The 60/40 rule is a guideline for splitting marketing spend between long-term brand building (about 60%) and short-term sales activation (about 40%). It comes from Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of campaigns in the IPA Effectiveness Awards databank, published by the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in 2013 as The Long and the Short of It.
How the 60/40 rule works
Binet and Field separate marketing into two jobs. Brand building reaches broad audiences, including people who are not buying yet, and leaves memories that make your business easier to think of and choose later. Its effects build slowly and last for months or years. Activation targets people who are ready to buy now: search ads, retargeting, promotions and offer emails. Its effects arrive quickly and fade quickly.
Across the campaigns they studied, the strongest long-term business results usually came when both jobs were funded and brand took the larger share. Roughly 60/40 was the average balance that performed best in their dataset. It is a starting point drawn from averages, not a law that fits every company.
The split moves with context. Later work by Binet and Field, including research with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, suggested business-to-business firms tend to do better with a more even split of close to half and half. Category, brand maturity, price point and how often people buy all shift the balance as well. A new product nobody has heard of behaves differently from an established brand defending its place.
Why it matters
Many small and mid-sized UK businesses spend almost everything on activation because it is easy to measure. Google Ads and Meta report conversions within days, so every pound looks accountable. The trouble is that activation mostly harvests demand that already exists. If nothing is building new demand, the pool of people who know and trust you shrinks, and cost per lead creeps upwards even when the campaigns themselves are well run.
The rule is useful as a check on that drift. It gives you a reason to fund the brand marketing that platform dashboards undervalue, and a framework for explaining that choice to a finance director. It also guards against the opposite error: brand campaigns with no route to purchase.
For a small budget the conversation looks different. A London plumber spending £800 a month cannot run a television campaign. At that scale brand building means a consistent visual identity, a well-kept Google Business Profile, useful short videos and steady social posting that reaches people before the boiler breaks. The principle still holds: some of your effort should go into being remembered, not only into being found.
Common mistakes
- Treating 60/40 as a precise target and ignoring differences by category and for B2B.
- Counting retargeting or branded search as brand spend. Both are activation, because they reach people already close to buying.
- Judging brand activity on next-week conversions, then cutting it because it “does not work”.
- Running brand campaigns without consistent assets, so nothing accumulates in memory.
- Quoting the rule without crediting the IPA research or understanding what it measured.
How to act on it
Start by sorting last year’s spend into brand and activation, honestly. Many small businesses discover the split is closer to 10/90 than 60/40. That is not automatically wrong, but it should be a decision rather than an accident.
Then choose a balance for your situation. A B2B firm with a short list of target accounts might aim near 50/50. A consumer brand in a crowded category might lean further towards brand. Move gradually, and measure brand work on suitable signals: reach within your target audience, branded search volume over several months, direct traffic, and prompted awareness where you can afford a survey. Ideas such as mental availability and excess share of voice give you language for those goals. Keep performance marketing running alongside, so the demand you create has somewhere to convert.
If you want an outside view of how your budget is split and what to change first, that is part of my digital marketing strategy and consulting work.