means considering more than Paid channels as part of a Yin, Yang marketing strategy. Thinking about every channel at your disposal in unison rather than having factions across Paid Owned and Earned channels, sounds simple enough but is still often forgotten by brands and by agencies, who deem these channels “out of scope”.
This synergy is a perfect representation of yin and yang — the balancing of different forces that, when harmonized, achieve results far greater than isolated efforts.
Taking lessons from the most extreme example of the Brand and Sales divide.
In low-interest, rational categories- think finance, insurance, utilities; there’s a temptation to focus heavily on rational sales messaging. But IPA Effectiveness in Context reminds us that these categories need more emotional, brand-building work than most others. To influence what seem like rational decisions.
Brand and Sales are co-dependent here. You won’t succeed with just one side of the equation. In fact, optimal investment for Brand as a percentage of total paid marketing budget is marked at 80%.
In this context, the two forces of brand and sales must balance each other. Emotional engagement drives interest, which in turn drives rational purchase decisions.
Ecosystem planning: The future of brand and sales
If you think “ecosystem planning” is just a new buzzword for integrated comms, think again. It’s about ensuring every touchpoint, paid, owned, earned, works in harmony to build mental availability and drive action. Not just media, but CX, retail, social, PR, partnerships, customer service. The entire brand experience needs to align. That’s how modern brands grow. And that’s what “everything brand, everything sales” looks like in action.
The yin here is the emotional brand-building work that pulls people in, while the yang is the sales-driven action that compels them to make a purchase. It’s the perfect balance.
Smarter measurement needs to catch up
One of the biggest barriers to this way of thinking? Measurement frameworks that focus on only one half of the story. Either sales, or brand health, rarely both in unison.
We need measurement aligned to communications roles, and channel roles, with both hard and soft metrics laddering up to show how brand and sales work together. Without this, you’re flying blind. Or worse, underestimating the true value of integrated marketing.
Just as yin and yang must be measured and understood in relation to each other, so too must brand and sales in modern marketing frameworks.
A harmonious way forward
So where does that leave us?
If brand and sales are the yin and yang of growth, then our strategies, agencies, and measurement frameworks need to reflect that interdependence. They are not competing priorities, they are parts of a greater whole.
If you’re a marketing leader reading this, reflect:
- Are we still thinking in silos: brand vs. sales?
- Are our agencies and partners helping us balance those forces? or pulling them apart?
For agencies, there’s an opportunity to show up differently: to structure, think and plan across the full spectrum, and to help brands grow in a more balanced, seamless, and future-fit way.
Because in a world of fragmented attention and heightened competition, “everything brand, everything sales” isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the yin and yang of modern brand growth.
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