Brand vs Performance Spend: Setting Your Own Split, Not Copying 60:40

Few numbers in marketing get repeated as often as 60:40: spend about 60% of the budget on brand building and 40% on sales activation. It turns up in board decks, agency proposals and budget meetings, often as if it were a law. A B2B version, roughly 46:54, travels the same way.

Both numbers come from serious research. Neither was meant to be copied into your budget. This report explains what each study measured, where its findings stop applying, and a practical way to build a split from your own objectives, margins and sales cycle.

What the 60:40 finding actually measured

The ratio comes from Les Binet and Peter Field’s work on the IPA Effectiveness Databank, a collection of campaigns entered into the UK’s IPA Effectiveness Awards. Their best-known report, The Long and the Short of It, analysed 996 campaigns entered into the IPA Effectiveness Awards between 1980 and 2010 and pointed to an optimum of around 60% brand building and 40% activation, as summarised by Alex Murrell. The IPA’s own summary today puts it as “just over 60 per cent on brand building and a little under 40 per cent on activation”, drawn from four decades of awards cases (IPA).

It helps to be precise about the two terms:

• Brand building means activity designed to create lasting memory and preference among a broad audience, including people who are not buying now. Its effects build over months and years.
• Sales activation means activity designed to produce an immediate response: a click, a call, an inquiry, a purchase. Its effects are strong and fast, then fade.

The same body of work produced findings that matter as much as the ratio. Share of voice above share of market tends to go with growth; campaigns that reach the whole category beat campaigns aimed only at existing customers; emotional campaigns produce more brand and business effects than rational ones (again as summarised by Alex Murrell). The split is one output of a larger argument, not the whole of it.

The B2B number, and why its authors called it tentative

In The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, published in October 2019 by the B2B Institute, a think tank funded by LinkedIn (IPA), Binet and Field ran a similar analysis on B2B cases from 1998 to 2018. They found effectiveness peaked at “around 46% of the budget is allocated to brand, with around 54% allocated to activation” (B2B Institute report). The report’s own summary rounds this to about 45:55, which is a reminder of how approximate the figure is.

The authors were unusually direct about the limits. In the report itself they state:

• The sample is small: fewer than 50 B2B cases, out of a Databank of almost 1,500 campaigns.
• The findings are “by necessity” tentative, and the sample “may not be typical of B2B marketing in general”.
• The cases skew towards the UK and towards relatively big budgets.
• The Databank is biased towards effective campaigns, because it is built from awards entries.
• “The optimal mix varies by category, price point, brand size and so on”, and the ratio “should not be followed too precisely”.

The report also notes that brand building “pays off in years, not months”, and treats effects measured over more than six months as long-term (B2B Institute). That timing point is often more useful to a CEO than the ratio itself, because it explains why brand spend looks wasted on a 30-day report.

Where the ratios stop applying

Neil Krikul, a marketing scientist at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, argued in B&T in August 2026 that the “magic split” should be retired as a planning tool. His points: the data came from awards entries, the authors themselves said the balance varies by category, and the later LinkedIn publications repeating it were self-published and may not have gone through academic peer review. Prescribing one split to every brand, he wrote, is like handing a newcomer an elite athlete’s training programme. He also notes that “smaller brands may spend more on short-term performance to bring the money in fast and grow” (B&T).

In practice, the published ratios are a poor fit when:

• Your budget is small in absolute terms. Brand building works through reach and continuity. If 50% of a modest budget cannot buy meaningful reach among your buyers for long enough, it buys very little memory. A larger activation share, aimed at people already searching, may be the rational choice until the business can fund both.
• Demand already exceeds what you capture. If buyers are searching for your exact product and you are not appearing, the first money belongs in capturing that demand.
• You are launching something new. A new distributor agency, product line or market entry needs awareness and immediate sales at the same time, and the balance usually shifts over the first year.
• Your buyer universe is narrow. A company selling to a few hundred named accounts can reach most of them with fewer media placements and more direct, relationship-led activity. The categories in the original data rarely looked like this.
• Your definitions differ. Many companies label a retargeting campaign or a product video “brand”. If the labels are loose, any ratio you report is meaningless.

A method to set your own split

Krikul’s article recommends combining several budgeting approaches instead of picking a ratio: objective-and-task budgeting, spending on short-term performance up to the point of diminishing returns while keeping acquisition cost below break-even, and funding brand building for reach, frequency and continuity, with share of voice as a cross-check (B&T). Here is how to turn that into four working steps. (For setting the total budget before any split, see our comparison of three methods for deciding how much to spend.)

Step 1: State the objectives in business terms

Write down what the year must deliver: revenue, new accounts, a market entry, a share target. Then separate what must come from people ready to buy this year from what must come from people who will buy later. A company with a long sales cycle and infrequent purchases has most of its future buyers out of the market today. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute set this out in 2021 as the 95:5 rule: up to 95% of business clients are not in the market for many goods and services at any one time (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute). Dawes calls the 95% a heuristic, not a precise rule, and the share in your category depends on how often it is bought, so estimate your own.

Step 2: Set an activation ceiling from your margins

Work out the maximum you can afford to pay for a lead, then fund activation up to the point where extra spend pushes your cost per lead above that line.

1. Average gross profit per new deal (first year, or lifetime if you trust the number).
2. Multiply by the share of that profit you are willing to spend to win the deal.
3. Multiply by your lead-to-deal close rate. The result is your maximum affordable cost per lead.

Then look at what each channel actually delivers. Search campaigns and inquiry ads usually become more expensive per lead as you push spend, because you run out of people actively looking. The point where your marginal cost per lead crosses the ceiling is where activation spend should stop for now. This step needs clean tracking of leads through to closed deals; without it, you are guessing.

Step 3: Set a brand floor from the job it has to do

Define the audience you need to be remembered by: the decision-makers and influencers across your target accounts, including those who are not buying this year. Then cost the reach, frequency and continuity needed to stay in front of them through the year, across the channels they actually use. Check the result against share of voice: if your competitors are far louder than you in the media your buyers see, a growth target that assumes rising share needs a voice to match.

Step 4: Reconcile and write down the split

Add the activation ceiling and the brand floor. If the total exceeds the budget, decide which objective gives way, and say so in the plan. The resulting split is yours, and it will often land well away from 60:40 or 46:54.

All figures are invented for illustration. The point is the logic: change the margin, close rate or audience size and the split moves, which is exactly why a fixed ratio cannot be right for everyone.

Adjusting the split for Gulf and Egyptian conditions

The underlying evidence comes mostly from UK campaigns. Companies in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt plan around a different calendar and a different sales reality, so a few adjustments usually matter more than the headline ratio:

• Seasonality. Ramadan, Eid, the summer slowdown and exhibition season change when buyers are reachable and when they act. Plan brand continuity across the year, and concentrate activation where your own data shows inquiries rise.
• Exhibitions sit in both buckets. A trade show booth builds memory among a category audience and generates leads in the same week. Split its cost honestly rather than putting it all in one column.
• Distributor launches. A newly appointed agent introducing an international brand needs to build recognition for that brand in a new market and sell stock quickly. Expect a heavier activation share in the first months and a deliberate shift towards brand as the range becomes known.
• Relationship-led selling. Where deals close through referrals, consultants and repeat relationships, brand activity often works by making the sales team’s first meeting easier. Track it through branded search, direct inquiries and how often prospects already know the name.

If you are building next year’s plan now, our guide to an annual marketing plan for B2B companies in the GCC shows how to work from the sales target down to a quarterly roadmap, and the budget split slots into that structure. Turning the split into a written plan with channel costs and measures is the core of our marketing strategy and budget planning work.

How to measure both halves and defend the split

A split only survives a budget review if each half is judged on the right evidence and the right timescale.

That last warning sign links the two halves. When brand building is cut too far, the pool of people who already know you shrinks, and activation has to work harder to find buyers; the evidence on what happens when brand spend stops is in our article on cutting marketing in a downturn. On the activation side, judge performance marketing on qualified inquiries rather than clicks.

When you present the budget to a board, show the reasoning rather than the ratio: the objective, the maximum affordable cost per lead, the audience the brand budget must reach, and what happens to each if the budget is cut. As Krikul notes, that argument carries more weight with senior management than quoting someone else’s number. Then review it. A split set in January should change once you have six months of your own cost-per-lead and pipeline data.