Performance vs Meaning

In recent years many have lived under the illusion that sustainable growth can be bought through performance marketing. Algorithms simplified the funnel, pushed companies toward quick wins and created a feeling of growth and control. Then the market got tougher, and the weakness of the approach became visible.

Acquisition costs have grown by 60–70% over the last five years. Competitors are almost identical in their offers, attention is getting more expensive, and performance now gives only a short-term boost at increasingly risky levels of spend. The moment you switch the budget off, sales drop.

That is not an investment, it is a dependency — and a waste of money if you are not meaningfully different from the other players in the market. Marketing in performance mode has stopped creating an asset and is simply maintaining turnover.

Performance is an arena where the best auction wins, not the best product

Digital platforms amplified what used to be obvious mainly to e‑commerce specialists: performance works only as long as you pay. The algorithm does not build long-term demand, it reallocates existing flow in the moment. It optimizes for cheap clicks rather than for value, and it brings a mass of users with no loyalty and no intention to return.

Most importantly, the model does not create capitalization. On the P&L it shows up as an expense; strategically it sits on the risk side. The more saturated the market becomes, the faster performance turns into burning cash to keep things as they are.

A brand builds loyalty and reduces dependency on budget

Strong brands also recruit on their own behalf. McKinsey finds that brands with high emotional appeal have two to four times more users who promote them proactively and for free — the organic advocacy metric. Kantar puts the same effect in pricing terms: strong brands retain 35–70% more perceived value without eroding themselves through discounts.

Frequent discounts train consumers to wait for the sale and to read the brand as the cheap option. A resilient brand can still discount, but selectively and in small doses, reinforcing its attractiveness instead of devaluing it.

Without meaning, performance degrades and stops scaling

The most visible failures of recent years are attempts to flood meaningless brands with traffic. When a product has no internal logic of behavior — no brand strategy anchored in emotion, values and cultural image — performance works worse and worse.

Performance, as a tool, can only accelerate what already exists. Including your costs.

Why the brands that grow offer more than a price advantage

The modern consumer chooses a solution and a sense of belonging at the same time. Over the last five to ten years the brands that rose fastest were the ones operating at the level of emotional self-perception: they build community, create a cultural code, and speak not as a company with a product but as a stance.

Liquid Death, Gymshark, Oatly, Ganni, Glossier are not product projects; they are emotional and psychological phenomena. They give people identification, social expression and a stable bond. None of that can be bought in contextual advertising or copied through performance.

Tools do not replace strategy, they work inside it

Brand and distribution together create the push and pull of sales. Performance adds speed. The chain runs in one direction only.

Meaning is the new — and very old — currency of competition

With rising advertising costs, increasingly similar products and the declining efficiency of a performance-only model, what a business needs is not budget optimization but a shift to a meaning-led strategy.

Branding lowers acquisition cost over time by building awareness and trust. It grows a paying core audience and raises its loyalty, and with it margin, because you do not have to recruit the same people twice — and they recruit others. It protects you from being copied, which on marketplaces is the difference between a price and a position. A brand is an asset: investing in it raises the value of everything else you own and turns marketing from an expense into an investment.

The market is moving toward higher competition. The companies that survive it are the ones able to create meaning, not clicks.