Should you invest in brand or marketing?
It’s everyone’s favorite debate to hate—and it’s time to stop giving it oxygen.
The question assumes brand and marketing sit on opposite sides of a seesaw, competing for resources, attention, and credit. But the reality is far more interesting: brand and marketing work best when they work together, starting from the center point and building toward the same outcomes. They’re two cylinders in the same engine, gaining power when the other fires.
At Sullivan, branding and marketing share a common foundation—moving in sync with one another to create meaningful growth.
How do we accomplish this?
1. Build with the Full Ecosystem in Mind
A brand doesn’t live in decks. It becomes real when it shows up in the world, in everyday moments. Vision statements and value propositions only matter when they’re translated into the tools and experiences that prospects, clients, and partners actually use.
That’s why we approach brand-building from both ends:
- Top-down thinking, by defining a strong strategic north star.
- Bottom-up executions, by designing real-world applications that deliver on that strategy.
Take our work with Osaic, for example. We developed a flexible messaging system that laddered up to a single brand promise, providing financial advisors the support they needed to thrive. This made every asset—no matter how tactical—feel unmistakably Osaic. The result? Consistency without rigidity. Coherence without constraint. And enough nuances to meet the needs of different audiences and use cases.
Just as importantly, marketing should inform brand. If you craft a brand that can’t flex into real-world contexts, you risk creating something beautiful on paper but brittle in practice. By testing how a brand performs in the wild, you make sure it can not only survive but thrive under pressure in the marketplace.
2. Measure Success Through a Brand Lens
Metrics like click-through and bounce rates have their place, but they are not the whole picture. If they are the only measure of success, it can lead to short-term optimization at the expense of long-term value. According to the Association of National Advertisers, 57% of brand and marketing leaders cite the difficulty of measuring ROI as the top barrier to investing in brand. So, we need to adopt a brand-led mindset that can push our thinking and create real impact built on depth—one that turns customers, new and existing, into loyal advocates over time.
Our work with NYU is about just that. We built a dashboard that redefined what “performance” meant. Beyond surface metrics, we aligned analytics with the institution’s true goals: education, depth, and meaningful connection. By treating short-term metrics as signals, not scorecards, we could optimize our data and learnings for lasting engagement instead of just fleeting clicks.
This is especially critical in B2B environments, where consideration cycles are long and attention is scarce. According to findings by Cannes Lions, up to 80% of prospects aren’t in market at any given time. You need to make an impression long before the sales cycle begins and sustain it until they are ready.
A brand-led lens ensures your metrics reflect what you’re truly trying to achieve. It’s what helps you make smarter trade-offs between the immediate and the enduring, to build trust, preference, and advocacy with prospects.
3. Lean into the Power of Audience Insight
In many industries — particularly those that are commoditized, relationship-driven, or tech-forward — functional differences between competitors are increasingly minimal. What separates brands is less about what they offer and more about how well they understand their audiences and the emotional experiences they create.
That’s what we call the “moment of consequence.” The moment when decisions are made and preference is formed. Brands win these moments not by shouting the same functional claims as everyone else, but by speaking to the deeper human needs and emotional truths others overlook.
Telecom is a textbook case. While this category obsessed over speed and coverage, T-Mobile reframed it around freedom and flexibility. It became the “un-carrier.” In tech, many brands have done the same, finding differentiation not through product specs, but through emotional positioning and human features. Zoom was the first to have emojis, backgrounds, and video filters in a conference call platform—adapting consumer digital norms into corporate settings.
In our world, brands like Capital Group, Crown Castle, and Weill Cornell Medicine also leaned into empathy and human insights to carve out differentiation that competitors can’t easily copy. For example, Weill Cornell leaned into the research to patient care feedback loop that changes outcomes quickly and at scale. Because anyone can match a feature, but no one can replicate a relationship.
The data backs this up. Companies that focus on customer experience see up to 80% lift in revenue. And 76% of consumers say they’ll buy from a brand they feel connected to over a competitor. That’s why it’s good business to focus on a human-centered, insight-led approach that drives revenue growth, strengthens customer loyalty, and builds long-term brand equity.
4. Be the Difference Maker
To achieve lasting success, you need to address both sides of the equation:
- A brand strategy that effectively translates into experience.
- Marketing that uses every touchpoint to shape long-term meaning.
When you find that balance, your brand informs every message, and your marketing brings that story to life in the moments that matter most to your audience. The result is far more powerful than what either discipline could deliver on its own.
That’s the difference that sets you apart.