If you’ve worked in ecommerce for more than five minutes, you know the pull of the conversion number. Everyone’s obsessed with it. The pressure gets intense, because the moment someone in leadership discovers that one magic number, that’s all they want to talk about. It doesn’t matter that you know how rubbery that number can be when you pull it apart.
Meanwhile, brand cops it. Brand gets called fluffy, and sometimes that’s on us, because we haven’t always shown the commercial outcomes of building great brands. So brand is the line that gets cut first when the quarter gets tight, because no one can point to exactly what it did this week for sales.
We’ve got the fight back to front. Brand and conversion aren’t rivals. Brand is the thing that makes your conversion cheaper.
The Fight Dave Has Every Month
The person who explains this better than anyone is Dave Dullens, Head of Brand and Consumer at Conquest Sports, which runs Converse in Australia and New Zealand. He’s spent 20 years keeping iconic brands relevant, and he sells across wholesale, retail and direct, so this isn’t just a big-brand problem. The point lands the same whether you’re pure DTC or selling every other way.
Dave has the fight with the conversion number every single month, and he’s worked out how to win it.
You can’t rely on the algorithm to surface the most commercial. Brands don’t sell one product, they sell hundreds, and some things need to find an audience to establish. It understands conversion, it doesn’t understand the brand priorities
- Dave Dullens, Head of Brand and Consumer, Conquest Sports
His method is to carve out a budget a couple of times a quarter for awareness and reach, then ladder that same audience down into consideration and conversion. You need the first piece to get the second. His whole philosophy comes down to one line: brand is planting the trees, performance is harvesting the fruit, and you can’t harvest what you never planted. Everything below makes that practical.
Lesson One: Pitch Brand as an Investment, Not a Cost
The first move is as much about language as money. Stop pitching brand as a cost and start pitching it as an investment. The way Dave makes that real is by ring-fencing a deliberate slice of spend for brand. But that money isn’t a free ride. It’s an investment budget with a job to do: run it for awareness and reach, then ladder the audience down into conversion.
In the ad account, that looks like a separate ad set built to reach new people with a brand message, which you feed back into your master converting campaign. You have to ring-fence it, because the algorithm will never choose to do this on its own. Left alone, it spends every dollar reshowing your best-converting ad to the same warm audience, and it eats your brand budget alive. Pamela Yip, co-founder of Bubble Tea Club, learned to make exactly that case in a business drowning in performance metrics.
There are people behind those metrics. If you’re too fast chasing your MER percentage and short temporary moments of a better ROAS, you might be compromising your brand. Just pitch it as an investment.
- Pamela Yip, Co-founder, Bubble Tea Club
So this month, carve out a fixed slice of spend, it doesn’t have to be a lot, ring-fence it from your conversion targets, and put it behind reaching people who don’t know you yet. Then feed that audience into your converting campaigns. Frame it to yourself and your leadership team as an investment with a job, not money set aside for a free brand ride.
Lesson Two: Hold Brand to Account With Numbers
Here’s why brand usually loses: it turns up to a numbers fight armed with feelings. If you want brand to have a seat at the boardroom table, it has to be accountable like everything else at that table. So bring numbers.
Dave’s recipe is simple and repeatable. Get a baseline of what people think of you today. Pick one specific thing you want to move, for Converse it’s being associated with sport. Put a KPI on it, like brand lift or category association. Activate against it for a set period, then measure again and walk the before and after with your team. Tools like Tracksuit make always-on brand monitoring available rather than a once-a-year survey. The trick is to measure something you can actually shift, not just overall awareness. No one makes this case better than Jess Hatzis, co-founder of Frank Body.
That’s the not-sexy side of branding. You have to spend your time in the numbers, and the numbers will tell you what needs to change. I don’t believe in the sentence ‘I feel and I believe’ sitting in the boardroom. It should be the numbers show us, therefore here’s the recommendation.
- Jess Hatzis, Co-founder, Frank Body
So pick one brand metric you want to move, baseline it now, activate against it, then remeasure. Take that before and after into rooms where people are skeptical about brand, and show them the numbers.
Lesson Three: If You Never Plant, You Never Harvest
The last argument is the one you reach for when someone calls brand a nice-to-have. It isn’t. It’s the thing that makes every conversion dollar stretch further. If you start from zero brand and just buy sales, it might work for a while, but it will quickly stall and get expensive, because you’re chasing a shrinking pool of people who already know you. That’s Dave’s plant-the-trees point. When the brand work is done, the customer has half-decided or half-trusted you before they ever land on your product page, so the conversion is cheaper by the time they get there.
Nick Gray, founder of IGU Global, put the mechanism about as plainly as it gets.
Humans make decisions with emotion first, and trust is built on emotion. If there’s doubt in your mind, that impacts trust. No different to a relationship, and it’s very hard to repair.
- Nick Gray, Founder, IGU Global
Nick had a brand stop pouring money into the lower funnel and put it all into filling the top with emotional narrative instead, and they grew triple digits in a year. That won’t happen for every brand, but it shows what’s possible. So watch your cost per acquisition over time. If it’s creeping up, it’s usually a sign your brand isn’t doing enough pre-selling. Fund the top of the funnel and watch the bottom get cheaper.
The Takeaway
Brand and conversion are not two teams, they’re the same team, and brand is the half that makes the other half cheaper. You win the argument not by insisting brand is special, but by treating it like an investment and holding it to account like everything else in the business. Give it its own ring-fenced budget, put real numbers and KPIs on it so it earns its seat, and keep reminding everyone that if you never plant, you never harvest. Do that, and brand stops being the first line cut and starts being the thing your leadership asks more of.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is brand marketing worth it compared to performance marketing? Yes, because they’re not rivals. Brand is what makes your conversion cheaper: when customers already know and trust you, they convert more readily and for less spend. If you only buy sales with no brand behind them, acquisition costs climb as you exhaust the pool of people who already know you.
How do you budget for brand without hurting conversion targets? Ring-fence a fixed slice of spend, separate from your conversion KPIs, and treat it as an investment with a job to do. Run it for awareness and reach a couple of times a quarter, then feed that audience into your converting campaigns. You have to protect it, because the algorithm will otherwise spend everything re-showing your best ad to the same warm audience.
How do you measure brand lift? Baseline what customers think of you today, pick one specific thing to move (like category association), put a KPI on it, activate for a set period, then remeasure and compare. Always-on brand tracking tools make this repeatable rather than an annual survey. The key is measuring something you can actually shift through specific actions, not just overall awareness.
How does brand lower customer acquisition cost? By pre-selling. When brand work has done its job, customers arrive at your product page already half-decided and half-trusting, so they convert more cheaply. If your cost per acquisition is creeping up over time, it’s often a sign your brand isn’t doing enough of that pre-selling at the top of the funnel.
Based on Episode 657 of the Add To Cart podcast with Dave Dullens, Head of Brand and Consumer at Conquest Sports. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
In this Playbook we cover three things ecommerce operators can take into their business:
- Stop pitching brand as a cost and start pitching it as an investment with a job to do
- Hold brand to account with real numbers, so it earns its seat at the table
- Remember that if you never plant, you never harvest, and watch your cost per acquisition prove it
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