Mitin Chakraborty
Head of marketing, Babyshop (Landmark Group)There’s a quiet standoff playing out in marketing departments everywhere. On one side: performance marketing, armed with dashboards, conversions and the intoxicating rush of real-time ROI. On the other: brand-building, with its slower burn, broader ambition, and that slightly smug aura of being in it for the long game.
If 2025 has taught us anything so far, it’s that this battle is exhausting and increasingly unhelpful.
The smarter question is not “Which one wins?” but “How can we make them work better together?”
Short-term sprints. Long-term vision. Both matter.
There’s no denying that performance marketing plays a vital role, especially in markets with organic demand on the table. When the customer is actively shopping, you’d better show up, and fast.
Miss that moment, and you might lose them not just for the day, but for the entire customer lifetime. In categories like parenting, where brand trust builds early and sticks, this matters even more.
But let’s not forget: Brand isn’t a soft concept floating above the numbers. It fuels demand. It makes performance marketing cheaper, more efficient and more effective.
Which begs the question: what’s stopping us?
Performance is learning from brand and vice versa.
The line between the two has already blurred. Great performance campaigns are now brand vehicles too, especially when they show up in high-visibility formats and sound like the brand they represent.
Likewise, brand campaigns increasingly carry performance triggers – swipe-up CTAs, limited-time drops, product-led storytelling.
Yet many organisations still plan and measure them in silos. The media team chases click-through rates while the brand team polishes a film. Agencies work off different briefs. Metrics clash. Timelines don’t align. And somehow, we expect synergy.
The brands that get it right? They collapse those walls. They look at the customer journey, not the org chart. They stop treating campaigns as either/or, and instead ask: How does this ad serve the now and the next?
CFOs aren’t anti-brand. They’re pro-clarity.
Now let’s talk about the tension we all feel but rarely say out loud.
It’s easy to pin the blame on finance. We say brand budgets are under pressure, performance is taking over, and CMOs are losing ground in the boardroom.
But here’s a gentler truth: CFOs aren’t allergic to brand. They’re allergic to vagueness. And if brand marketers show up with slides full of sentiment scores and no commercial link, it’s no surprise when the budget tips the other way.
This is where bold marketing leadership comes in.
Of course, building the case for brand isn’t always straightforward, especially when you’re balancing monthly performance targets and a CFO who needs numbers, not narratives. But this is where a strong CMO and CFO partnership matters. Ongoing conversations, shared learning from campaigns and transparent tracking
of both short- and long-term results can build the trust needed to back brand investment.
Tools such as Binet and Field’s 60/40 rule, WARC’s effectiveness studies, or even brand health metrics linked to commercial outcomes can help bridge the gap. The goal isn’t just to justify brand, but to embed it in business thinking.
Brand is everyone’s job now. Especially yours.
Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: brand-building is no longer just a creative or media challenge. It’s an orchestration challenge.
In 2025, your brand shows up in a hundred places at once – from search results to in-store displays to influencer shoutouts to that oddly specific push notification your CRM team just sent out. The old model where agencies handled the polish and internal teams handled the plumbing just doesn’t cut it anymore. If your brand feels fragmented, inconsistent, or ‘same-same’ in a cluttered market, chances are the issue isn’t the agency’s ways of working. It’s a lack of internal ownership.
We’ve learned this first-hand. With multiple segments across different parenting life stages, precision matters. Segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP) is not just a framework – it’s our operating system. But creative and media strategy alone won’t save you. It’s the marketing team’s orchestration – the tone, the timing, the tenacity – that makes it land. CEOs, take note: this is not where you compromise on teams.
The real magic? When both sides respect each other.
At its best, marketing doesn’t live in extremes. It thrives in balance.
Performance without brand is a short-term sugar rush. Brand without performance is a beautiful film no one watches. But together? They can move markets and mindsets. So let’s drop the tug of war. Let’s build teams, tools and trust that allow both sides to do what they do best, with one shared goal: meaningful, measurable, sustainable growth. Not just now. But for the long run.
By Mitin Chakraborty, Head of Marketing – Babyshop, Landmark Group.
