Chrisa Chatzisavva - Global Digital Lead, UMFor years, marketing teams have wrestled with the divide between brand and performance. One is tasked with building long-term equity; the other, with delivering this quarter’s results. But this binary view fails to reflect how businesses grow or how people interact with brands.
Customers don’t distinguish between brand and performance. Their expectations—relevance, value, trust seamlessly cut across every channel and interaction. Yet inside many businesses, these functions still operate in silos. While the aspiration to integrate is nearly universal, the path to achieving it remains anything but straightforward.
This exploration isn’t about quick fixes. The obstacles are substantial: entrenched legacy structures, divided accountabilities, and complex partner ecosystems. However, true integration doesn’t require dismantling everything. It begins with strategically rethinking alignment between people, plans, and platforms.
Brand and performance: two engines, one direction
Let’s start by resetting the narrative. Brand isn’t merely the glossy element that sits at the top of the funnel. Rather, it should form the essential foundation: influencing how we position, segment, and connect with audiences.
And performance isn’t simply about transactions; it’s the sophisticated system that enables brand strategies to respond, scale, and evolve dynamically in-market.
When brand and performance operate as a unified force, the output becomes remarkably sharper, faster, and more accountable. Media can drive both awareness and action. Creative development transforms into an iterative, connected process. Strategic decisions balance both reach and measurable return.
Why integration stalls: internal realities
It’s easy to advocate for “breaking silos.” It’s considerably more challenging when those silos are deeply embedded within organisational charts, P&Ls, and entrenched legacy processes—reinforced by divergent leadership structures, separate agency contracts, and teams incentivised by fundamentally different KPIs.
Let’s be candid: meaningful integration doesn’t require everyone to suddenly report into one boss or the dismantling of specialised teams.
Rather, it demands thoughtfully crafted operating models that enable genuine collaboration: synchronised planning cycles, shared briefs, and clearly defined interaction points where brand and performance collectively shape strategy together.
This alignment isn’t just operational. It’s cultural. It requires leaders to actively model collaboration and shift the conversation from attribution to contribution.
One strategy, one scorecard for both brand and performance
Measurement is often the linchpin, or the landmine. Brand teams optimise for mental availability and long-term lift, while performance teams focus on efficiency metrics. These KPIs aren’t inherently at odds, but if they’re managed in isolation, they can pull teams in opposite directions.
The solution isn’t to flatten everything into one master metric. Instead, it requires building a layered scorecard that reflects both brand strength and performance output while tying both dimensions back to business outcomes.
This means developing metrics that evolve across the funnel, creating dashboards that surface shares accountability, and establishing a framework that enables diverse disciplines to speak the same language.
Connected systems, not just connected data
Data alone doesn’t create integration. Many organisations have rich insights, but they’re fragmented, housed in different systems, managed by different teams, and structured in incompatible ways.
Fixing this isn’t about overhauling the tech stack overnight. It’s about building interoperability: shared taxonomies, linked identifiers, and processes that move insights from analysis to activation.
When signals flow between teams, when brand teams use search data, and performance teams leverage audience segmentation, everyone gets smarter.
And just as important: fostering a mindset where data isn’t owned, it’s shared.
Brand and performance integration isn’t a campaign issue, It’s a design issue
Integration isn’t fixed through quarterly campaigns or cosmetic team rebranding. True integration demands reworking the fundamental mechanics: how teams receive briefs, how partners are held accountable, and how success is recognised.
That might mean co-located teams or new incentive models. It might mean brand and performance budget owners jointly reviewing creative, not just results. The goal isn’t hierarchy – it’s clarity.
Some of the most effective transformations haven’t come from radical change. Rather, they evolve from small, persistent shifts: new rituals, shared reviews, cross-functional playbooks. Moves that build trust and reduce friction.
Final words
The separation between brand and performance rarely stems from strategic choice; more often, it’s a structural inheritance. Yet building brands that achieve sustained growth demands we move beyond treating integration as theoretical — we must intentionally design for it in practice.
This isn’t about merging disciplines. Rather, it’s about purposefully aligning them, both operationally and philosophically. Because the brands that win long-term will be the ones that make brand and performance work as one system, not just one budget.
By Chrisa Chatzisavva – Global Digital Lead, UM
