How to Justify Brand Spend to a Performance Team | #657

If you've worked in ecommerce for more than five minutes, you know the pull of the conversion number. The moment leadership discovers that one magic number, it's all they want to talk about, and it doesn't matter how rubbery that number gets when you pull it apart. Meanwhile brand cops it. Brand gets called fluffy, and it's the line cut first when the quarter gets tight.

We've got the fight back to front. Brand and conversion aren't rivals. Brand is the thing that makes your conversion cheaper. The brands that win the argument don't insist brand is special, they treat it like an investment and hold it to account with real numbers, the same as everything else in the business.

This Playbook is anchored by Dave Dullens, Head of Brand and Consumer at Conquest Sports, which runs Converse in Australia and New Zealand. He's spent 20 years keeping iconic brands relevant, and he has the fight with the conversion number every single month.

In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about winning the brand vs conversion fight:

• Pitch brand as an investment with a job, not a cost, and ring-fence its budget from your conversion targets
• Hold brand to account with real numbers and KPIs, so it earns its seat at the boardroom table
• Remember that if you never plant, you never harvest, and watch your cost per acquisition prove it

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