January is usually a trap.
Fresh budgets land, new targets are set, and the immediate instinct is to capture the sales sitting right in front of us. It’s understandable. But it often leads to a strategy that trades margin for volume and tells your customers to wait for the next discount.
The industry has been stuck in this loop since 2008. As Sean Dwyer, MD here at Door4, points out, we’ve inadvertently built a culture of risk aversion:
“Since the invention of digital ads and the ability to track ROI directly, optimisation over fame has become the MO for marketers. The 2008 crash smashed into budgets and reduced appetite for risk—and that risk aversion has continued ever since in a low-growth economy.”
We stopped building brands and started buying clicks. The problem? You hit a ceiling.
The 5% Trap: Performance activity focuses almost entirely on the audience currently “in-market.” At any given time, that is only about 5% of your potential customers.
If your strategy is purely performance-led, you are fighting competitors for that same sliver of the market. You might win the scraps, but you’ll never grow the pie. Sean explains the commercial reality of this balance perfectly:
“As a business starts out, you can get quite far using performance means—but in time you hit a ceiling. If you only focus on brand, people will steal your lunch money when it matters. But if you only focus on performance, you’ll hit a ceiling of growth quite quickly.”
You need the performance engine to defend your lunch money today, but you need the brand engine to ensure there’s still food on the table tomorrow.
The reason “Brand Building” gets cut from budgets is that it sounds fluffy. It sounds like vanity.
Sean suggests a simple shift in language that changes the commercial reality: Call it Future Demand.
“Labels like ‘Brand Awareness’ are often too woolly to cut the mustard in boardrooms. ‘Future Demand’ speaks to the commercial job to be done: creating buyers for tomorrow, not just awareness for its own sake.”
When you speak to 100% of the market (the 5% buying now and the 95% buying later), you secure medium and long-term growth.
This requires a mindset shift. We need to stop treating marketing solely as a spreadsheet exercise.
“We need to view advertising and customer pre-purchase experience as commercial art meets needs, not just technical science meets optimisation.” — Sean.
You know the 60:40 rule (Binet & Field). We don’t need to lecture you on the theory. Here is how it actually looks for a Home & Garden brand in Q1 2026:
Summary The “Brand vs Performance” dilemma is a false choice. You need to harvest the 5% to pay the bills, and nurture the 95% to build the business.
Don’t let January’s panic force you into a corner of short-termism. Balance the science of optimisation with the commercial art of creating need.
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“Since the invention of digital ads and the ability to track ROI directly, optimisation over fame has become the MO for marketers. The 2008 crash smashed into budgets and reduced appetite for risk—and that risk aversion has continued ever since in a low-growth economy.”