PPC vs Brand: How Growing Sports and Fitness Brands are Balancing Performance and Awareness

If you're a marketing lead at a growing sports or fitness brand, there's a very good chance you've had this meeting. Your board or lead investor looks at the brand campaign line in the next quarter's budget and says: "What's the return on this, exactly?"

And you either have a brilliant answer, or you spend the next twenty minutes defending something you believe in but can't fully quantify.

It's one of the most common tensions in modern ecommerce marketing. And in the sports and fitness category - where performance channels are easy to justify and brand investment is harder to defend - it comes up constantly.

Defining the divide: what separates brand from performance?

In its simplest form, brand marketing is the long game of cultivating trust, recognition, and an emotional bond with your community. Performance marketing is the immediate sprint, designed to trigger specific, quantifiable results - the click, the lead, or the completed purchase.

However, for scaling sports and fitness brands, the nuance of this distinction is where the real value lies.

Brand marketing is about emotional infrastructure. It focuses on how an audience perceives and remembers you, leveraging credibility and familiarity over the long term. In high-stakes categories like nutrition or technical gear - where authenticity and safety are paramount - a robust brand serves as a powerful signal of quality. Customers are far more inclined to invest in premium apparel or new training protocols when they have confidence in the name on the label.

Performance marketing is the art of capturing active intent. It relies on urgency and clear incentives - from targeted social ads to time-sensitive promotions - to drive high-velocity outcomes. The metrics here are clear and immediate: did the investment convert right now?

Why performance marketing alone isn't enough

Here’s the thing: performance marketing feels safe. You can see the numbers. You know your CPA, your ROAS, down to the penny. Brand activity doesn't come with that comfort blanket, and when someone's asking you to justify every pound, upper-funnel spend becomes the first thing on the chopping block.

But here's what that logic misses: performance marketing doesn't work in a vacuum.

The reason your paid search is converting is partly because people already know who you are - or at the very least, trust what they see when they land. There's a well-documented halo effect from brand investment on paid search performance: as brand awareness grows, branded search volume rises, quality scores improve, and CPCs on non-branded terms fall. Pull the brand thread long enough and you don't just see brand metrics soften. Eventually, your performance efficiency follows.

The most useful framework for understanding why comes from Les Binet and Peter Field's research for the IPA, The Long and the Short of It. Their analysis of nearly 1,000 advertising effectiveness case studies found that the optimal budget split for most brands sits around 60% brand building to 40% sales activation - though this shifts depending on category, brand maturity, and market position.

For scaling brands in sports and fitness, the balance typically tilts more heavily toward performance in the early stages - closer to 70/30. But the principle holds regardless of where you are: brand investment isn't a soft cost. It's the infrastructure that makes your performance spend work harder, and cheaper, over time.

What this looks like in practice: three sports brands worth studying

HOKA: feel something, not just click something

HOKA is probably the clearest example of this in the sports space right now. Yes, it's a performance-led brand - the shoes are serious kit - but its marketing has moved deliberately into emotional territory.

Campaigns focused on the joy of movement, inclusivity, and community have turned HOKA from a niche running shoe into something closer to a cultural movement. That shift didn't happen because someone approved a brand budget reluctantly. It happened because the team understood that long-term growth requires people to feel something, not just click something.

By championing emotional freedom alongside athletic credibility, HOKA has built the kind of brand loyalty that no amount of PPC spend can manufacture from scratch. And the commercial outcome is visible: stronger branded search volume, lower CPCs on non-brand terms, and a customer base that actively advocates for the product.

Dryrobe: build the culture before you sell the product

Dryrobe built an entire identity around outdoor swimming and cold water culture before either was remotely mainstream. They weren't waiting for demand to exist - they were creating it, through content, community, and consistent brand storytelling.

Their performance marketing now works harder because the brand does half the job before anyone even sees an ad. That's the compounding effect brand investment produces when it's done with conviction and patience. It's also a brilliant example of how a relatively small brand can build a market, not just compete in one.

Patagonia: when the brand is the product

Patagonia is the extreme version of this argument, and it's worth taking seriously even if your brand's values are a little less radical.

They've built a company where the brand is effectively the product. The environmental positioning isn't a campaign - it's baked into every decision, every supply chain choice, every piece of communication. And it creates a customer base that's deeply loyal, highly vocal, and largely immune to cheaper competitors.

You can't build that through PPC alone. You probably can't measure the full value of it in any single quarter's reporting. But the brands that have done it have a structural advantage that grows over time, rather than one they have to keep buying back.

Four signals that your brand investment is overdue

There's no universal trigger point, but these are the patterns we see most consistently in scaling sports and fitness brands.

Are you in a category where trust shapes the purchase decision? Sports nutrition, fitness equipment, outdoor gear - these are spaces where people want to know who they're buying from before they buy. Brand investment here isn't optional; it's the foundation the rest of your marketing stands on.

Are you seeing diminishing returns from performance channels? This is often the first signal that you've reached everyone who already knows you. Brand activity opens the top of the funnel and refills it.

Are you expanding into new markets or trying to win a new type of customer? Performance marketing alone won't build recognition fast enough. You need people to have seen you before they're ready to click.

Are your competitors better known than you? If someone searches your category and your rivals have brand equity you don't, you're paying more to win clicks that should be cheaper. That's a brand problem wearing a PPC hat.

How to make the internal case

This is where a lot of marketing teams get stuck. The instinct is to apologise for brand spend - to frame it as a soft investment with soft returns.

Don't frame brand spend as untrackable. It isn't. The key is establishing the right measurement framework before you start, not retrofitting justification after the fact. And critically, the goal isn't to defend brand metrics in isolation - it's to show how brand investment makes your performance numbers better over time. 

Here's how to split the metrics conversation:

Performance indicators: CPA, ROAS, conversion rate, CTR, paid revenue.

Brand indicators: branded search volume, direct traffic trends, social share of voice, brand lift via survey, engagement depth (saves, shares, video views).

The goal is to connect these two sets of numbers over time - to show that periods of brand investment correlate with improved performance efficiency downstream. That's the case that wins boardrooms, because it reframes brand spend not as a marketing indulgence but as a lever that makes the performance budget go further.

For brands that want to go further still, incrementality testing - measuring the true causal impact of brand activity on downstream conversion - is increasingly the standard for demonstrating this link with statistical rigour. It's worth exploring if your investor expectations demand that level of accountability.

And use the brands in your space as evidence. HOKA didn't become a billion-pound brand through performance marketing alone. Neither did Patagonia or Dryrobe. If a CFO needs a precedent, the sports and fitness category is full of them.

Our take

We're a performance agency. PPC, paid social, affiliates - that's what we do, and we're good at it.

But we've been doing this long enough to know that performance marketing without brand is a short game. You can win quarters. You'll struggle to build something that compounds.

What we actually help clients do is work out the right balance for their stage, their category, and their investor expectations. That looks very different for a £10m DTC sports brand finding its feet in paid social than it does for a £100m omnichannel retailer defending market share. Both are conversations we've had. Both lead to different answers.

Treat brand and performance as a portfolio, not a competition. Each has a job. Each has a timeframe. And the team managing them understands how the two things interact.

That's the conversation worth having. Not "brand or performance?" - but "how much of each, right now, and why?"

Frequently asked questions

What is the right split between brand and performance marketing spend? There's no single right answer, but Les Binet and Peter Field's IPA research suggests a starting point of 60% brand to 40% performance activation for established brands. For earlier-stage or scaling brands, the balance typically shifts toward performance - closer to 70/30 - before moving toward greater brand investment as recognition grows. The right split depends on your category, brand maturity, competitive landscape, and growth stage.

Does brand investment actually improve PPC performance? Yes - and the mechanism is measurable. Brand awareness drives branded search volume, which typically converts at a higher rate and lower CPA than non-branded terms. It also improves quality scores and ad relevance, which reduces CPCs across your paid search activity. Brands that invest consistently in awareness tend to see their performance channels become more efficient over time, not less.

How do you measure brand awareness for an ecommerce brand? The most practical indicators are: growth in branded search volume, direct traffic trends, share of voice in social conversations, brand lift measured through surveys, and engagement depth metrics (saves, shares, video completions). None of these are as immediate as ROAS, but tracked consistently over time they tell a clear story about whether brand investment is working.

When is performance marketing not enough on its own? Performance marketing starts to show diminishing returns when you've effectively reached everyone who already knows your brand. At that point, CPAs rise, ROAS falls, and incremental growth slows - not because the channel is broken, but because the top of the funnel isn't being refilled. This is the most common signal that brand investment is overdue.

What is incrementality testing and why does it matter for brand spend? Incrementality testing measures the true causal impact of a marketing activity — in this case, brand investment — on downstream outcomes like conversions and revenue. Rather than relying on correlation, it isolates the actual lift that brand activity produces. For brands that need to demonstrate ROI on brand spend to investors or a board, it's increasingly the most credible methodology available.

Is brand marketing relevant for smaller sports and fitness brands? Yes - arguably more so. Smaller brands in competitive categories like sports nutrition, activewear, or fitness equipment face a trust gap that performance marketing alone can't close. Brand storytelling, community building, and consistent positioning help level that playing field before someone ever sees a paid ad. Dryrobe is the clearest example of a relatively small brand that built a market through brand conviction before scaling its performance activity.

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