McKinsey recently put language to a problem most marketing teams feel in their numbers. A lot of “brand” activity sits in the budget, but not in the system. So spend gets optimised in pieces across channels, assets, and campaigns, without a coherent centre. And when that centre is missing, marketing doesn’t build memory. It builds noise. McKinsey’s work on “performance branding” is essentially a call to close this gap, to treat upper-funnel investment with the same seriousness as lower-funnel optimisation, because the two are connected in how value is created.

In a world where everything is an ad, literally everything from the films we watch to the reels we scroll, the only thing that truly cuts through is a clear sender.

That’s the part we tend to forget. Not the targeting. Not the format. The sender.

When communication isn’t rooted in a brand, with distinctive assets, a recognisable voice, and a promise you can feel before you can explain, performance becomes a treadmill. You can keep feeding it new creative, new hooks, new audiences. But without identity, nothing accumulates. The moment the spend stops, the attention stops. And the ceiling usually shows up in the numbers first.

This is why brand is not the opposite of performance. Brand is what makes performance efficient.

When brand is strong, people click faster because you feel familiar. They convert easier because they trust you. They stay longer because they are choosing you for more than price.

Take Lakrids by Bülow.

After a decade of momentum, the brand hit a wall. Cheaper copycats entered, the category became crowded, and the premium edge started to blur. In 2018, the business took a 20% loss. At that moment, the easy reaction would have been to push harder on campaigns, to lean into offers, media, and conversion pressure.

Instead, they took a step back and dared to invest in rebuilding the sender.

Back in 2019, the team that today forms N96 led the rebrand. The name was refined, the brand idea was defined, and the identity and packaging were evolved to protect provenance and premium without breaking profitability. Even packaging innovation was achieved without additional production cost, keeping unit economics intact.

And then the business numbers did what the brand system allowed them to do.

A 139% bottom line comeback.
Turnover growing 16% year on year post redesign, in a category growing 2%. International sales share rising from 53% to 63% between 2018 and 2020, evenwhile COVID disrupted key retail channels.

That is not “brand love.” That is commercial leverage.

And it is also the kind of leverage investors recognise. In 2025, Lakrids by Bülow entered a new ownership chapter as IDGCapital acquired the business, backing continued international scale.

This is why brand is not a nice-to-have investment. It isn’t a nice identity. It is a brand system that has proven it can defend premium pricing, out perform a category, and expand across markets and channels.

So maybe the most useful way to think about brand building now is this. Brand is not the story you tell once you’ve grown. Brand is the infrastructure that makes growth cheaper.

Which leads to the simplest test we know:

If you stopped your paid ads tomorrow, would your growth stop too?

If yes, it’s not a performance problem. It’s a sender problem.