“Our marketing spend has to focus on tactics that drive sales.”
Well, sure. I get it. Unfortunately, it’s usually a synonym for, “We focus on bottom-of-funnel performance marketing tactics where attribution is easy.”
For a few reasons, many consumer tech CMOs continue to define marketing effectiveness almost exclusively by activities that can be directly tied to short-term sales. Things like digital ads, paid search, and retargeting are treated as the core growth levers because they are measurable, familiar, and easy to defend internally.
Demand creation and PR are often deprioritized because their impact is harder to attribute and slower to materialize. This nefarious perspective is sticky, because attribution systems reward proximity, not causality. The closer an activity sits to the moment of purchase, the more credit it receives, regardless of whether it meaningfully influenced the decision.
Demand creation work operates earlier, diffusely, and across time, so it is under-credited by last-click and even multi-touch models. This leads organizations to systematically over-invest in what is measurable.
A performance-first (or only) approach belies a structural misunderstanding of how consumer decisions are made today. And that misunderstanding increasingly leads to stalled growth.
The consumer decision is largely made before the click
Today, by the time a consumer clicks on a Google or Facebook ad, most of the decision process has already occurred.
Google’s research on the “Messy Middle” shows that consumer purchase journeys are muti-faceted and complex. Buyers move through a pre-purchase process of brand familiarity, social proof, availability bias, and perceived authority well before they take a measurable action. This phase is non-linear and heavily influenced by prior exposure rather than just a last-touch moment when someone clicks a link from a TikTok influencer.
There’s solid data about the importance of upper and out-of-funnel activities that promote recall. Nielsen’s brand equity research supports the idea that, across consumer categories, brands with higher awareness and familiarity convert more efficiently even when price, promotion, and media spend are held constant.
In other words, performance tactics benefit brands that already exist in the consumer’s memory and enter the journey after preference has been shaped by top-of-funnel (TOFU) activities like PR.
Consumers do not evaluate all brands equally
Think for a second about the last time you made a considered purchase, say for a new computer or pair of headphones. My guess is your search was not exhaustive.
Rarely do we understand the full bevy of options when we buy. Instead, we choose from a limited set of brands we already recognize. This is another reason TOFU is critical.
Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute demonstrates that brand growth is driven primarily by mental availability, defined as the likelihood that a brand comes to mind in a buying situation. Brands that are not mentally available are rarely considered, regardless of how strong their performance advertising may be.
This is where many performance-first strategies break down. Performance ads tend to reinforce existing awareness rather than create new preference. Over time, this leads to diminishing returns as the same high-intent audiences are repeatedly targeted while the broader market remains untouched.
Oddly, sometimes, certain performance metrics often improve in this phase. CPA might look better and ROAS more efficient. But the total pool of future buyers quietly shrinks because fewer new consumers are entering the consideration set. Efficiency improves while growth stalls.
The eventual result is usually some sort of frenetic moment where the performance marketing team retreats into a cave to “look at the data” and “optimize the spend.”
They are, at that point, solving the wrong problem.
Performance marketing extracts demand
Performance marketing is effective at capturing demand that already exists. It is not designed to generate that demand in the first place.
Meta’s marketing effectiveness research shows that upper-funnel activity improves lower-funnel performance. Quite interesting given that the tech giant bears significant responsibility for creating an entire generation of marketers who devalue top-of-funnel activities. Brand activity, they found, changes how consumers respond to performance messages.
Nielsen’s analysis of full-funnel campaigns reaches a similar conclusion. They found brand investment amplifies the effectiveness of performance media rather than competing with it. When brand investment is removed, performance efficiency declines.
PR is often described as an awareness tactic, but its real role is explanatory. Earned media shapes how a category is understood, which brands are seen as legitimate options, and what attributes matter in the first place. Long before a consumer compares prices or clicks an ad, PR helps determine which brands feel real, credible, and worthy of consideration.
Familiarity precedes trust
Purchase always involves trust. And trust is not established at the moment of conversion.
Nielsen’s research on advertising frequency shows that repeated exposure increases recall, credibility, and purchase likelihood, particularly in crowded consumer categories. Familiarity reduces perceived risk and lowers the cognitive effort required to make a decision.
Earned media, owned content and cultural visibility play a central role in building this familiarity. They establish legitimacy and context before a consumer encounters a performance ad. Without that foundation, performance messaging feels interruptive rather than reinforcing.
A cautionary note to foreign firms scaling in the US
In many manufacturing hubs, where optimization and measurability are deeply engrained into the production culture, consumer marketing has historically emphasized short-term efficiency and thus performance marketing. PR and TOFU tactics are treated as a light add on that does little beyond vanity. This is the root cause of myriad US market failures by foreign firms.
In contrast, leading American brands tend to integrate PR into demand creation. They use earned media and narrative visibility to shape category understanding, establish third-party validation, and build mental availability at scale. The impact of this approach is not always visible in quarterly dashboards, but it shows up clearly in long-term growth and brand resilience.
What sustainable consumer growth requires in 2026
Is there a magic formula?
Unfortunately not. There is no universal budget split for various funnel stages that applies to every category or lifecycle. However, the evidence consistently supports full-funnel investment and PR.
WARC’s analysis of long-term effectiveness shows that brands investing in both brand building and performance achieve stronger and more durable growth than those relying on performance alone.
Performance converts demand. TOFU tactics like PR create the conditions that make conversion possible.
In 2026, CMOs who chase last-touch measurability over meaningful framing and familiarity will find growth measurable only in its absence.