If you market like a smaller brand, you will become a smaller brand

When Napoleon marched into Spain in 1808, his Grande Armée was the most fearsome military machine on the planet. Having toppled Austria (twice), Prussia and Russia, and subdued most of continental Europe into alliances or client states, the Armée appeared singularly unconquerable.

Looking south toward Spain, Bonaparte saw a small, disorganised kingdom ruled by a weak Bourbon monarchy. Spain’s armies were poorly led, its politics chaotic. Spain would fall easily, another breezy annexation.

But rather than facing a traditional army, the French infantry found villagers, priests, and peasants rising up, not in grand battles, but in ambushes and sabotage. Attacking supply lines, murdering isolated officers and disappearing. They called it la guerrilla – literally “the little war.” It was the first time that word appeared in history.

Fighting like smaller rivals undermines the advantages of scale

At first, the French held their dignity. “We will crush these insects,” a general said. But as the insects drew blood, France responded by spreading its forces thinly, into penny packets, in scattered skirmishes, at the pace of mules and mountain paths.

In deciding to fight the guerrillas on their own terms, Napoleon ceased to fight as Napoleon. He traded shock and awe for exhaustion and attrition. He became the thing he despised – reactive, local, incremental.

Over six years of bitter warfare, the “little war” became the ulcer of the empire. France lost over 200,000 men, its treasury bled dry, its morale collapsed.

By fighting like a smaller army, the Grande Armée became a smaller army.

The crisis in confidence among big brands

All over the world at the moment, I meet marketers who call to mind that collapsing morale. Looking at encroaching challenger brands, those little upstarts nipping at the heels of their market share, and at first holding their dignity. Before gradually being drawn into the same self-betrayal as Napoleon.

Social, digital, influencer and creator marketing have put guerilla tactics in the hands of any young company wanting to build itself into a bit part of its category. Beauty and skincare probably have the most copious insurgents, but it’s happening everywhere. You can indeed performance market anything to about 3% market share. Which tends to put big, good brands in a crisis of confidence.

Inevitably they follow the fallacious logic that, because those tiny brands are growing at a rate much faster than theirs, the correct strategy is to market just like them. “I want an influencer in every zip code”, said Unilever’s CEO earlier this year, with all the confidence of Napoleon, albeit Napoleon had the excuse of being twenty years younger than Unilever’s Fernandez at the time.

That performance marketing is perniciously alluring is not news. That social media companies have addicted marketers to the practice, just as they’ve addicted teenagers to their products, is not surprising. But we have a rich history to draw on, one which tells us again and again of the pitfalls of over-focusing on short-term promotional marketing.

It seemed a revelation when Field & Binet published their 60/40 Split. We had proof that over-spending on performance produced poorer commercial effects for brands over a year, albeit being so deliciously measurable over a fortnight.

But long before, JWT’s Peter Kim used the American PIMS database to observe that, between 1969 and 1989, brands were spending less on advertising (which is what we used to call ‘brand building’) and more on promotion (which is what we used to call ‘performance’ or ‘sales activation’).

Brand builders are more likely to be ‘dominators’

Kim produced an analysis remarkably similar to that in The Long and the Short of It.

He firstly found that the market share leaders - which he called ‘dominators’ - tended to spend much more on advertising, and much less on promotion, than the market share followers or marginal leaders.

So he ran an ROI analysis, and found that indeed, advertising ROI was much higher when companies spent less on promotion and more on advertising.

Brands that spent more than 70% of their budgets on promotion yielded an average profit ROI of 18%.

Brands that spent less than 50% on promotion, and more than 50% on brand advertising, achieved a much higher average profit ROI of 31%.

In his paper, published in The Journal of Consumer Marketing in the autumn of 1992, he concluded that “In short, heavily advertised brands are more likely than heavily promoted brands to be category leaders as well as to be highly profitable.”

A repeated pattern of evidence – and an exception

This year, WARC and Analytic Partners published their own analysis, with global data, showing that brands spending more than 50% on performance yet again yielded significantly lower commercial returns than brands spending more than 50% on brand building.

WARC followed up with data showing that the optimal split in Asia - where marketing supposedly works completely differently to everywhere else - was, horror of horrors, 50% or more toward brand building.

Marketing science talks a lot about ‘generalisable patterns’. The academics mean that we see the same thing over and over again in different datasets in different markets and categories and time periods.

The principle that we should spend about half of our budgets on brand and about half on performance is one of these generalisable patterns. From 1992 to 2025, across the US, UK, Asia and global datasets, we see basically the exact same thing. Spend more than half on performance and you don’t get the return on marketing investment that you could be getting.

The only place that principle breaks down? Brands in their earliest stages. A couple of years ago, Peter Field ran the 60/40 analysis on brands in their first year and found the optimal split was 65% performance and 35% brand. In the earliest stages of a brand’s life, provided that brand has created something new and valuable, there’ll be a degree of ‘pre-existing demand’ for whatever they’re selling. And it makes sense to use the algorithms and influencers to convert that demand, to get the brand off the ground.

And that’s what the big brands overlook. Performance is a great strategy for take-off. And a terrible strategy for maintaining altitude.

Small brands don’t use social and influencer marketing because they’re the most effective activities. They use them because they’re what they can afford. Big brands can afford to use the big guns. TV, outdoor, long-form content shown in premium contextual media on big screens. Big creative ideas that make the brand famous. The kinds of things that keep tens or hundreds of millions of customers happy to pay a little bit more for them. Trading in the F‑22 Raptor for a million pen knives and pepper sprays looks like incredible value for money on a per-unit basis until half your troops have fallen.

Nike did a very good job at the wrong thing

In 2020, the headlines around Nike’s new marketing strategy were optimistic. “Why Nike is Doubling Down on Its Digital Strategy”, “Nike CEO: Digital is the New Normal”, “Nike shutting down 9 wholesale accounts in shift to DTC”.

By 2024, they’d become “How Nike Ran Off Course”, “Why Nike’s DTC pivot didn’t pan out”, “Nike is broken. Can Elliott Hill fix it?”.

On Running and Hoka had appeared on the scene. They’d made quick use of direct-to-consumer sales and influencer marketing as any young brand should. And Nike blinked. The market leader upended its marketing and distribution strategy to emulate its smaller competitors.

To be fair, Nike did a very good job of its influencer marketing. In 2024, it was named the top fashion brand for influencer marketing in the US.

Also in 2024, Nike’s share price dropped 28%, wiping close to $30B off the company’s enterprise value. Quarterly sales decreased 8% and quarterly profit fell 27% year-on-year. The CEO “stepped down” under mounting pressure from the market.

It wasn’t the case that Nike didn’t do good influencer and performance marketing. It lost because it did too much of it.

By marketing like a smaller brand, Nike became a smaller brand.

When Napoleon himself abdicated in 1814, the seeds of his downfall had been sown years earlier, not at Waterloo, but in the Spanish hills.

The empire had shrunk in the world’s imagination.

James Hurman is an advertising effectiveness expert, author of "Future Demand" and "The Case for Creativity", and founder/co-founder of Previously Unavailable, New+Improved Ventures, Tracksuit, AF Drinks, and Caffeine.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.