The 60/40 rule says that, over time, marketing budgets work best when roughly 60% goes to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term sales activation. It comes from Les Binet and Peter Field's landmark analysis of hundreds of real campaign databases for the UK's Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), and it has become one of the most quoted planning principles in modern marketing.
Brand vs activation: the two jobs of marketing
- Brand building makes people know, remember and prefer you before they are ready to buy: broad-reach advertising, memorable creative, consistent identity. It works slowly and compounds - its effects last years.
- Sales activation harvests demand that already exists: search ads, retargeting, promotions, lead campaigns. It works fast and decays fast - turn it off and the sales stop.
Binet and Field's finding was that businesses over-investing in easily-measured activation grow well for a while, then stall, because nobody new is entering the funnel. The 60/40 balance consistently produced the strongest long-term growth and profitability.
Why the short-term trap is so common in digital
Activation is instantly measurable - you can see this week's cost per lead - while brand effects hide in baselines and take quarters to show. Dashboards therefore flatter activation and understate brand, and budgets follow the dashboard. Knowing the rule is largely a defence against that bias; pair it with honest measurement over sensible timeframes.
Should every business use exactly 60/40?
No - the authors themselves vary it by context. B2B and considered purchases often sit nearer 50/50; young direct-response businesses may briefly need 30/70 toward activation while cash is tight; big consumer brands sometimes justify 70/30 toward brand. The principle to keep is not the precise ratio but the discipline: deliberately fund tomorrow's demand, not just this week's harvest - a core allocation question alongside the ones in how much to budget for digital marketing.
Applying it practically
- Label every line of your marketing spend as brand or activation - most teams are shocked at their real ratio
- Protect a fixed brand allocation from quarterly raids
- Judge activation weekly on cost per acquisition, and brand quarterly on baseline demand, search volume and share of voice
Alongside frameworks like the 3-3-3 rule and the 7 C's, the 60/40 rule earns its place by forcing one uncomfortable, profitable conversation: are we building anything, or just harvesting? Strategy questions like this run through the Digital Marketing in Practice course at London School of Business UK - enquire here.