Latest / The Marketing Career Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Jobs, Skills, and Career Growth / Why Brand Marketing Is Back in 2026
Transcript
- Lucas: So last week I was looking at a deck from a DTC mattress company — one of those brands that started in a garage and grew to a hundred million in revenue mostly on Facebook ads — and what caught my eye was their budget allocation for Q2 2026. Luna: Let me guess — they shifted away from performance? Lucas: Completely. They went from spending 80 percent of their marketing budget on direct-response digital ads to 60 percent on brand marketing. Print, out-of-home, podcast sponsorships, even a TV commercial test. Luna: That feels like a throwback to 2019. I thought the whole DTC thesis was that you could skip brand and go straight to conversion. Lucas: That thesis worked when Facebook's algorithm was generous and customer acquisition cost was under fifty dollars. But by late 2025, the cost to acquire a customer through performance ads for a mattress had ballooned to over two hundred and fifty dollars. The math just broke. Luna: And brand marketing — that's a slower payback. How do they justify it to their board? Lucas: They showed that customers acquired through brand channels had an average order value 30 percent higher and a return rate 15 percent lower. More importantly, the lifetime value was nearly double because those customers were more likely to refer friends. The CFO did the math and saw that a dollar spent on brand returned one point forty over eighteen months, while a dollar on performance returned one point ten over six months — then flatlined. Luna: So brand actually outperformed on a long-term return basis. That's the kind of data that changes internal conversations. Lucas: Exactly. And it's not just that one company. I've seen similar shifts at a meal-kit brand, a direct to consumer eyeglass company, even a B2B software firm. They're all rediscovering that brand creates a moat that performance ads can't replicate. Luna: What's the concrete mechanism? How does brand marketing actually lower acquisition cost over time? Lucas: The simplest way to think about it is that brand builds search volume. When someone hears about a product from a podcast or sees a billboard, they later type the brand name into Google. That branded search click is essentially free — you don't have to bid on a generic keyword. Over time, branded searches can account for 30 to 40 percent of total site traffic, and those visitors convert at two to three times the rate of non-branded traffic. Luna: So it's not just about awareness, it's about creating a cheaper source of demand. Lucas: Right. And the mattress company saw that their branded search volume grew 40 percent year-over-year after they started the brand push, while their overall ad spend stayed flat. That's a direct trade-off. Luna: But I imagine some marketers are skeptical. Brand is harder to measure, and attribution models are still messy. Lucas: That's the biggest hurdle. But the companies that are succeeding with brand in 2026 are using incrementality testing. They run geo experiments — they advertise on TV in one market but not in another, then compare the lift in overall sales. The mattress company did that and found that TV drove a twelve percent incremental lift in sales across all channels, including their own website and even retail partners. Luna: So they're not abandoning performance, they're rebalancing. It's a portfolio approach. Lucas: Exactly. The new formula seems to be roughly 60-40 or 70-30 brand to performance, depending on the category. And the performance side gets smarter too — instead of blasting a generic ad to everyone, they retarget people who already saw a brand impression. That second click becomes incredibly efficient. Luna: For marketers listening, what's the takeaway? How do you make the case to your own leadership? Lucas: I think the strongest argument is to show the diminishing returns of performance alone. Pull your last twelve months of CAC data by channel and plot it against spend. If you see CAC rising faster than revenue, that's your opening. Then propose a small brand test — maybe five to ten percent of budget — with a clear measurement framework. The mattress company started with just three percent in Q3 of last year, saw results, and scaled up. Luna: Start small, prove the model, then scale. That's a career-savvy move too — it shows you're thinking about long-term value, not just hitting quarterly targets. Lucas: And honestly, from a career perspective, being the person who brought brand back into the conversation — that's a narrative that hiring managers remember. It shows strategic depth. Luna: Yeah, that's a good point. If today's episode sparked something you've actually used in your own planning — or even just gave you a framework to think about — that's exactly why we do this. And the way these stay ad-free is listener support. If you found value, you can head to buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Just a simple way to keep the conversations going without any sponsors. And we really appreciate it. Luna: So back to the brand shift — what's the one metric you'd track to know if brand investment is working? Lucas: Branded search volume. It's clean, it's correlated with everything else, and it's easy to pull from Google Search Console. If your branded searches are growing faster than your total traffic, you're building real equity. That, and direct traffic — people typing your URL into their browser — that's a signal that your brand is becoming a habit. Luna: Direct traffic is the ultimate vote of confidence, isn't it? No ad, no search engine — just someone who remembers you. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the kind of asset that a competitor can't buy for the same price you paid. It's defensible. Luna: So for anyone listening who's considering a similar shift, start small, measure branded search, and make the case with data. It's a winning approach. Lucas: And if you want to talk about it more, we'll be back next week with another deep dive. Until then.