The famous research by Les Binet and Peter Field points to a baseline 60/40 split between brand-building and sales activation for long-term, profitable growth. Byron Sharp's *How Brands Grow* argues that brands scale by maximizing mental and physical availability: being thought of in buying situations, and being easy to purchase. Yet, these frameworks were studied on global brands with massive budgets. So what do you do when your entire annual budget wouldn't cover a corporate brand's photo shoot?
The temptation: All activation, all the time
Small-to-mid-sized businesses frequently fall into the performance-only trap. Because sales activation (such as Google Search ads, retargeting, and discount emails) is immediate, measurable, and highly trackable, it is easy to justify. But this approach quietly caps your growth. Activation does not create new demand; it merely harvests existing demand.
When every dollar you spend is focused on buyers who are already in-market, you find yourself bidding in highly competitive ad auctions against rivals doing the exact same thing. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) rise, margins compress, and your sales velocity decays the moment you turn off your ad spend. You are left renting an audience instead of owning one.
Brand-building without a corporate brand budget
The 60/40 principle remains valid on small budgets if you translate it correctly: brand-building does not require multi-million-dollar television campaigns or billboard buyouts. Instead, it means building memorability and consistency into everything you already execute:
- Distinctive Brand Assets: Treat your visual assets, typography, and brand voice with absolute discipline. Using the exact same visual identifiers across your email flows, social channels, and product packaging builds familiarity over time. This discipline was key when I managed 52 regional dealerships under one strict Harley-Davidson framework.
- Authority Content: Build mental availability by answering the unglamorous, high-intent research questions your category buyers ask. Comparison guides, technical FAQs, and honest industry evaluations cost nothing to write but build deep credibility that buyers remember when they are ready to purchase.
- Leveraging Community: At Harley-Davidson, we didn't rely on massive media buys. We turned the local dealership into a community hub. Ride-outs, bike launches, and charity runs turned existing owners into active brand ambassadors, creating organic reach that paid media couldn't duplicate.
Maximizing physical availability
Byron Sharp's second pillar—making your brand easy to buy—is often the most cost-effective growth lever available to lean teams:
- Local Findability: Ensure your local search presence is flawless. For businesses like Active Safety (with 14 safety and workwear brands) or the Porter Group, maintaining optimized Google Business locations ensured that local contractors could find a branch immediately.
- Frictionless Conversion: Fix the user experience of your e-commerce and mobile landing pages. Clear stock levels, transparent shipping fees, simple checkout processes, and a phone number that connects to a real person are core marketing assets. Reducing checkout friction will move your bottom line faster than another expensive ad campaign.
A realistic split for lean portfolios
In my current role leading a five-brand portfolio, I apply this split by keeping sales activation campaigns highly targeted and capped at physical efficiency levels. I then protect a dedicated portion of our team's time and budget for compounding brand assets: search optimization, owned database retention (Klaviyo welcome and lifecycle flows), and community engagement.
The exact percentage split is less critical than the organizational discipline of maintaining one. Sales activation is the harvest; brand-building is the seed. Focusing entirely on harvesting works for one season, but eventually, you run out of crops.