Brand forward: The strategic edge for company transition

The ability to navigate market volatility while transforming commercial and go-to-market mechanics represents the defining challenge for executives in 2025.

Companies struggling with eroding margins, lengthening sales cycles, or slowing new business acquisition face a consequential decision about resource allocation between immediate sales activation and systematic brand development. It's a choice that profoundly influences both recovery trajectory and sustainable competitive position.

The instinctive action for many growth leaders is to direct resources toward immediate revenue generation. Yet this approach often accelerates decline by eroding the memory structures through which buyers evaluate solutions.

This article presents an evidence-based framework for balancing immediate sales recovery with strategic brand development.

Balancing long & short, in/out-of-market buyers

Effective brand building provides transformational leverage during business turnarounds, representing one of the most underutilized assets in corporate renewal strategies.

The persistent misconception that brand marketing requires extensive time to deliver results while performance marketing offers immediate returns fundamentally mischaracterizes how effective marketing actually operates.

Research consistently demonstrates that strategic brand development works simultaneously on dual horizons—influencing the approximately 5% of buyers actively considering purchase today while establishing critical memory structures with the future 95% who will enter the market in coming cycles.

Companies that successfully balance these approaches consistently outperform competitors, with data from multiple sectors confirming that stronger brands generate margins 15-20% higher than category averages regardless of company position.

The truth about brand impact

Brand marketing begins delivering measurable impact from first implementation. Neuroscience research confirms that well-designed brand initiatives immediately influence in-market buyers through the same cognitive pathways as "performance marketing," while simultaneously establishing durable memory structures that performance marketing alone cannot create.

Pro tip: Rather than using the term "performance marketing," I prefer the B2C term direct response. The definition makes clear that we expect something to happen from the promotions investment: i.e., a buying activity as a direct response to the promotion.

It's also a useful distinction between certain types of "brand marketing" where we don't expect a direct response today, instead building memory structures with the ≈95% of out-of-market (future) buyers.

Organizations under transformation pressure often prioritize immediate sales activation at the expense of brand development, creating a cycle of diminishing returns where each quarter requires incrementally higher investment for progressively smaller gains.

This flawed approach misunderstands how purchase decisions form in B2B environments, where brand awareness, confidence, and trust precede transaction. In fact, most buying decisions are made before the buyer contacts the prospective shortlisted vendors.

Direct response activity without prior brand development resembles attempting to close complex deals without relationship foundation—technically possible but extraordinarily inefficient.

The integration of brand and performance creates compound effectiveness that neither approach can achieve independently.

Start with "Market Orientation"

Successful transformation begins with proper market orientation—focusing organizational attention outward on customer requirements rather than internal perspectives on product capabilities or sales methodologies.

Many companies default to product orientation (emphasizing technical features) or sales orientation (focusing on transaction mechanics) without establishing the fundamental value proposition that creates customer interest.

Market orientation re-calibrates this approach by centering all strategic decisions on validated customer requirements identified through methodical research.

The foundational shift to a market orientation provides the organizational change context necessary for sustainable differentiation in competitive markets.

However, not every company—especially with a turnaround requirement—has the time to re-orientate their go-to-market mechanics. Also, in some cases a product, sales, or advertising orientation is the correct approach for that firm.

In the next section of this article, we'll investigate some of the actionable strategies you can execute in a turnaround. Starting with market research.

Research that delivers insight

Contrary to popular belief, effective market understanding doesn't necessarily require extensive research budgets. Nor does it always take a lot of time.

Targeted qualitative approaches typically reveal more actionable insights than volumetric survey data alone. A common practice for B2B companies is to use an ethnographic methodology (site visits and observation) alongside a small number in-depth customer interviews (sometimes as few as 15-20). This is true for small-cap and mid-market B2B companies just as much as SMEs and growth scaleups.

The research objective is to uncover the underlying decision behavioral drivers and emotional factors that influence purchase consideration. It is to test a business hypothesis, not attempt to fill random knowledge gaps.

These research methodologies should include current customers, lost deals, competitor customers, and non-buyers to provide comprehensive market perspective. The collective insights often reveal positioning opportunities invisible from internal viewpoints or those who argue, "we've always done it this way."

Segmentation: Mapping strategic opportunity

Strategic segmentation creates structured understanding of customer groups based on needs, behaviors, and value expectations—essential for focused resource allocation during transformation.

The primary challenge for many organizations is resisting the temptation to target all potential customers simultaneously, diluting limited resources across too many opportunities. You are likely familiar with companies attempting to be everything to everyone and therefore aren't much use to anyone.

To paraphrase renowned marketing professor, Mark Ritson, "The essence of strategy is sacrifice." This means we must focus resources where competitive advantage potential is greatest. This involves segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

This targeting discipline balances segment attractiveness (size, growth trajectory, profitability) against realistic positioning opportunities given current capabilities and competitive dynamics. It helps determine where you will play and how you will win.

Byron Sharp's research shared in his famous book How Brands Grow adds valuable perspective on avoiding excessive segmentation fragmentation. His concept of sophisticated mass marketing—developing distinctive brand assets that function across the entire customer base while maintaining precision in media targeting—often delivers superior outcomes versus hyper-segmented approaches for resource-constrained organizations.

To quote Professor Sharp:

Sophisticated mass marketing doesn’t mean targeting everyone, nor does it mean treating everyone the same. It means understanding the heterogeneity in your market, and then catering for only the differences that matter in order to maximize reach while not eliminating the benefits of scale."

Positioning to create competitive advantage

Effective positioning answers the essential question: "What distinctive value can only we deliver?" This doesn't require absolute uniqueness but rather meaningful differentiation within the competitive context that addresses genuine customer priorities.

Roger Martin's strategic framework emphasizes that positioning must make a clear promise to the customer while demonstrating organizational capability to deliver consistently. For companies in transformation, this positioning requires ruthless focus—attempting to claim multiple value propositions simultaneously dilutes impact and strains credibility during periods of change.

The most successful positioning establishes both rational and emotional connections with decision makers, recognizing that B2B purchases involve complex consideration processes spanning both analytical and psychological dimensions.

Strategic integration of Brand and Direct Response

Unfortunately, the artificial separation between brand and direct response marketing undermines effectiveness for organizations in transition.

Brand initiatives establish memory structures and emotional connections that make subsequent direct response efforts more productive by creating the cognitive frameworks buyers access during purchase consideration.

Direct response activates immediate purchase behaviors among in-market customers by triggering existing brand associations and creating urgency through specific offers or incentives.

The most successful transformation marketers understand that these approaches complement rather than compete with each other, requiring strategic integration aligned with business maturity and market position.

Implementation framework

For organizations managing resource constraints during transformation, brand building requires disciplined prioritization beginning with clear brand codes. These are the distinctive visual and verbal elements that create immediate recognition across all buyer touch points—including existing customers!

Investment should focus on understanding actual customer journeys, motivations, and objectives rather than theoretical funnels, identifying the critical moments where brand presence delivers disproportionate impact.

Binet & Field's famous analysis of effective marketing campaigns, The Long & the Short of It, provides compelling evidence for balanced investment approach. Programs maintaining approximately 60:40 ratio of brand-to-activation spending deliver both immediate sales uplift and long-term market share growth—precisely the dual outcome transformation strategies require.

Evaluating current marketing allocation reveals strategic opportunities. Organizations investing less than half their marketing resources in brand development likely sacrifice substantial long-term equity for incremental short-term gains—a trade that becomes increasingly costly as transformation progresses.

The strategic imperative remains clear: build brand foundations systematically while capturing immediate results from actively purchasing customers to create sustainable competitive advantage.

For companies in a turnaround situation, the urge to spend on direct response and sales activity is overwhelming, and often necessary. However, more tactics will not fix your problems.

Pause for a moment, conduct market research, segment, target, position your firm, and then execute brand and direct response programs from a position of knowledge and strength.

Sources & reading

Below are the primary research sources and frameworks referenced in the article, with relevant links for further exploration if you're interested.

Neuroscience & Cognitive Research

• Binet, L., & Field, P. (2013). "The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies." Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.
• Sharp, B., & Romaniuk, J. (2016). "How Brands Grow: Part 2." Oxford University Press.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Dooley, R. (2019). "Friction: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage." McGraw Hill.

Brand Performance & Business Outcomes

• McKinsey & Company (2023). "B2B Brand Premium: Measuring the Value of Brand Investment."
• LinkedIn B2B Institute & Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (2022). "How B2B Brands Grow."
• Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study (2021).
• Gartner Research (2022). "B2B Buying Journey Report."

Market Orientation & Research Methodologies

• Ritson, M. (2020). "Mini MBA in Marketing."
• Christensen, C., Hall, T., Dillon, K., & Duncan, D. (2016). "Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done." Harvard Business Review.
• Zaltman, G. (2003). "How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market." Harvard Business School Press.

Segmentation & Targeting

• Ritson, M. (2019). "The Perils of Modern Marketing Segmentation." Marketing Week.
• Sharp, B. (2010). "How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know." Oxford University Press.
• McDonald, M., & Dunbar, I. (2012). "Market Segmentation: How to Do It and How to Profit from It." Wiley.

Positioning & Brand Strategy

• Martin, R. (2014). "The Big Lie of Strategic Planning." Harvard Business Review.
• Keller, K.L. (2013). "Strategic Brand Management." Pearson.
• Collins, J., & Porras, J. (1994). "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies." HarperBusiness.