Increasing the budget doesn't always increase value. Many companies put more money into marketing, fill their dashboards with metrics, and yet see their business value stagnate. The problem is almost never how much is invested. It's where.
There's an almost automatic reaction in companies when growth slows: they invest more in marketing. More media, more campaigns, more channels, more performance. The logic seems impeccable; if marketing generates results, more marketing should generate more results. However, frequently, the budget increases, but the value doesn't keep pace. Short-term metrics improve, the spreadsheet becomes more active, and the difficult question remains unanswered: has all this made the company more valuable?
It was to discuss this type of trap that we wrote the paper at Anacouto. Strategic Planning 2027. In this article, the clipping refers to a specific and quite common error: increasing the investment in marketing without it generating more value for the business. It's worth understanding why this happens, what separates spending from true investment, and how to correct course.
The mistake: confusing more marketing with more value.
The mistake begins with a subtle confusion between activity and value. Putting more money into marketing increases the volume of things the company does—more ads, more blasts, more content—but volume is not the same thing as value. When the budget grows based on actions that deliver immediate results and then expire, the company is buying momentum, not building assets.
This imbalance has a name and a size. Data from WARC They show that more professionals plan to increase investment in performance (46%) than in brand building (31%). And the Kantar It directly points out the consequence: when a brand consistently prioritizes performance over brand building, base sales begin to erode. In other words, short-term excess corrodes precisely what sustains long-term results. The company pays increasingly higher prices to maintain the same level because the brand, which should be driving demand for free, has been weakening from below.
Expense that expires versus investment that accumulates.
Here's the distinction that changes everything. Short-term activation (promotion, performance media, offers) delivers sales now, but the effect wears off quickly: the day the ad stops, demand drops along with it. Brand building, on the other hand, functions as an investment that accumulates; it creates memory, preference, and willingness to pay more—assets that continue to work even when the budget decreases. One is an expense that expires. The other is an investment that builds up.
The best-known research on this comes from Les Binet and Peter Field, [A study by] [authors], who analyzed approximately one thousand cases of advertising effectiveness in the IPA database, concluded that the best return comes from allocating around 60% of the investment to brand building and 40% to sales activation. Campaigns close to this balance outperformed those that leaned too heavily to either side, with gains not only in immediate sales but also in market share, margin, and pricing power. A study by [authors/organizations] Saïd Business School (University of Oxford) with Kantar, A study analyzing 1,105 multimedia campaigns reinforces this point: the average campaign could be 2.6 times more effective at generating brand value with a different budget allocation. The money is often already there. It's just going to the place that yields the least value.
Why does the mistake keep happening?
If the evidence is so clear, why do so many companies keep falling into the same trap? The reasons tend to be the same.
The first is the allure of the immediately measurable. Performance is easy to measure: clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition—it all appears on the dashboard tomorrow morning. Brand building yields results over months and quarters, at a pace that doesn't fit into a weekly report. Faced with the pressure for quick numbers, the budget naturally flows toward what can be proven now, even if it yields less overall.
The second is the absence of curation. We live in a context of information overload, where trends, data, and channels are available to everyone simultaneously. Without a clear brand identity to filter what matters, everything seems urgent, and the company becomes scattered, investing a little in each new trend without delving deeply into anything. As we argued in the paper, the key differentiator today lies in the ability to separate signal from noise, a curation that is only possible when the brand knows who it is.
The third is to measure activity, not value. Many companies closely monitor impressions, reach, and engagement, but lack a gauge of what truly matters: how much of their revenue comes from brand strength and whether that value is growing. Without measuring value, marketing can only justify more spending on more activity, and the cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
How to turn marketing investment into value.
Correcting the mistake doesn't mean investing less; it means investing intentionally. The first change is to rebalance the equation between building the brand and activating sales, treating the two functions as complementary, not competitors. Activation harvests the demand that exists today; branding creates the demand of tomorrow. A company that only harvests and never plants ends up paying more and more for the same harvest.
The second change is to start measuring value, not just movement. That's why we created the... Valometry®, This tool translates brand strength into business language, with the Branding Value Score (BVS) showing whether each real invested is actually building an asset or just generating activity. When a company clearly sees the value of its brand, the budget discussion changes tone: it stops being "how much do we spend" and starts being "how much do we build".
The third change is to use the brand's purpose and identity as an investment filter. Instead of chasing every channel and every trend, the company focuses resources on what reinforces what the brand is and what generates real value. Less dispersion, more consistency. And consistency, in the end, is what transforms investment into a strong brand. It's not about choosing between performance and brand, but about orchestrating both within the same plan, so that every short-term investment also contributes to building the long-term asset.
It's important to remember that this rebalancing is, first and foremost, a leadership decision. Research by Marketing Week with Kantar showed that mainstream companies are twice as likely to have cut investment in brand building compared to companies that stand out in growth. In other words, the difference between those who only spend and those who generate value begins with the courage to protect investments that don't yield immediate returns but sustain the business over time.
Invest more, or invest better.
The mistake that leads companies to invest more in marketing without generating more value is rarely a matter of the courage to spend. It's a matter of direction. A larger budget applied with the wrong logic only accelerates the erosion of brand value; a well-directed budget transforms each investment into preference, margin, and sustainable growth.
At Anacouto, we believe that marketing only generates value when it's connected to strategy and brand building, and when it's measured by what truly matters to the business. The important question isn't "Are we investing enough?", but rather "Are we investing in what builds value?".
Is your marketing investment building brand value or just generating activity? For a thorough assessment, speak with an Anacouto specialist and learn about what we do.
