📖 Glossary

Brand Building — Definition & Evidence

Brand building is the long-term marketing investment that grows mental availability, penetration, and pricing power. Here's the Binet & Field evidence and how to do it.

·6 min read

Definition (≤25 words). Brand building is the long-term marketing investment that grows mental availability, market penetration, and pricing power — as distinct from short-term activation.

TL;DR. Brand building is the "long" in Les Binet and Peter Field's long-and-short framework. It is the emotional, broad-reach, mass-market work that pays back over years rather than weeks — growing the number of buyers who think of your brand, and the price they are willing to pay. It is the 60 in the 60:40 rule, and it is the half of the budget that most organisations chronically under-invest in, because it is harder to measure, slower to show results, and the first thing cut when budgets tighten. The evidence says that is exactly backwards.

What is brand building, precisely?

The term gets used loosely — sometimes to mean any advertising that isn't a price promotion, sometimes as a synonym for "brand strategy" or "brand identity." Binet and Field give it a more rigorous definition, built on the long-vs-short distinction at the heart of their IPA Databank work.

Brand building is marketing investment whose objective is to grow long-term demand — not to generate an immediate sale. Its mechanisms are:

  • Building mental availability: creating and refreshing the memory links that make a brand come to mind in buying situations.
  • Growing market penetration: reaching more of the category's buyers, however light their purchase frequency, rather than deepening loyalty among existing ones.
  • Increasing pricing power: strengthening the brand's perceived value so that it can charge more, resist promotional pressure, and protect margin over time.

Contrast this with activation — the "short" — whose objective is to convert existing demand into sales quickly, through targeting, promotion, and direct response. The two do different jobs on different timescales. Brand building creates the demand and the price the brand can charge; activation harvests it. Neither works well without the other, but the evidence is clear that most organisations drift toward activation and away from brand building, because activation is measurable within the quarter and brand building is not.

How does brand building work, at the mechanism level?

The Ehrenberg-Bass framework explains why brand building works, and the IPA Databank explains what kind of brand building works best. Together they describe a coherent mechanism.

Reach is the foundation. Growth comes from penetration — getting more buyers, not more loyal ones. This is the double jeopardy law, and it means brand building must reach broadly across the category's buyer base, including light and non-buyers, not just the loyal heavy users. Mass-reach media — television, out-of-home, video — remain disproportionately effective for this job, not because they are old-fashioned but because they reach the most people most efficiently.

Emotion builds memory. Binet and Field's evidence consistently shows that emotionally-led campaigns are more effective at driving long-term, profitable growth than rational, hard-sell campaigns. Emotion makes advertising memorable — it encodes the brand more deeply in memory, which is exactly what mental availability requires. Rational messaging may drive short-term response, but it decays quickly and does little to build the lasting associations that sustain a brand over years.

Distinctive assets do the heavy lifting. Romaniuk and Sharp's work on distinctive assets — the colours, logos, characters, slogans, and sounds that identify a brand — shows that these are what make advertising effective at building memory. The job of brand-building creative is not to argue why the brand is better but to link the brand's distinctive assets to as many category entry points as possible, so that the brand is thought of when buyers are in the market.

Consistency compounds. A single campaign builds some mental availability. Years of consistent investment — same assets, same emotional territory, refreshed and reinforced across cycles — build a lot. This is why the brands with the strongest mental availability are usually the ones that have invested consistently for decades, not the ones that ran one brilliant campaign and moved on.

What does the evidence show?

The Binet and Field analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank — first in Marketing in the Era of Accountability (2007), then in The Long and the Short of It (2013), and refined in Effectiveness in Context (2018) — produced several findings that directly shape what good brand building looks like:

Emotional campaigns outperform rational ones for long-term growth. The data shows that campaigns judged as strongly emotional are disproportionately associated with profitable, long-term business results — share growth, pricing power, profit — while rational campaigns tend to drive short-term sales that decay quickly.

The most effective budget split is roughly 60:40. The highest-performing cases in the Databank invested about 60% in brand building and 40% in activation. This is the 60:40 rule — a starting point, not a prescription, but a powerful corrective to the drift toward activation-heavy spending.

Brand building sustains excess share of voice. The brands that grow are those that maintain share of voice above their share of market — positive excess share of voice. Brand-building investment is what sustains that voice over the long term, because it commits budget to broad reach and mental availability rather than narrow, short-term conversion.

The split should shift toward brand under price pressure. In their 2018 update, Binet and Field argued that the modern, promotion-saturated, digitally-attributed environment calls for a more brand-heavy split — closer to 70:30 — because brands need stronger mental availability and pricing power to resist the race to the bottom that performance-only marketing creates.

Brands that hold brand investment through recessions gain share. The evidence is consistent across multiple downturns: brands that maintain their brand-building budget while competitors cut tend to emerge with higher market share and stronger share of search. The short-term cost is real; the long-term reward is larger.

Where people get it wrong

  • Treating brand building as "unmeasurable." It is harder to measure than activation — but it is not unmeasurable. Share of search, penetration, pricing power, brand tracking, and mental availability metrics all provide evidence of brand-building effects, on a longer clock. "We can't measure it" is, in 2026, an excuse.
  • Confusing brand building with brand awareness. Awareness is recognition — "I've heard of it." Brand building is about mental availability — "I think of it when I'm buying." A brand can have high awareness and low mental availability, and still not grow.
  • Classifying by channel instead of objective. A TV ad with a price promotion is activation, not brand building — even though it is on a "brand channel." Brand building is defined by what the money is trying to achieve (long-term demand, mental availability, pricing power), not by where it is spent.
  • Cutting brand building first when budgets tighten. This is the most common and most damaging error. Brand building is the investment with the longest payback, so it is the most expensive to interrupt — and the hardest to restart. Cutting it protects the quarter and damages the years.
  • Expecting brand building to show results in 90 days. It pays back over years. Demanding a quarterly return from brand investment guarantees you will never sustain it, and then wonder why your pricing power is eroding and your penetration is flat.

In practice — how to do brand building well

  1. Commit to a multi-year brand-building budget and protect it. The 60:40 rule is your starting point. Ring-fence the brand portion so it cannot be raided for short-term activation when results look soft.
  2. Invest in emotion and distinctive assets. Brief creative to build feeling and to link your distinctive assets to category entry points. Resist the pressure to fill brand-building campaigns with rational claims and product features.
  3. Prioritise reach. Growth comes from penetration, so your brand-building media must reach broadly — across the category's buyers, including light and non-buyers. Choose channels for reach efficiency, not for targeting precision.
  4. Measure brand building with long-term metrics. Track share of search, penetration, pricing power, and mental availability alongside activation ROAS. Report both halves of the return to the board, on their respective timescales.
  5. Maintain consistency across years. Use the same distinctive assets, the same emotional territory, and the same core strategy. Refresh the execution, not the identity. The compounding effect of consistent brand building is where the real growth lives.

So what?

Brand building is the half of marketing that actually grows businesses — and it is the half that most organisations systematically neglect. The evidence is clear: emotional, broad-reach, long-term investment in mental availability and penetration is what drives profitable growth, sustains pricing power, and builds the excess share of voice that moves market share. The discipline is not in knowing this — it is in holding the budget, resisting the drift to activation, and having the patience to let the compounding work. Fundamentals over fashion. No magic. No hacks.

Evidence & sources

  • Binet, L. & Field, P. (2007). Marketing in the Era of Accountability. IPA.
  • Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It. IPA — the long-vs-short framework and the 60:40 evidence.
  • Binet, L. & Field, P. (2018). Effectiveness in Context. IPA — the shift toward more brand building under promotional and price pressure.
  • Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow. Oxford University Press — penetration, mental availability, and the mechanism of brand growth.
  • Romaniuk, J. & Sharp, B. (2016). How Brands Grow 2. Oxford University Press — distinctive assets and category entry points.
  • Ehrenberg-Bass Institute — research on the role of emotion, reach, and consistency in long-term brand growth.

Definition type: DefinedTerm. Reviewed: 2026-07-09. Written by Andrei Tarnovski for Boringly Effective. Fundamentals over fashion.