Brand as Performance: Giving Marketing the Credit it Deserves- Report.
Why protecting brand budgets is as critical as chasing clicks
For years, marketers have fought a wearying battle in the boardroom. When budgets tighten, brand marketing is often the first line item to face scrutiny. Finance chiefs prefer numbers that show impact today, not tomorrow. CMOs may know instinctively that brand drives long-term growth but proving it has been another matter.
Now, new research from TransUnion and MMA Global offers marketers the missing evidence. Their latest whitepaper, Giving Marketing the Credit it Deserves, makes the case that brand marketing has been systematically undervalued by as much as 83% under traditional measurement models. Worse, the frameworks on which most companies still rely capture only a sliver of the real commercial impact of brand.
The study introduces and validates a model known as Brand as Performance (BaP), first developed by MMA Global in 2022. By linking brand activity directly to customer behaviour using large-scale identity graphs, surveys and causal experiments BaP reframes brand not as an intangible but as a measurable driver of sales, loyalty and market share. The central claim is simple, but powerful: brand is performance.
The Measurement Gap
When CMOs defend their budgets, they run up against a persistent perception gap. Traditional attribution tools, focused on immediate outcomes such as click-through rates or last-touch sales, underestimate the real impact of brand on sales. In some cases, only 17% of the contribution is measured, leaving the majority invisible.
The implications are serious. If brand appears unproductive, the budget goes elsewhere usually to short-term performance campaigns. Yet, as the BaP data demonstrates, this is a false economy. Cutting brand may produce a temporary bump in efficiency ratios but risks eroding long-term growth.
The Favourability Pathway
At the heart of the BaP model lies the concept of the “favourability pathway”. The logic is straightforward: consumers who like a brand are more inclined to try it, buy more of it, and stick with it over time.
What BaP contributes is quantification. Across case studies, brand campaigns lifted favourability scores by up to 24%, even for household names such as Campbell’s. In turn, consumers with favourable perceptions purchased four to five times more than those without.
The pathway shows how advertising does more than generate awareness; it sets off a chain reaction. Favourability boosts conversion, conversion drives revenue, and loyalty compounds returns. Put another way: if brand is the engine of growth, favourability is the turbocharger.
Lessons from Three Industries
Ally Bank: Evidence for Patience
When Ally launched in 2010, it was hardly obvious that a digital-only bank could compete with America’s century-old retail giants. Its pitch was simple: transparency, customer service, and a brand that stood apart from the jargon of finance. The strategy worked. By 2022, Ally had become one of the country’s largest digital banks, with tens of millions of deposit accounts.
Yet success brought scrutiny. With deposits swelling and competitors flooding the market with aggressive promotions, executives began asking whether the brand-first playbook should be recalibrated. Was Ally spending too much on building affinity and not enough on targeted account openings?
BaP provided a structured answer. A 10-week national test campaign, measured across 850,000 households, tracked not only exposures but subsequent account activity for nine months. Surveys of 10,000 consumers monitored shifts in favourability. The analysis compared two approaches: one skewed to short-term acquisition, another weighted to long-term brand.
The outcome was unequivocal. The brand-first path would generate 16% more customers and 29% more new accounts over two years than a short-term approach could deliver. In absolute terms, this meant roughly 7,000 more customers and 44,000 more accounts.
For Ally’s leadership, the finding mattered beyond the numbers. It showed that brand sentiment is not soft equity but hard capital. Consumers who grew to like Ally were more likely to consolidate their banking, return for auto loans or mortgages, and remain sticky. The short-term approach could deliver a temporary surge but at the expense of lifetime value.
Andrea Brimmer, Ally’s CMO, described the results as vindication: “We’ve always believed our incredibly strong brand was the foundation of our growth. This work proved that it doesn’t just build equity, it drives measurable results.”
For marketers in other sectors, Ally’s story illustrates how BaP can de-risk long-term brand investment. What looked like a leap of faith proved to be a repeatable formula.
Kroger: Fresh for Everyone, Online
Kroger’s dilemma was different. As America’s oldest grocery chain, it had ubiquity and familiarity. What it needed was to translate that into loyalty among younger and increasingly online shoppers.
In 2019, the company refreshed its brand, rolling out “Krojis,” animated avatars that brought to life its “Fresh for Everyone” positioning. The creative was distinctive, but executives wondered if it was shifting behaviour in the right way. Would quirky animation persuade customers to load their online baskets?
BaP allowed them to test the hypothesis. The study spanned 400,000 shopper IDs across multiple banners (including Ralphs, Fred Meyer, King Soopers, and others). Over three months, Kroger ran campaigns mixing brand and performance messaging. Then the data team tracked results for another seven months, applying identity-based attribution models.
The findings upended conventional wisdom. First, brand campaigns produced a 24% lift in favourability among non-customers evidence that Kroger could indeed win new households in a crowded market.
Second, the long-term sales impact was extraordinary. While performance campaigns delivered quick bumps, the cumulative effect of brand activity on online sales was six times greater than the short-term impact. Moreover, 70% of that lift came from favourable consumers.
The insight: in online grocery, where margins are slim and loyalty fragile, the decisive factor was not coupons or clicks but brand sentiment. A consumer who felt positively about Kroger was not only more likely to try an online shop but also to return, fill larger baskets, and tolerate slightly higher prices.
The lesson for Kroger was both tactical and strategic. Tactical, because the company could optimise spend by tilting more heavily to connected TV and digital video—channels that proved most effective in building favourability. Strategic, because it showed that online growth was not about chasing transactions but about building affinity that translates into habit.
Campbell’s: How to Grow When You Already Own the Shelf
If Ally had to prove patience and Kroger had to win online, Campbell’s faced a subtler challenge: how do you grow when you already dominate?
Campbell’s soup is a staple of American cupboards, commanding 60% of the wet soup market. Its red-and-white cans are immortalised by Andy Warhol. In branding terms, Campbell’s was already ubiquitous. Yet that ubiquity risked stagnation. Penetration was high, but sales growth was anaemic. The company needed to know whether advertising could still shift behaviour.
BaP provided an answer by building a backbone of one million shopper IDs linked to survey data. Over three months in 2024, Campbell’s ran brand and performance campaigns, then tracked outcomes for six more months.
The results were revealing. While brand favourability among existing customers was already high, there was room to move non-customers. Even a modest +1% lift in favourability translated into meaningful gains, because favourable consumers were 2.9 times more likely to purchase than those unfavourable. More importantly, they had a 21% higher retention rate.
In practice, this meant that brand investment could still carve out incremental growth in an apparently saturated market. For a company of Campbell’s scale, even single-digit percentage gains equated to significant revenue.
The takeaway for marketers is clear: even when you are the category leader, favourability matters. A small shift in perception among the unconvinced can yield outsized returns.
Summarising the Evidence
When viewed together, the case studies underscore three findings:
Brand drives favourability — lifting sentiment by up to 24%.
Favourability drives conversion — favourable consumers buy four to five times more.
Long-term impact outstrips the short-term — by as much as sixfold.
Insert Figure 7 here: “Summary table of Brand as Performance findings” – comparing Ally, Kroger and Campbell’s side by side.
The conclusion: brand should no longer be treated as discretionary spend. It is a compounding asset.
Rebalancing the Mix
If brand is performance, then the budget mix must change. The BaP analysis recommends a 90% tilt towards brand messaging, anchored by mass-reach channels such as connected TV, supported by tactical performance campaigns.
This finding runs counter to the trend of over-indexing on digital performance channels in pursuit of immediate metrics. As Greg Stuart, CEO of MMA Global, put it: “Brand investment compounds over time and drives growth in ways short-term tactics never could.”
For CMOs, the cheat sheet doubles as a tool to take into budget meetings proof points in the language of growth, not impressions.
Beyond Case Studies: The Methodology Matters
What makes the research credible is not just the findings, but the scale of the data. The studies used identity backbones covering up to one million households, combined with more than 10,000 consumer surveys and nine to ten months of tracking. Causal lift experiments and attribution modelling were applied at household level, linking exposure to outcomes with unusual precision.
This methodology matters for CMOs under pressure. Too often, brand marketing has been seen as “faith-based.” With BaP, it can be evidence-based.
The New Language of Growth
The significance of BaP goes beyond any single campaign. It offers marketing leaders a new language for the boardroom. Instead of talking in abstractions—equity, awareness, sentiment—CMOs can point to customer growth, retention rates, and revenue impact.
In practice, this means brand is no longer a line item to be justified. It is a growth lever to be optimised. The “either/or” debate between brand and performance collapses: both are performance, but brand has the longer tail.
Conclusion: Brand Is Back in the Spotlight
For too long, marketers have been forced to defend brand as if it were a cost centre. The TransUnion/MMA Global research reframes the debate. Brand is not a nice-to-have; it is the compound interest of business growth.
Those who neglect it may gain in the short term but will lose in the long run. Those who invest, by contrast, can expect not only stronger sentiment but more customers, more sales, and more loyalty.
The age of underestimating brand is over. The evidence is in.
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