Brand vs. Revenue - Decoding the controversy

Popular opinion:

Brand is marketing’s most important function.

Unpopular opinion:

Revenue and pipeline ALWAYS come first.

Not too long ago, Kyle Lacy shared his version of this particular hot take.

To understand what makes this take such a spicy marketing meatball, let’s take a time-traveling adventure through marketing’s recent past.

Once upon a time, marketers frolicked freely across the land, without a care in the world. As long as they could convince their boss they were valuable, they could play with crayons all day, annoy everyone in sales, and practice origami to their little hearts’ content.

Then someone released an unholy evil into the world: The big, bad internet (boo!) — and with it, endless ways to capture marketing data — which huffed and puffed and blew marketing’s little house of cards down. Thanks to the newfound dark magic of attribution, CEOs could evaluate marketing by their contributions to revenue and not just whether their precious coloring project was good enough to hang on the fridge.

This led to a dark shadow spreading across the land as marketers began to care more about attribution than job satisfaction, joy, or children’s laughter. Everywhere you turned, there were monsters, goblins, and ghouls: gated content, email newsletter sign-ups, keyword-stuffed SEO pages, and nefarious chatbots pushing product demos.

It sucked.

That’s why, these days, plenty of marketers like to distinguish between brand and revenue marketing — and a decent chunk of them now think the harder-to-attribute brand marketing is the way forward.

Our take:

It’s not because we don’t love Watercolor Wednesdays and Fingerpaint Fridays…

It's that, while brand is important, prioritizing it over revenue is like decorating your house before you even have walls. Without revenue, everyone in your company starves.

You don’t pay the bills with brand.

And you’d be hard-pressed to find clearer phrasing of this simple fact than Christopher Lochhead’s:

As for the many sins committed in the name of revenue, we can’t stress this enough: That’s a problem with how we attribute, not with simply acknowledging that revenue is the ultimate goal of ALL marketing.

The problem with this debate (and why so many marketers are still confused) is that it’s not brand vs. revenue — as Christopher’s point illustrates, looking at brand as separate from revenue doesn’t even make sense. You only get to play with Play-Doh professionally if it’s bringing in some serious dough — i.e. revenue.

As Peep Laja points out: Nobody’s gonna scrutinize your arts and crafts projects when you deliver results.

That’s why we prefer not to draw a line between brand and revenue. Both paths ultimately still lead to the same destination: keeping the lights on.

Your turn: 

What do you think? Should revenue always come first?

Is demand creation vs. capture a better way to view the debate?

How much finger paint can a marketer “accidentally” ingest before it’s legally considered a medical emergency?