By Justin Chatigny, CMO
Justin serves as PlatinumBlack’s CMO and is responsible for both the day-to-day operations of PlatinumBlack and for ensuring that its strategy, marketing, and creative output delivers on client objectives. He has over 25 years of experience helping companies grow and has served in numerous marketing, business development, and consulting capacities in that time. Before taking on his current role at PlatinumBlack, Justin was a Director on Accenture’s Global Marketing Strategy team and held senior marketing leadership positions at Grant Thornton and Deloitte.
There’s a growing tension inside B2B marketing teams — and increasingly, inside boardrooms. Every marketing dollar is expected to prove its worth through pipeline attribution. If it can’t be tied directly to a deal, the pressure to justify the spend is intense. This is the age of performance marketing — rapid feedback, measurable ROI, and dashboards for everything (all critically important, of course). But as budgets chase what’s easy to measure, the brand is quietly being underfunded. Here’s the reality: brand drives demand, and demand drives revenue. You need both for scalable, sustainable growth.
Performance is the harvest. Brand is the planting.
Performance marketing turns attention into action. It delivers with immediate hits. But without brand, there’s no soil from which those results grow.
When organizations over-index on lead generation and under-invest in brand, returns eventually diminish. Channels fatigue. Pipelines get less efficient. Teams work harder for smaller wins.
Meanwhile, strong brands make every marketing dollar more effective. According to Binet & Field’s research for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, brand building drives 2x more growth in the long run than short-term activation. And Think with Google found that strong brands reduce cost per acquisition across paid channels by up to 50%. That’s not a creative argument for brand — that’s a financial one.
Brand makes performance work harder.
A strong brand doesn’t replace performance marketing – it amplifies it.
When people already know and trust your brand, your performance campaigns convert faster and at a lower cost. Prospects are more receptive. Buyers are more confident. Deals close quicker, and pricing conversations go smoother.
Research backs this up: companies with high brand awareness close deals faster and command premium pricing (McKinsey, Bain, LinkedIn B2B Institute). That’s brand equity showing up in the bottom line.
It’s the difference between trying to convince and simply reminding. Brand creates that familiarity – the kind that quietly compounds over time.
The modern buyer has already made up their mind.
Today, up to 80% of a B2B buyer’s decision-making process is complete before they ever talk to sales (Gartner). That means for 80% of B2B buyers, your brand — not your sales team — is doing most of the heavy lifting in shaping perceptions, building trust, and positioning value.
If your brand isn’t visible, credible, and consistent during that research phase, you’re not even in the consideration set. Executives may think they’re buying a product or solution, but what they’re really buying is confidence — in the company, in the leadership, in the promise that what’s been built will deliver. That confidence is created through brand.
Brand as a long-term growth asset.
It’s tempting to treat brand spend as a discretionary expense — something you turn up when times are good and cut back when things tighten. But that view misses the point.
Brand is not a campaign. It’s a compound-growth asset — one that reduces risk, stabilizes revenue, and increases return on every future marketing dollar.
When markets soften or competition intensifies, brand is what sustains pricing power, customer loyalty, and inbound demand. It’s what keeps the pipeline warm when budgets cool.
Strong brands make companies more resilient — and resilience is the most underrated growth strategy there is.
So, what does this look like in practice? How do leading companies balance brand and performance — and how do we do it at PlatinumBlack?
At PlatinumBlack, we build hybrid systems that integrate performance and brand by design, not default. Our go-to-market teams are structured to avoid the classic silo between "performance marketers" and "brand strategists." Strategy, creative, and analytics work as one.
Our rule of thumb: brand building and performance marketing must report into a shared strategic narrative. We treat performance outcomes as proof points of brand value, and we treat brand investment as a multiplier of future performance. We use:
This helps us balance short-term ROI with long-term brand equity — and adjust as the business evolves.
We also use this data to inform budget allocations. While the ideal brand-performance split varies by maturity and context, our baseline recommendation for mid-market and enterprise clients is 60% brand / 40% performance. Younger or earlier-stage companies may flip that ratio. What matters most is consistency over time and quarterly calibration.
What Should Marketing Leaders Do?
A better way to grow.
B2B growth isn’t about choosing between brand and performance. It’s about building an ecosystem where each reinforces the other. Performance marketing delivers immediate wins; brand ensures those wins keep coming.
The best marketers — and the most effective business leaders — understand that growth is both art and science. It’s not just about measuring what converts, but investing in what compounds.
Because in the end, performance may drive the quarter but brand builds the business.
