Marketing has evolved considerably over the past decades, yet many companies still operate with an outdated division between brand-building and sales-driving activities. This separation creates blind spots that harm business growth and market position. Few understand this challenge better than Kingsley Taylor, Managing Director at WPromote and a marketing veteran with two decades of experience working with major brands like Coca-Cola, Nestle, Qualcomm, and Sephora across global markets.
Separating Brand and Sales Hurts Business
Marketing departments have traditionally operated as two separate entities for too long, and it’s hurting the bottom line. “Brand and performance have been treated as two separate entities for too long and it’s starting to hurt business,” Kingsley explains, pointing to recent high-profile stumbles. “Let’s look at what Nike’s been going through in the press recently. They drilled down far too much into the transactional side of the business and they forgot who they were.”
This division creates a fundamental problem. While performance teams fixate on customer acquisition costs and lifetime consumer value, brand teams focus on emotional connections and storytelling. “Your sales driving teams are obsessed with customer acquisition costs and lifetime consumer value, and the brand team is obsessed about the brand and the raw emotion that those brands build,” Kingsley notes. The reality? Both matter tremendously, but treating them as separate functions creates serious business problems.
How Digital Changed Everything
The marketing landscape has fundamentally shifted, erasing many of the divisions that once seemed natural. “Digital has quite honestly changed everything,” Kingsley points out. “It continues to blur the line between the digital experience and a transactional moment.” This transformation has fragmented consumer attention in unprecedented ways. Gone are the days when families gathered to watch scheduled programming. “In the past, you would be as a family interested in one particular TV show that you would all watch together at six or seven in the evening,” he explains. “Brand builders could buy advertising at that particular time and know that they had attracted those families.” Today’s reality is vastly different, with content consumption happening across countless devices and platforms.
Digital’s measurability has also created new challenges. “Once you move from a more analog way of consuming information to a digital way, you start to bring about an ability to measure everything,” Kingsley observes. This can push marketers toward over-reliance on metrics at the expense of brand building.
Bringing Brand and Performance Together
Addressing this disconnect requires changes across several dimensions. Kingsley highlights four critical areas:
Unified Measurement
First, unified measurement must connect what brand and performance teams track. “Digital is infinitely measurable, but brand marketers and performance marketers measure two different things,” he notes. “How do we unify those elements of measurement and start to bring them together under one roof?”
Integrated Teams
Second, integrated teams need to replace siloed structures. “The brand team is on one floor and the sales team and the marketing team are on another floor. They have different cultures, they have different bosses, they operate in different worlds,” Kingsley explains. Breaking down these divisions is essential.
Smarter Creative
Creative approaches must evolve. “Creative over the years has been designed to spark emotion and build brand love on the brand side, and on the performance side at the bottom of the funnel, it’s been there to drive someone to act in the moment,” he says. The future requires blending these approaches to build emotional connections while driving action.
Better Technology
Lastly, technology can bridge the gap. “Technology can start to bring these two together with AI-driven tools that can build marketing assets more quickly and at a higher quality,” Kingsley explains, highlighting how new tools can measure across both sales and brand tactics. Implementing this unified approach isn’t simple, but Kingsley offers practical steps. “Companies operate in silos, and it’s not really a negative thing to say – it’s just how companies have been built,” he acknowledges. Starting small makes sense: “Don’t try to change everything overnight. Just start with one campaign.” Building internal support means finding champions from both sides. “Identify champions in the sales and performance team and someone in the brand team that can be the bridge,” he suggests. Once initial successes accumulate, thoughtful scaling becomes possible.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. “The future of marketing is not about choosing between ‘do I want to build my brand or do I want to drive sales?’ because you have to do both,” Kingsley emphasizes. “If you’re just focused on driving sales, you’re ultimately only ever converting people who are in the market to buy your product. If you’re only focused on building the brand, you’re not necessarily giving them the incentive to buy.”
For deeper insights on uniting brand and performance marketing strategies in today’s fragmented landscape, connect with Kingsley Taylor on LinkedIn.
