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Building Brand Awareness While Driving Revenue Growth
Connect brand awareness to revenue with a two-speed growth model and shared metrics, so you turn attention into preference and profitable demand.
Summary
Many leadership teams mistake more campaigns or tighter targets for progress. The real signal is lost in timing debates and the split between brand building and profitability. Focus returns when a shared value roadmap forces a choice. That’s how the C-suite regains momentum and converts brand investment into faster decisions, stronger pricing power, and durable growth.
Watch The Video
In this video, Dipendra Mistry (CSO & Managing Partner) shows how to align brand building with profitability for lasting growth.Our Perspective
What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.
The Real Trade-Off
The C‑suite split isn’t really about belief in brand versus belief in profit. It’s about mismatched clocks and unclear rules. Brand work compounds value over time; finance protects margins today. When those cycles aren’t reconciled, decisions slow, campaigns hedge, and pricing authority erodes. Kantar & Google’s Effectiveness Equation reports that almost half of marketing leaders are prioritising brand building for 2024–25, while a similar share of finance leaders put profitability first (48% versus 45%), showing how common this split has become.
The fix is not to pick a side; it’s to define how brand creates future cash flows and the point at which those flows exceed their cost. Put plainly, treat brand as a capital investment with explicit break‑even, triggers, and exit criteria.
Build A Value Runway
A practical way forward is a value runway: a shared roadmap that ties brand bets to profit boundaries and time‑boxed checkpoints. It gives everyone one plan, not competing plans. In our experience with leadership teams at inflection points, this reframes debates from “should we spend?” to “what must be true for this to return?”.
Design the runway with clear decision rules:
- Investment tranches linked to milestones and expected return on investment (ROI).
- Defined break‑even windows by segment or product line.
- Guardrails for gross margin, price realisation and payback.
- Pre‑agreed exit or scale‑up triggers if signals beat or miss thresholds.
One Plan, Two Clocks
Operationally, run dual cadences: monthly leading signals to steer, and quarterly lagging results to judge. Marketing can move quickly on creative and channel tests while finance validates the commercial effects. The discipline is to connect both clocks through one scorecard and one narrative.
That link matters. When brand activity and commercial outcomes are read together, you see cause and effect earlier: pricing power firming before revenue shifts, or consideration rising before conversion catches up. That’s when leaders can redirect spend confidently rather than cutting or doubling down on instinct.
Measures That Matter
Choose a small set of measures that represent both meaning and money, so teams can trade intelligently rather than argue philosophy.
- Leading signals: share of search, qualified demand, win‑rate against target accounts.
- Pricing signals: average realised price, discount depth, and deal slippage.
- Efficiency signals: acquisition cost trend, sales cycle length, retention and expansion rates.
- Confidence signals: employee referrals and offer acceptance—early reads on internal belief.
Leadership Commitments
The strategic work is behavioural. Three commitments make the split disappear:
- Set a single value narrative that ties brand promises to commercial levers.
- Align incentives to blended outcomes: profit within period and value creation over horizon.
- Protect learning cycles—fund tests to a conclusion, not to the first wobble.
When leaders close the gap between the clocks, brand stops being a debate and becomes a system that earns today while compounding tomorrow—shifting the organisation from defensive targets to durable advantage.
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Further Resources
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