We Optimise To Just One Third of the Funnel

Acquisition-first is the wrong default

If you’re a challenger, your advantage is speed and focus. But so many brands are still operating to an acquisition-first model.  Why?

The aspects of “trust build” before the sale and “trust keep” after it treated as optional? Why?

The answer is cultural, marketing is still widely treated as a cost line, not a compounding investment.

Marketing Week’s 2024 survey found 46.5% of marketers saying their companies see marketing as a cost first and foremost. 

The measurable trap, amplified by procurement?

Modern advertising is uniquely easy to hold hostage to short-term metrics because it’s instrumented for instant gratification: clicks, conversions, CAC, ROAS and attribution dashboards. Boring.

WARC has reported Peter Field’s warning that digital’s instant measurement encourages short-termism by making short-term metrics more available and easier to optimise.  

That creates a quiet bias where we optimise what is easiest to count, not what is most valuable over time. WARC argues that a short-term ROI obsession can cause advertisers to overlook a substantial share of media returns that emerge over longer horizons. 

Then procurement completes the loop. Industry reporting has long noted procurement’s growing role in agency compensation negotiations and the tendency for that process to treat marketing services like commodities: tender, squeeze fees, repeat.  

But even marketing procurement leaders publish “principled sourcing” standards explicitly reminding teams that value is greater than cost. 

Brand building and retention are where value compounds

When you over-weight activation and under-fund brand, you can look “efficient” quarter-to-quarter while quietly eroding the things that actually compound: pricing power, loyalty, and resilience.

Les Binet has argued that performance-style sales effects are easy to measure but represent only part of payback and that attribution modelling can mislead budget decisions by overstating the short term whilst not understating long-term brand impact. Mix media modelling needs to take long-term and softer KPIs into consideration.

Underneath the jargon is a simple mechanism, memory. The Ehrenberg‑Bass Institute describes advertising as working largely through memory by refreshing “brand memory structures”, increasing the chance a brand is noticed and recalled in buying situations.  That’s why long-term brand investment can make future acquisition cheaper in practice.

Then there’s the part most brands starve - what happens after checkout? Classic retention research argues that as customer defections fall, profits can rise sharply; Reichheld and Sasser’s “zero defections” work is a canonical example.  Bain’s loyalty work makes the maths explicit: retaining just 5% more customers can lift profits by 25–95%. And it lays out the logic that acquisition costs are front-loaded; loyal customers cost less to serve over time; they buy more, and they refer others.  Starve reassurance and the post‑purchase relationship and you’re not saving money, you are burning the asset you just paid to acquire!

So much research and we’re still swimming against the tide.