There's a version of marketing that gets talked about constantly in startup circles, growth communities, and boardrooms. It's obsessed with attribution. Laser-focused on conversion rates. It optimises the click, the open, the cost-per-acquisition. It treats anything that can't be tied to a direct sale as a waste of budget.
It's also, quietly, destroying long-term growth potential for a lot of businesses.
This isn't a post about what's trending in marketing. It's about what actually works, backed by decades of evidence, and why so many CEOs, founders, and marketers have drifted so far from it.
If you've found yourself questioning whether your marketing is actually building anything, you're probably right to ask.
The Problem: Tactics Without Foundations
The last decade has produced an extraordinary amount of marketing tooling. There are platforms for everything: automation, personalisation, paid media, SEO, social scheduling, email flows, lead scoring. The technology is genuinely impressive.
But here's what the tools can't give you: a coherent strategy built on proven principles.
What's happened instead is a kind of collective drift. Teams optimise what they can measure. Founders double down on what drove the last sale. Marketers justify budgets through ROI calculations that make short-term tactics look brilliant and long-term brand investment look like a luxury.
And somewhere along the way, the fundamentals stopped getting taught.
A 2023 Bain & Company survey found that only 20% of executives believe their marketing is highly effective at driving growth. Meanwhile, marketing budgets are under more scrutiny than ever. The pressure to show immediate, attributable returns has never been higher.
That pressure is producing exactly the wrong kind of marketing.
The Seven Principles That Actually Drive Growth
These aren't new ideas. They are, in many ways, the oldest ideas in the discipline. But they've been buried under a decade of performance marketing orthodoxy, and they deserve to be said plainly again.
1. Brand Building And Sales Activation Are Both Required
The research is consistent: the most effective marketing approach balances long-term brand building with short-term sales activation. The work of researchers like Les Binet and Peter Field, published through the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, points to an optimal investment split in the region of 50/50 between brand and activation.
Brand building works slowly and broadly. It creates memory structures, builds mental availability, and reduces price sensitivity. Activation works quickly and narrowly. It converts existing demand.
The problem? Activation is easy to measure. Brand building is not. So under budget pressure, brand gets cut. Teams end up doing 100% activation with diminishing returns and no long-term growth engine behind it.
If you sell something complex, premium, or with a long buying cycle, you likely need to tilt even further toward brand.
2. New Customers Are Where Growth Lives
Marketing research consistently shows that acquiring new customers is more profitable for growth than increasing loyalty or share of wallet among existing ones. This doesn't mean you ignore your existing customers. It means growth comes primarily from expanding your buyer pool, not from squeezing more value from the people who already know you.
This has significant implications for how you think about targeting. Narrow, hyper-targeted campaigns feel efficient. They often aren't. Broad reach, across the widest relevant audience, tends to produce better long-term returns.
The instinct to target only the people most likely to buy right now is understandable. It's also a trap.
3. Most Of Your Market Is Not Buying Today: The 95-5 Rule
Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute suggests that at any given time, only around 5% of your potential customers are actively in-market. The remaining 95% are not ready to buy, but many of them will be at some point.
If your marketing speaks exclusively to the 5%, you're invisible to the rest. And when those people do enter the buying process, they'll default to whoever already has a presence in their memory.
This is why brand building matters. It's how you earn the attention of future customers before they're looking for you.
Content that educates, inspires, and informs has a job beyond driving immediate conversions. It's planting flags in the minds of people who will eventually become buyers, months or years from now.
4. If You're Not On The Shortlist, The Sale Is Already Lost
Studies in B2B purchasing behaviour suggest that approximately 92% of purchases are awarded to a company the buyer considered on day one of their search. Not day seven, not after a follow-up email sequence. Day one.
This is what's called mental availability: the likelihood that your brand comes to mind when a buyer begins to think about a category.
You cannot buy your way onto that shortlist at the point of purchase. You build your way onto it over time, through consistent brand presence, distinctive assets, and meaningful content.
The implication is uncomfortable for teams that only invest in the bottom of the funnel. If you weren't building awareness and credibility before the buyer started looking, you likely aren't on their list at all.
5. Investment In Media Is Not Optional
There is a well-established relationship between share of voice and market share. Companies whose share of voice exceeds their market share tend to grow. Companies that sit below it tend to stagnate or shrink.
This is known as the excess share of voice model, and it has held up across categories and markets for decades.
Owned and earned media are valuable. A strong organic presence, a compelling content strategy, and genuine word of mouth all contribute to growth. But they rarely provide the reach needed to move a market. Paid media is generally required if growth is the goal.
The lesson isn't "spend more". It's: spend with purpose, prioritise reach, and don't expect organic alone to build a brand at scale.
6. Measure What Matters, Not Just What's Measurable
This might be the most important principle in the current environment.
Campaign-level ROI is not a reliable indicator of long-term business value. Research consistently shows that the activities with the highest short-term ROI tend to be the ones with the lowest long-term impact. They harvest existing demand rather than creating new demand.
Effectiveness measures what you're trying to achieve commercially: brand awareness, market share, revenue growth, customer acquisition. Efficiency measures how well you used your resources to get there.
Both matter, but they're different questions. Conflating them leads to decisions that look smart in a spreadsheet and quietly erode brand value over time.
Founders and CEOs who ask only "what's the ROI on this?" are asking the wrong question. The better questions are: Is our share of voice growing? Is our brand salience increasing in our target market? Are we acquiring new customers at a sustainable rate?
7. Creativity Is A Growth Lever, Not A Nice-To-Have
Creative quality has a measurable impact on effectiveness. Research from the IPA Databank shows that creatively awarded campaigns produce between three and five times more commercial effect than average campaigns, for the same media investment.
This matters because creativity is often treated as subjective, hard to justify, or the first thing to be compromised when budgets are tight.
The data suggests the opposite is true. Distinctive, memorable, well-crafted creative work earns more return from the same media spend. It builds mental availability faster. It makes brand building more efficient, not just more appealing.
Creativity isn't art for its own sake. It's leverage.
Why This Gets Lost
None of these principles are obscure. They've been documented, replicated, and written about for years by researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the IPA, and organisations like WARC.
So why do so many smart founders and marketers end up ignoring them?
A few reasons:
Short-term pressure is real. Investors, boards, and revenue targets create an environment where the next quarter matters more than the next three years. Tactics that show immediate results win the budget conversation, even when they're not building anything durable.
Attribution bias is powerful. Digital marketing has made some things very measurable. The problem is that what gets measured gets managed, and what can't be attributed tends to get defunded. Brand building, reach, and mental availability rarely show up cleanly in a last-click attribution model.
Complexity creates drift. When teams are running ten tools, managing multiple channels, and constantly optimising, it becomes difficult to step back and ask whether the strategy itself is sound. Execution consumes the space where strategy should live.
The result is marketing that is technically active but strategically hollow.
Where To Start
If any of this resonates, the starting point isn't a new tool or a new tactic. It's getting your strategy and your foundations right.
That means being clear on who you're trying to reach, including the 95% who aren't ready to buy today. It means building brand assets that earn mental availability over time. It means investing in creative quality. It means measuring the right things, not just the easiest things.
And it means being willing to make the case internally for doing marketing well, not just doing marketing quickly.
A Note On Tools
Getting your foundations right requires more than willpower. It requires a structure that connects your strategy to your execution, keeps your team aligned, and makes the thinking visible.
That's the problem STRAETCH was built to solve. It's a contextual AI marketing platform designed for lean teams who need their strategy, branding, planning, and content creation to work together as one system, rather than scattered across tools and documents that no one can find.
If you're a founder, solopreneur, or marketing leader who knows the fundamentals matter but doesn't have the infrastructure to make them stick, it's worth a look. Not because it's the only option, but because building on solid foundations is significantly easier when the platform you're working in was designed for exactly that.
Context in. Impact out.
Sources And Further Reading
Binet, L. and Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It. IPA.
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. How Brands Grow.
IPA Databank. Creativity and Effectiveness Research.
WARC. Share of Voice and Market Share Evidence.
Bain and Company. Marketing Effectiveness Survey, 2023.
