This edition of The Brand Equation is brought to you by our CEO & Founder, Lauryn Warnick. For 20 years, she has partnered with and advised the leaders of organizations including Docusign, PayPal, Sitecore, Google, and General Assembly — helping leaders align strategy, language, and decision-making when the pressure is real and the audience is unforgiving.
At a glance
Most brand budget conversations start with the wrong question.
Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey puts total marketing budgets at 7.7% of revenue for companies over $1B. Brand strategy (the infrastructure underneath all of it) is a fraction of that, but most companies are still underfunding it.
Today, we’re covering how to find that number in your own business.
The question behind the question
“How much should we be investing in brand?”
We hear this most often from leadership teams who already believe brand matters but want a rational way to defend a specific number — something that holds up outside the marketing function, in a room where every dollar needs a justification that doesn't start with awareness or perception.
The instinct to benchmark makes sense. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that companies over $1B in revenue are holding marketing budgets flat at 7.7% of revenue. That number includes maintaining or updating your brand infrastructure to stay on course with the long-term vision (positioning, visual / verbal identity, messaging, brand architecture, guidelines) as well as that year’s activations from content, campaign creative, organic and paid media, PR…among other things. Like any good standard, it needs context. What are the brand's goals and ambitions? What is the pace of growth? This number might be a sufficient investment for legacy brands looking to maintain status, but limiting for new players looking to make a name. Standards like this are putting marketers in the position of making decisions that benefit the short-term vs. the long-term vision. But as a strategist, I love a good reframe. Which got me thinking, what is the cost of compounding short-term deposits over building long-term equity?
That’s the number worth finding.
Starting with brand infrastructure
Before we get to the number, a definition matters, because this is where the conversation usually breaks down outside of a marketing team.
Remind everyone that brand infrastructure isn’t total marketing spend. We're talking about the investment in brand infrastructure: positioning, narrative architecture, the verbal systems that let your story travel without you. The work that determines whether your sales team, your leadership, your new hires, and your biggest prospects are all operating from the same understanding of what you are and why it matters.
To be explicit: this doesn't include advertising spend, production costs, or paid media. Those live elsewhere in the budget. What we're talking about is the strategic foundation: a fraction of a total marketing budget that determines what the rest of the spend can do.
Paid media amplifies a story. Brand infrastructure is the story. Fund the campaign without the foundation, you're making short-term deposits that don't add up to long-term equity.
Doing the math
The right brand investment is built from the costs that already exist in your business. The baseline number assumes your brand is starting from a relatively stable position. If any of these are true, your number is higher — often 2-3x for 12-24 months while you close the gap:
You're in a challenger position or have accumulated significant brand debt
Your spend has been heavily downstream, focused on demand generation with little investment in awareness
You're trying to shift perception at scale — well known for one thing, but the market hasn't caught up to everything else you do
These aren't edge cases. For most companies in a growth phase, at least one of them is true.
Start here:
Where are decisions slower than they should be because the strategic rationale keeps getting re-litigated?
Where does your sales cycle extend because buyers can't get a clear answer without looping in senior leadership?
Where are teams doing redundant work because there's no shared understanding of what the company stands for and where it's going?
Put rough numbers on those things. What does a stalled deal cost at your average contract value? What does an extra month in a sales cycle cost across your pipeline? What does it cost when your best leaders are spending time re-explaining strategy instead of executing it?
That's your baseline. Brand investment sized to fix those problems won't look like discretionary spend. It will look like the cheaper option.
What we've seen
Across engagements with companies in the $500M–$3B range, brand infrastructure investment consistently lands between $800K and $3M. For companies solving for brand debt, a significant perception shift, or a restructured spend mix, that range moves to $1.5M–$6M+ for the first 12–24 months, and then normalizes as the foundation holds. This is a pattern we've seen hold across the companies where the work actually moved the needle.
Here's what the threshold looks like in practice:
Under it:
Work looks fine on the surface — guidelines exist, the website holds
When pressure arrives (a reorg, an acquisition, a new growth phase), it cracks
Those cracks are expensive to fix
At it:
Core questions stop getting re-litigated
Teams operate from the same understanding
The story holds through growth, hiring, and change
That’s the bridge from “brand spend” → “operational efficiency.”
The more useful question
The more useful question is not “What should we invest?”
It’s: Where is lack of clarity already slowing us down… and what is that costing us?
Look at decision timelines, sales cycle length, and how often teams revisit the same core questions. Those are measurable symptoms. The investment required to fix them is almost always less than the cost of leaving them alone.
Back to you
When brand stops holding up under growth, the problem is usually how it’s funded, not how it’s perceived.
Most B2B companies underinvest in brand and overpay for it later in longer sales cycles, higher CAC, and deals that stall on confusion.
Working through a specific situation? Office hours are open. Bring your numbers. We’ll pressure-test it together.
-Lauryn
