Every brand lives inside a system of competing demands: the hunger for immediate sales and the patience required to build lasting meaning. In practice, these demands often clash. Marketers chase quarterly numbers with discounts, promotions, and targeted ads, while long-term investments in identity, memory, and culture are sidelined. Yet the research of Les Binet and Peter Field, built on one of the most robust bodies of marketing effectiveness data we have, shows this tension is not a paradox to be solved but a balance to be managed. Their finding—an optimum split of roughly 60% brand building to 40% activation—is less a rule than a compass. It guides us to recognize that emotion sustains brands while activation sells, and that neither can endure without the other.

The Evidence: Two Timescales, One System

Brand building and activation operate on different clocks. Activation is fast, rational, and targeted: a promotion, a reminder, an offer. It triggers existing demand but fades quickly. Brand building is slow, diffuse, and emotional: a story, a symbol, an idea that we carry long after the ad ends. It works by shaping mental availability—the ease with which a brand comes to mind in buying situations. Binet and Field’s meta-analyses show that campaigns leaning heavily on rational, activation-style appeals deliver short spikes but little durability, while emotional campaigns expand demand and pricing power over years.

The brilliance of the 60/40 principle is not its precision but its systems insight: long-term growth emerges from reinforcing loops between memory and sales. Emotional brand campaigns expand the pool of potential buyers, and that larger pool makes activation tactics more efficient. In turn, successful activations provide feedback that strengthens brand salience. It is a coupled system—neglecting one weakens the other.

Interplay and Interference

This dual system offers synergy but also friction. Marketers often attempt “double-duty creative,” squeezing both brand and activation into a single campaign. Yet the research shows this hybrid approach usually underperforms, trapped between vague storytelling and blunt calls to action. The lesson: clarity of purpose matters. A film trailer doesn’t need a coupon code, and a subscription reminder doesn’t need a manifesto. Systems function best when each component does the work it is designed to do.

Context and Contingency

No brand lives in a vacuum, and the 60/40 split is a heuristic, not a law. The balance shifts with context:

• Category type: A utilitarian tool brand may require more activation; a lifestyle-driven brand thrives on emotion.
• Brand stage: A challenger must activate to win first trials; an incumbent can lean harder into brand memory.
• Market dynamics: In fast-moving categories, sustained brand building prevents obsolescence.
• Channel ecosystem: In digital-first environments, performance metrics can seduce teams into over-weighting activation, starving the brand’s cultural resonance.

In systems thinking, this is boundary critique: the right mix depends on where the brand sits within its category, culture, and time horizon.

Obstacles and Short-Termism

Why, then, do organizations chronically underinvest in brand? Because emotional effects are diffuse, lagging, and difficult to measure. Finance demands accountability in quarters, while brand equity accumulates across years. The temptation of click-through rates and instant dashboards is strong. Yet as systems thinkers know, chasing what is most easily measured often creates perverse incentives. Short-term optimization undermines long-term resilience. Emotional advertising may be harder to measure, but it is also harder for competitors to copy, making it one of the few true sources of durable advantage.

Practices for Balance

Maintaining balance requires governance as much as creativity:

• Ringfence brand budgets so they cannot be cannibalized in downturns.
• Measure across timescales: pair econometrics with leading indicators of brand salience.
• Build distinctive assets—characters, sonic cues, visual systems—that compound over time and make activation cheaper and more effective.
• Align stakeholders so that finance, strategy, and creative teams share a common language of long vs. short-term effects.

Case Examples

• A24: By cultivating a brand of cinematic taste and cultural cachet, A24 ensures its logo alone signals a promise of quality. Activations like trailer drops, limited screenings, and collectible merchandise harness that equity to drive immediate demand.
• Duolingo: The irreverent voice and mascot Owl embody the brand, creating recognition and affection. Activation lives in push notifications, streak savers, and subscription offers—mechanisms that convert attention into usage and revenue.
• Figma: A brand built on collaboration and creative empowerment, reinforced through community events and design culture. Activations—like free-to-paid nudges and team seat bundles—transform that equity into sustained growth.

Each demonstrates the systemic truth: emotional equity makes activation more efficient, and consistent activation keeps brand energy in circulation.

Conclusion: Interdependence, Not Opposition

Emotion builds brands; activation sells. To treat them as competitors is to misunderstand the system. Brand equity and activation response are mutually reinforcing loops, not rival strategies. The 60/40 guideline is valuable precisely because it reminds us that neglecting either side destabilizes the whole. The challenge for modern marketers is not simply to allocate budgets, but to think systemically—to design portfolios of work that honor both memory and response, story and sale, the long and the short. Only then can brands achieve resilience in a marketplace increasingly addicted to the ephemeral.