The Brand Equity ROI Multipler
Why companies ignoring brand building are leaving money on the table.
Brand building is one of the highest-return investments available to B2B marketers, yet most organizations continue to underinvest in it. This report explains why balancing brand and performance marketing can significantly improve long-term ROI.
While most professionals understand that long-term brand communications successfully imprint messages on decision-makers, daily budget decisions tell a different story. Today, an alarming 69% of marketing budgets are funneled into short-term performance tactics like search ads, email sequences, and SEO landing pages, leaving just 31% for long-term brand building.
Many organizations have become overly dependent on the immediate attribution provided by lower-funnel tactics. However, leaning too far downstream is a critical error. Performance marketing only reaches the 5% of B2B buyers who are actively in-market at any given time —meaning performance-only strategies completely miss out on 95% of your potential future market.
New research from IMS Marketing Sciences highlights how without sustained brand investment, sales can decline by approximately 15% over five years as brand equity erodes. Conversely, transitioning from a performance-only approach to a balanced, mixed model can improve total revenue ROI by 25% to 100%, yielding an average ROI uplift of 90%.
SourceCode Communications and IMS Marketing break down the compounding returns of steady brand capital, expose the costly illusion of misleading performance signals, and explain why the rapid rise of AI answer engines makes brand building more critical today than ever before.
What You’ll Learn Inside the Report
- Understand the mechanics of sales activation versus brand building.
- Discover why high-performing channels like branded search are frequently a mirage. Learn from real-world examples how lower-funnel tactics often claim credit for demand your brand equity had already won.
- Explore how 68% of leading organizations are using advanced econometric modeling to control for external trends and precisely isolate the financial contribution of brand marketing.
- Learn how consistent owned and earned media generate the authority, expertise, and trust that LLMs look for when generating synthesized answers.
- Discover how to cluster external mentions into thematic “value creators” and “value suppressors” to build a data-driven PR content strategy that uncovers counterintuitive audience insights.
Have questions or want to discuss how these marketing trends will impact your brand?
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