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

Connect with Dave Dullens
Explore Conquest Sports

Transcript

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Conversion Obsession Vs Brand Value

SPEAKER_04 0:10

If you've worked in e-commerce for more than, say, five minutes, you know the pull of the conversion number. Everyone's obsessed with it. And the pressure gets intense because the moment someone in a leadership position discovers that one magic number, that's all they want to talk about. It doesn't matter that you know the intricacies, that you know how uncertain it can be and how rubbery that number actually can be when you pull it apart. Meanwhile, brand seems to cop it. Brand gets called fluffy. And if I'm honest, sometimes that's on us because we haven't always done ourselves any justice in showing the commercial outcomes of building great brands. So, brand is often the line that gets cut first when the quarter gets really tight because no one can point to exactly what it did this week when it comes to delivering sales. I've sat in those meetings on both sides, and I reckon we've got the fight back to front. Brand and conversion aren't rivals. Brand is the thing that makes your conversion cheaper. The person who explains this better than anyone else I've met is Dave Dullens. Dave's the head of brand and consumer at Conquest Sport. They run Converse here in Australia and New Zealand, and he spent 20 years keeping iconic brands like Converse, Doc Martins, and Timberland relevant across generations. Now, Dave sells across a lot of channels, wholesale, retail, direct. So you might be tempted to think that this is a big brand problem, but it isn't. Whether you're pure D to C or selling every other way, the point lands the same for all of us. You have to keep investing in brand, not just always drive to a direct conversion to make the conversion cheaper. Dave has this exact fight with the conversion number every single month, and he's worked out how to actually win it. So let's hear it from Dave.

When The Algorithm Blocks New Messages

SPEAKER_01 2:06

There's sometimes you just need some messages to cut through. You can't rely on the algorithm to surface the most commercial. That's fine. If if I was selling one product and all I was worried about was converting that one product, sure, let that go. But the reality is brands don't sell one product, brands sell hundreds of products. And some things need to find an audience to be able to establish as a product. So, you know, sometimes we need to step out of that algorithm and give things its own budget to be like, this needs to find an audience because this is what we want to talk about, this is what we want to grow. So we're constantly kind of, you know, working through the content that we have and navigating the algorithm where we need to. You know, set up a separate ad set that delivers to an audience and then feed that back into your master ad set that can then push them down the finance of conversion. But yeah, we can't always rely on the algorithm to to do it, doesn't understand the brand priorities. It understands conversion. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:00

So have you got any examples of where you've gone? Actually, we need to fund this message. Like this is just a message that we want to get out there, especially through social content. I don't care about conversion at this point. But this is a really important message to help grow our brand.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Yeah. Well, look, that's a battle that we constantly have like every month, I'd say, internal, external. Like, because you've got people with priorities. Like, my priority is to drive people to the website to buy. I'm like, cool. My priority is to grow the brand so people want to come to the website and buy. As well as driving sales. So you always gotta play this two sides of the

Ring-Fence Budget For Brand Reach

SPEAKER_01 3:36

coin. So, you know, most, you know, a couple of times a quarter we'll have a campaign that needs attention. So you will carve out budget, we'll say this is non-conversion, this is brand, we're gonna deliver these for awareness, we're gonna deliver these for reach, and then we're gonna ladder that down into consideration conversion. But you need that first piece to get the second piece because you know, if we just let the algorithm do its thing, it's gonna keep showing the same product to the same people and and and push them all the way down. So the chance to talk to new is difficult.

Finding New Customers Beyond DTC

SPEAKER_04 4:09

What's your approach to getting new consumers into the brand? Do you have any special messaging or formats that you find to acquire or engage new consumers?

SPEAKER_01 4:19

We tend to do a lot of lookalike targeting. You know, people who like our brand are likely to look like people who also might like our brand. So we'll do it with that. You know, it's we work with a different wholesale partners. We we tend to use them as some positioning sometimes. Getting into the right accounts gets you in front of customers that uh don't come to the converse.com or don't walk into a Converse store. So I guess that's the power of wholesale, and that's where you know you'll talk to a consumer that's looking at six or seven brands as options, and you're one of them. So finding the right putting the right product in the right places is is a big part of kind of marketplace management. So, you know, building good relationships with wholesale partners is pretty essential to that as well.

unknown 4:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:58

It's really interesting, isn't it? Because even all the brands that you've worked across and that you've mentioned so far, new consumers probably already have an opinion one way or another, even if they haven't experienced it, because you are such real-world brands. You exist, like you can't avoid them. I know my 11-year-old, he's basketball mad and thinks he's the coolest guy in the world, even though he's 11. And we were somewhere the other day, and I said, Oh, look at these cons, these would be cool. He's like, No, I don't wear cons. I'm like, why not? He's like, I wear Nike. And I'm like, he's got no grounding at all on why it is or what it isn't, but they've got an opinion, and that will change and evolve over time.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, and they uh it feels like they're getting that younger and the other. When I was 11, I didn't, I was just wearing whatever my parents got me. I'm the same. Like, he wears Jordan's. I'm like, mate, can you put some combos on? He's like, I don't want to put Jordan. So, hey, look, hey, I said the consumer decides, he's a consumer, he's gonna decide what he wants to wear, and that's fine, no matter what his dad says, you know. Yeah, it's not the only thing he pushes back on either. So, you know.

Affiliates As A Content Engine

SPEAKER_04 6:04

I want to put uh I want to go back to what you said about affiliate because I think that's really interesting and a model that we don't do a lot of in Australia, very popular in the US. Yeah, big time. We've obviously got a few technical challenges with, you know, TikTok shop isn't here yet. I don't think, you know, it's just not part of a big part of our culture around rewarding others for producing content that directly drives sales. Do you find that the effort to uh work on those affiliate programs justifies the outcome?

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Well, I think you're and you're right, but it's not a massive part of it. And even when we were exploring it, we're like, is this right for footwear? Like it feels like, you know, FMCG or or cosmetics and things feels like a place that that really works and lands. So we thought we'd give it a try uh locally. It's still what it needs to do, I think. So the effort's there, but the power is really the content. You know, we we get great content, we then leverage that content back into our channels. Um and yeah, it just allows us to feed that funnel with content more so than you know, and it pays for itself from a affiliate.

SPEAKER_04 7:15

So the the the direct sales is secondary to it and it's almost like a little bit of a cherry for the creator to go.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Yeah, I think if they're doing good content, we want to reward them for it. So that's what the affiliate's there for. It also you know just allows us to start to set up when things like TikTok shop do come into market. You know, we're we would have a community ready to go who's used to working with us, we're used to working with them, um, they're creating content, and then nope, it just falls into another platform and they can monetize over there as well. As can we.

TikTok Shop Hype Meets Reality

SPEAKER_04 7:44

I'm keen to get your thought on TikTok shop, especially after the patent event, because we had Tim from TikTok present, and since then there's been a little bit of press. It feels to me like TikTok have basically put their hands up and said, if you're in Australia, don't wait for TikTok shop because it uh isn't happening anytime soon.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Yeah, I think it's I still think that like from a brand point of view, brands really want it and they think they want it, but they're not producing content at the scale to justify TikTok opening it here, is the message I'm I'm understanding from TikTok. So until it's cut before the horse kind of stuff, like brands are like, cool, when TikTok shop comes, we'll go. Like, actually, no, you're gonna go now, and then TikTok shop will come.

SPEAKER_04 8:26

So TikTok isn't sitting there not driving sales at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

They're doing fine. They're doing it. Yep. So uh and the brands are still using TikTok and and and directing them back to their websites to complete the purchase. So it's not like they're missing out on on what's happening on platform at the moment. But it's just like, you know, the talk that you hear out of the US and the size of what that's doing there, you know, there's some sparkles in some people's eyes around what the potential could be. So look, well, you can only build what's here. You can only work with what's available. So you do that, and then when new technology comes in, as it always does, you you assess and you adapt.

Reddit And The Return Of Physical

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:02

Are there any emerging channels that you personally have got your eye on that you think are really interesting? Like whether it's live shopping or whether it's I don't know, long form video, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

Is there anything else that you Yeah, like from a like a platform's point of view, Reddit is the one that you know everyone's tends to talk about at the moment. Reddit's great, it's kind of had this resurgence with you know uh AI and and you know that's been a source of truth. So uh that's a really interesting one. You know, brands to play there is uh it's almost community management, you know, it's almost like social media comments, community management. You kind of gotta if you want to be there organically and answer questions, you're gonna be there like all the time organically. So that's a big commitment for brands. And obviously you can advertise there. Yeah, I think I actually think, and this probably goes against this podcast, but I think physical is the area that will start to come back, you know. This consumer and the next is chronically online. You know, the screen time is alarming. So I think the next connection people are gonna want to have is offered. You know, and then the from a brand point of view, always talking like a brand, like how do you how do you show up there? And does that need to be digital? Must you show up digital or can you be authentic and just be in the physical space and do something for this small group of people that are there? Is that what makes it special? But then the question is well, how does that scale?

SPEAKER_04 10:31

Yeah. How many Converse stores do you have at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 10:35

We've got a fleet of about 24 Converse stores across Outlet of Price. So yeah, there's there's things happen there. Done some really interesting stuff

Renew Labs And Community Retail

SPEAKER_01 10:44

in the past. Pre-COVID, we actually opened a store, a Converse store that was called Renew Labs, which was a more community-based store, which was a pretty fun concept that I was able to bring to market, and it was about extending the life of the product you rehab.

SPEAKER_04 10:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

So, you know, everyone's got Converse in the back of the wardrobe, like we're trying to keep that in use. So bring it in and we'll clean it up, we'll fix it, we'll customize it for you, and then off you go. Ultimately, commercially didn't stack up, unfortunately, but what did really work was the community piece of it. That people like to come in, like to have a chat, like to talk about their shoes and the stories and and all that sort of stuff in there. So there's there's some nuggets in there that, you know, how do you bring that together? Um, does product play a role? You know, does those communities play a role? Is it skateboarding? Is it basketball? Is it music? Is it whatever? So I think that's the space.

SPEAKER_04 11:34

I love that insight because once you have a good pair of Converse that you've worn in and you've gotten to a comfortable spot, you actually get really upset if they start to fray.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Yeah, that's kind of part of the oh, you've really, you know, and that's that's a beautiful thing about a lot of well, Converse as well, like duck barns as well. Honestly, broken in a pair of docks, you're you're not getting rid of those. Like you've done the hard yards. Yeah. Exactly. But yeah, look, I've got pairs of Converse in the cupboard that are trashed, but I'd never get rid of them because they reflect what I've done in them. We're a bit and you know, and then uh but I think that's been the beauty of the brand. Everyone's like, oh yeah, it's just a shoe until I've put it on, and then it becomes part of who I am, what I do. So and that message can translate into many different places.

SPEAKER_04 12:19

I agree, I agree.

Turn Activations Into Scalable Content

SPEAKER_04 12:20

I think I think too, just to challenge your your thing of I think online's got a resurgence, and just to challenge your thought around I think offline's got a resurgence. I think you're absolutely right. But the best brands are the ones who are thinking, all right, well, if people wanting to show up in person, if they want those in-person events, those communities, those activations, those experiences, how do we use that as a content generation activity to feed back online? So we kind of feed this bit of FOMO and to expand the reach because who was it? It was Mike from Scratch talked about this. He ran a big activation in a dog park. They do uh dog food.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yeah, yeah. My dog, my dog eats scratch. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 13:03

There you go. Mike will be very happy. But he had this huge activation plan. I think it went over a couple of days, and it was taking over a park, huge dog setup, everything. And he's like, to be fair, I could have done that for two hours on one morning and had the hype and the event and got the community there, but just filmed everything and got a heap of content and got just as much out of it by bringing that online as having a real world experience for five days or whatever it was.

unknown 13:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah. And well, it's the measure is hard on the physical event. Yeah. It's like, did that move the needle for all of those people who came over those five days? And is that going to have a longer term effect on my brand and and building that longevity and brand love and community versus I need to take this and put it put it online to get reach and push people down the front. So and that's random performance, you know? There's the the brand feels like it's the hard one. It's the long game, it's the slow, it's the in the trenches, in the mud, in the park with the dogs, versus the you know, the the quick sugar hits that you're getting from the response on digital. So look, I think if you think about it like brand, you gotta plant the trees. You gotta put them in the ground, you gotta let them grow. And then performance, you you harvest the fruit. So you can't really do the second one without the first one. If you're not planting trees, you're not harvesting anything. So yeah.

Plant Trees Then Harvest Performance

SPEAKER_04 14:29

So for the people listening to this who are big believers in brand and they might be working in larger companies where there is so much focus on conversion and driving direct sales, what advice would you have from your career around keeping brand relevant in a conversation and getting the budgets and getting the teams and the space and the ideas to continue developing strong brands in a culture now where it's very much X dollars equals Y dollars out?

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Yeah. Look, and to get me around, that has a place. Absolutely, that has a place down the funnel. But like I said, without the brand, it's hard to push down the funnel. And the funnel only gets you so far, you know, from a conversion point of view. If you're starting fresh with no brand and you're just driving sales, that's cool, but that's probably gonna stop and it's gonna get more expensive until you start building a bit of a backbone of a brand behind that. My advice would be if you're in a business that loves measurement, you need to measure brand. You know, you need to show that the work you do has an impact on where the brand ends up. So getting a baseline on where you're at, I think is really important. Understand what your consumer thinks, do some market research, get a line, propose a plan, put some KPIs on brand, brand lift, you know.

SPEAKER_04 15:39

And you're using TrackSoup for that?

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Yeah, we use TrackSoup for that, and we use an another independent research as well. So, you know, there might be things that you're you're wanting to move the needle on. It doesn't have to be overall brand. It might be in a certain niche. Like we want to, you know, be closer to sport. We want to be associated with sport, you know. So you measure that and then you activate in sport and you give it a period of time and you measure it again and and you prove to your board or your business if it's working or not. So I think that's the advice.

SPEAKER_04 16:09

What Dave's giving us there isn't a philosophical argument for why brand still matters, it's a logical argument for how brand helps conversion, and it works whether you sell sneakers or supplements. So let's make it practical with a little bit of help from the Add to Card archive. Firstly, the first move reframes everything, and it's about language as it is about money. Stop pitching brand as a cost and start pitching it as an investment. The way Dave makes that real is by ring fencing a budget, a deliberate slice of spend set aside for brand. But here's the bit that actually matters: that ring-fenced money is not a free ride, and it's not permission to spend without anyone watching. It's an investment budget with a job to do. He runs it a couple of times a quarter for awareness and reach, and then ladders that same audience down into consideration and conversion. In the ad account, that looks like a separate ad set built to reach new people with a brand message, which you then feed back into your master converting campaign. You have to ring fence this because the algorithm will never choose to do this on its own. Left alone, and it spends every dollar, reshowing your best converting ad to the same warm audience, and it eats your brand budget alive. The reason the investment framing matters so much is that it changes the conversation with the people holding

Measure Brand Lift Like A KPI

SPEAKER_04 17:43

the budget. Pamela Yip, co-founder of Bubble Tea Club, learned to make exactly that case in a business drowning in performance metrics.

SPEAKER_02 17:51

I think in e-com there's a very big focus on metrics, obviously, like your CPC, your ROAS, your MERA percentage, but just remembering that there are people behind there. And then if you're too fast and chasing your MERA percentage and growing and short temporary moments of a better ROAS, imagine compromising on your brand. Just pitch it as an investment and show them how your funnel and how brand awareness is keeping you guys on top.

SPEAKER_04 18:13

So this month, carve out a fixed slice of your spend. It doesn't have to be a lot, and ring fence it from your conversion targets and put it behind reaching people who don't know you yet. Then feed that audience into your converting campaigns and let it do the job from there. But frame it to yourself and to your leadership teams as an investment with a job to do, not money set aside for a free brand ride. But here's why brand usually loses. It turns up to a numbers fight armed with feelings. If you want your brand to have a seat at the boardroom table, it has to be accountable like everything else sitting at that table. So bring numbers. Dave's recipe is simple and repeatable. Get a baseline of what people think of you today. Pick one specific thing that you want to move. For converse, it's being associated with sport. Put a KPI on it, brand lift or category association, activate against it for a set period, then measure again and walk the before and after with your team. Tools like Track Suit make always-on brand monitoring available rather than a once-a-year survey. And the trick is to measure something that you can actually shift. Not just overall brand awareness. You need to be able to measure cause and effect over a specific time based on specific actions. No one makes this case better than Jess Hatzis. She's the co-founder of Frank Body. Jess is a creative leader through and through. She's one of the smartest people in the business and has been able to evolve brands, especially legacy brands in retail, into the modern world of digital and e-commerce. And she does it based on data rather than gut feel.

SPEAKER_03 19:58

That's the not sexy side of branding. You have to spend your time in the numbers. And the numbers will tell you what needs to change. How the recommendations are built on inside, not just me going, this looks nice, but let's go in that direction where it led me to who I thought our new customer should be. How do we still maintain the older by older I mean like the legacy customer that wants to be part of the brand? But how do we get comfortable with letting go of the customer who isn't adding as much long-term value to the business? I don't believe in the sentence I feel I believe sitting in the boardroom unless it's so relevant to the topic. It should be what the numbers show us or what the research shows us, therefore, here is the recommendation. And everything was based, the conversation was rooted in that type of insight.

SPEAKER_04 20:44

So pick one brand metric that you want to move. Baseline it now, activate against it, and then remeasure. Take that before and after into rooms where people might be a little bit skeptical about brand and show them the numbers. Show them the activity of the before and after. The last one is the argument that you reach for when someone calls brand a nice to have. Don't you love that? Because we all know brand isn't. It's the thing that makes every conversion dollar stretch further. If you start from zero brand and just buy sales, it might work for a while, but it will quickly stall and get very expensive because you're chasing a shrinking pool of people who already know you.

Emotion Builds Trust Before Purchase

SPEAKER_04 21:27

That's Dave's plant the trees point. You can't harvest what you never planted. When the brand work is done, the customer has half decided or half-trusted you before they ever land on your product page. So the conversion is cheaper by the time they get there. Nick Gray, the founder of IGU Global, or I Got You Global, put the mechanism about as plainly as it gets.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

You know, humans make decisions with emotion first. You know, trust is built on emotion. And so the problem is, is that if we're not clear on that, double down on that, and anchor to that, what that actually ends up doing is confusing consumers. And that's what impacts doubt, puts doubt, you know, and you've done it yourself. You know, you've gone to a website or into a store and you've gone, is this the right store for me? I'm not quite sure, you know. And as soon as there's doubt in your mind, then what that does is impact trust. No different to a relationship. And it's very hard to repair.

SPEAKER_04 22:27

Nick had a brand stop pouring money into the lower half of the funnel and put it all into filling the top with emotional narrative instead. They grew triple digits in a year. I don't expect that to happen for every brand, but it's an example of what can happen when you take that leap. So watch what's happening in your cost per acquisition over time. If it's creeping up, it's usually a sign that your brand isn't doing enough pre-selling. Fund the top of the funnel and watch the bottom get cheaper. So here's how you position a brand in a world of ROAS obsession. Brand and conversion are not two teams. They're absolutely the same team. And the brand is the half that makes the other half cheaper. You win the argument not by insisting brand is special, but by treating it like an investment and holding it to account like everything else in the business. Give it its own ring fence budget. Put real numbers and KPIs on it so it earns its seat at the table. And keep reminding everyone that if you never planned, you never harvest. Do that. And the brand stops being the first line cut and starts being the thing that the board and your leadership team ask more

Join The Add To Cart Community

SPEAKER_04 23:42

of. If you're trying to work out how to carve out brand budget without blowing your targets or how to measure brand lift in a way that your finance team will actually believe, that's exactly the kind of thing that marketers are working through now in the Add to Cart community every day. It's free to join. Just head on over to addocart.com.au. We'd love to see you in there. That's it for the playbook this week. Good luck in your brand conversations. I'll see you next Friday.

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SPEAKER_04 24:07

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