Brand? Or Demand? (Exit Five Newsletter)

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🤨 Brand vs. Demand: Where Marketers Are Placing Their Bets in 2026

Everyone's talking about how (because of AI) "brand is back." You've seen the LinkedIn posts. The talks about building awareness and reputation. Because the influx of AI slop and copy cat competitors has left us one last differentiator: BRAND.

But no matter what people say about brand being back, they're still struggling to disconnect it from the numbers. OK, that’s great - brand is back. But I still need to show the impact of “brand” to the CEO and CFO.

My take: we’ve become so obsessed with tracking the performance of everything that we lose sight of what actually matters.

I was playing golf with a friend of mine up here in Vermont; he owns a small business. And you know how he measures if something “worked” or not? Did more people come into his store. Now of course B2B buying cycles are much more complex than that - but there’s something about making things so simple and seeing the other side of the spectrum.

Plus: not everything “brand” related is immediately measurable. If more people know you exist, and get to know/like/trust you over time, months and years from now that compounds and more people will start showing up at your website.

But I wanted to know what marketing leaders are actually thinking about right now, beyond my over simplified small business example.

So we hosted a webinar with a group of marketing leaders to talk all about Brand vs. Demand and where it’s headed into 2026. I think this will be helpful for you to read through…

🧑‍💻 The Real Problem: Operating in Silos

We heard this over and over again. “Demand gen won't collaborate with the brand side because they're so focused on conversion metrics.”

One marketer tried to pull their paid media owner into social strategy sessions. The response? That's not going to work for our goals.

Another leader wanted to review content before building a campaign around it. The content team questioned why they needed to see it.

When teams operate like this, brand and demand might as well be on different planets.

👉 It’s Probably Time To Do Less

Here's the thing: just because you can put 20 things on your to-do list doesn't mean they all have equal impact. It's usually gonna be 1 or 2 big things that produce the 80/20 result.

So how do we find out what those are and take more bets on them?

This is where brand and demand should work together.

Do less, but work together more on bigger swings and bigger initiatives. Then you can make a bigger impact.

I'd rather take a big swing, pause all the little stuff, and try 2-3 big campaigns. I love when teams think "these are the campaigns we're running this quarter" - not 47 different things running at the same time.

It's safe to always do the small things and never pause them. But that's not how you break through.

💰 Real Example: A Massive Budget Shift

One demand gen leader moved a third of her demand budget and shifted it to brand campaigns.

Her brand spend? Nearly doubled from $350K to $700K.

They expected a revenue miss because of this shift.

But you know what happened? The top of funnel came down (as expected), but starting at the SQL level, they actually saw increases in both SQLs and pipeline.

📱 Why Organic Social Is Your Secret Weapon (And Most People Are Missing It)

I see this mistake constantly.

Organic social is an amazing way to test what's gonna work on paid. If you create an amazing piece of content organically, you can see what resonates before spending a dime.

All the Mad Men-era advertisers would have killed to reach people directly and get these insights. Now we have that ability, and we're...ignoring it?

Here's a real example: Gary Vee's team (yeah, I know some people don't like him, but stay with me) created an organic post for Miralax. It was basically a whiteboard chart showing how often you poop in a day. Sounds ridiculous, right?

It went viral.

So what did they do? They took that same video, edited in a CTA and offer at the end, and ran it as paid.

Why don't we think like this in B2B? Your viral might not be a thousand comments (maybe you got 12 comments on an organic post when you usually get none). That's an amazing signal.

I do this all the time. If I write about a topic and it pops off on social a little bit, that becomes "hey team, we should write about this in our newsletter."

📈 How to Actually Measure Brand

If you're shifting budget to brand, how do you report on it? Here’s what’s working for the marketing leaders we chatted with:

The Leading Indicators Framework

Keep detailed channel tracking within the team, but when you report up, position metrics as leading indicators - not hard KPIs.

Show overall pipeline alongside these leading indicators. Leadership gets one view of pipeline, then leading indicators on the brand side. This makes conversations easier and reports a lot shorter.

The Attributed vs. Touched Shift

Another approach that's working: Change the story from attributed to touched.

Brand campaigns aren't directly attributing as much pipeline, but they're touching a lot of it. This reframes the conversation from "did this ad directly create a deal?" to "are we influencing the buyers who eventually convert?"

The Core Metrics That Matter

Here's what one team landed on after two years of iteration:

• Web traffic
• Branded search impressions
• Social engagement (not just follower growth)
• Category leadership metrics (like G2 rankings)
• Conversion rates at each stage

The key? Don't isolate brand metrics from full marketing metrics. Show the rising tide. These are the initiatives we did together, and we hit our goals or we didn't.

Sales Cycle Efficiency

One often-overlooked metric: sales cycle time reduction. Are conversions happening faster?

If brand investment gives your sales team more ammo and makes deals close faster, that's a story worth telling.

🗓️ What This Means for You in 2026

The companies that win in 2026 won't be the ones that choose brand OR demand. They'll be the ones that figure out how to make them work together.

That means:

1️⃣ Breaking down the silos. Your demand team can't operate separately from brand. Your content team can't gate-keep. Your social team needs to be in the room early. If collaboration is painful, that's a system problem, not a people problem.

2️⃣ Testing organically before you spend. Use organic social as your R&D lab. See what resonates, then amplify it with paid. This isn't "nice to have" - it's how modern marketing works.

3️⃣ Taking bigger swings on fewer things. Stop trying to do so many things at once. Pick 2-3 big campaigns per quarter and actually resource them properly. Bring brand and demand together to execute.

4️⃣ Reframing your metrics. Move from attributed to touched. Position metrics as leading indicators, not hard KPIs. Show the rising tide, not individual droplets.

5️⃣ Building trust before breaking things. If you want to shift budget to brand, you need credibility. Get quick wins. Show you understand the business. Then you can take bigger risks.

6️⃣ Recognizing that creative isn't a luxury. If your team is creatively bankrupt, you're already behind. Brand investment gives you more ammunition, better stories, and warmer leads. That makes everyone's job easier.

The bottom line? Brand isn't really "back" because it never left. What's changing is that more leaders are finally admitting what we've known all along: you can't performance-marketing your way to sustainable growth.

But you also can't just "build brand" without any connection to business results.

The answer isn't choosing sides. It's building a system where brand and demand feed each other. Where organic social informs paid strategy. Where content and campaigns are built together, not in silos.

- Dave

P.S. The most interesting part of this conversation was how similar the challenges were across different company sizes and industries. Whether you've got a $400K budget or a $4M budget, the tension between brand and demand is real. So I want to hear from you. What’s your biggest challenge with brand and demand right now?

Reply back to me - I am looking for ways to improve our newsletter (always) and I want to hear what’s on your mind.

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