2026 Brand vs Demand Benchmark Report

Live from Schenectady, New York, it's the Metrics Brothers, Growth and CAC. And I'm Growth, better known as Ray Reich, founder and CEO of Benchmarkit.

And I'm CAC, better known as Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital, independent consultant, and the author of Kelblog.

And together we are the Metrics Brothers.

And we go together like brand and demand.

Are you suggesting we compete for budget and only one of us can show the return of our respective investments?

No, no, Growth. I'm suggesting the two are interdependent and one actually complements the other a little bit like us.

Well, I've always been told by several of our listeners that our discussions, and dare I say sometimes debates, Are part of the entertainment value of our podcast.

Our podcast has entertainment value, Ray?

Yes, it does, David. You know, maybe I alone provide it, but but back to what I was saying: I like the direction you're taking with the complementary nature of brand and demand investments.

Yep, I saw the brand versus demand benchmark report that you, Carity Dietrich, John Miller, Bill Masitis recently put out. Really recently, like four days ago, January fifth. 2026. And I thought it would be an excellent topic for today's episode.

Well, as one of the participants, I do also. But before we start that, let's hear a word from our sponsor. The Metrics Brothers is proudly sponsored by Benchmarkit, the B2B AI and software industry's largest, broadest, and most contextualized benchmarking index. Dave Kellogg and Ray Grothright have put the Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus for the remainder of 2026. All episodes we have ever recorded are still available on your favorite podcasting app. You can reach Dave @Kellogg and Ray on LinkedIn @RayReich. Thank you so much for listening to the Metrics Brothers podcast.

Okay, Ray, let me just do the quick intro here, I guess. So this report was written by Carrie-Lee Dietrich, former CMO of Atlassian. John Miller, founder of Marketo and Engagio, I believe. Bill Masaitis, who was at Zendesk and Salesforce as CMO, among others. Ray, who invited you to this party?

Well, it's kind of like when I was in college. I found out the only way I had a lot of friends was inviting them to my party.

Ah, okay, okay. So, uh, those— you 4 guys are the authors of this report. Um, it's a survey. It touches 168 companies. The size range is pretty decent. Roughly speaking, 15% below $5 million, then 23% in $5 to $20 million, $20 to $50 million is 15%, $50 to $100 million is 12%, $100 million plus is 36%. So I'd say it's a pretty broad distribution of sizes. 62-page report including 18-page appendix that does segmentation of the benchmarks. Really, I like how the summary slide of this report, you know, it starts with the executive summary. What I don't like at a high level about the report is you didn't put the verbatim questions in, which, you know, I know you also like.

I do. And I must admit, going forward after this, like the 3rd time I've been hit on this, we're gonna put the questions.

Yay, yay, we need that, Ray. So other than that, look, it's certainly a red-hot topic. I know there's been a good response to the post you guys have done about it out there in the market, and I know people are definitely wrestling with the question of how much brand versus how much demand. Um, so, so tell us more.

Yeah. Well, you know, we did open this survey late August, early September and left it open through October. And one of the questions is why we didn't get it published until now. And we just thought there was so much noise out there in December. We wanted to, to have it right now at the beginning of the year. But as I was talking to especially Bill and John, they said there's a lot of positive sentiment around brand. But there's not a lot of empirical evidence of how it's really driving things like pipeline. So they wanted to try to couple sentiment and hard-hitting return on investment type metrics. So that was the goal. And, um, by the way, sometimes I believe that there's belief and then there's empirical evidence. And I think this report actually highlighted some of that.

Okay, keep going, Ray.

Well, the way we started it, and it's on pages 10 to 11, And anyone can download this report at benchmarkit.ai. We started it with just overall marketing budget allocation as a percent of revenue. And even though on page 10, it says the median is 8%, it's really page 11 that breaks it down by company size. And just like the B2B marketing budget benchmarks we did about 9 months ago, it really shows that as you're smaller, Right under $5 million, the median is 5%. And there's a pretty broad range between 25th and 75th percentile. At $5 to $20 million is 8%. At $20 million to $50 million, it was also 8%. Then it went down to 7% from $50 million all the way up to $500 million. And then above $500 million was at 4%. And one thing I did want to comment is one of the differences in this benchmark report than what you see in a lot of SaaS-centric ones. I mean, we had over 30% of the participants were over $100 million. So this really had some great enterprise SaaS companies participating. And these findings were very aligned with the findings we did 9 months ago. 1% lower at median. It was 9% overall for the entire population 9 months ago. And now heading into 2026, it looks like it's at 8%. So that's kind of just overall marketing allocation because I wanted to ground the brand versus demand components of that and the overall budget.

So as your metrics brother, Ray, I need to give you shit when indicated. Um, and, and as you may recall, I used to call you Stranger Things for a year because one year you published a metric report where up was down and I said, ah, Ray's living in the Upside Down. Well, with season 5 of Stranger Things, we have now learned that the upside down is simply a wormhole that connects the right side up to the abyss. And I believe you have descended into the abyss with a visualization on slide 10, which my brain exploded, Ray, when I saw a bar with 4 equal sizes and then the numbers 0, 3, 8, 15, 100. I, I think I now understand it, but I would, I would ask you to reconsider this visualization technique, which has been done a couple times in the report. Thoughts?

You know, it reminds me of seeing my SAT score on a percentile basis. It was horizontal. Now, I'm not saying which side of that long bar I was on, but it was at least a horizontal chart, Dave.

Well, there you go. And for readers, if you're looking at this, what Ray has done, he's basically showing quartiles with 4 equal-sized boxes and then putting the data on the quartiles. But to me, it causes major cognitive dissonance because halfway across the line it says 8%. And what that means— and by the way, this is exactly what a box and whiskers chart does, but it does it the other way, and we're used to seeing it. And it says that 8% was the median. Now, visualization aside, onto the content. 8% is roughly consistent with what I think people are, you know, seeing out there. You say it's consistent with your other benchmarks. I checked it against the High Alpha benchmarks. The median there runs around 30% for sales and marketing. And if you apply the Dave Kellogg 2-to-1 rule that says most companies— and again, there's a rule of thumb Most companies spend twice as much on sales as marketing, then that 8 becomes 8 for marketing, 16 for sales, 24 overall, right? So I then I kind of triple the 8 and then compare to other benchmarks. And I would say this looks to be a slightly efficient group. I'm curious if you feel that way. Do you think the people who responded to this are more, you know, efficient or are they normal? Because I think with 8%, I think they're a little bit on the efficient side.

They are a little bit more efficient than I've seen in other samples. However, I will go back to High Alpha. If you look at their distribution by company size, it skews to lower than $20 million, and we're skewing to $100 million and above. And you will see lower percent of revenue in larger companies, especially for marketing.

Yeah, excellent counter, Ray. The other thing I was going to mention is I do believe there's— there is selection bias in all these studies. Which is people who fill in the studies to get the data are people who care about the data, right? And those people tend to be more metrics conscious and more efficient. But I don't think that would affect this study more than any other study. I think all studies are selection biased because the— correct me if I'm wrong, Ray, but what you get for this is what? You get a copy of the data back, or do you also get a gift card? Or like normally the gift get is I'll give you my data and you give me back the summary.

Yeah, we give them back the summary and we give it to them about a week before it goes to the general public.

There you go. Okay. So, so you fill this in because you care about numbers, which means you probably are more efficient. In any case, not to beat that to death. The other things I'd say on this, Ray, is you just got to be careful when you ask a bunch of people sales and marketing as a percent of revenue or marketing as a percent of revenue, because it will vary as a function of growth rate a lot, as I know you know, because you publish it in some of your other benchmarks. It also varies as a function of investor base, right? Bootstrap versus PE versus VC is going to change Yeah, you make such a good point.

And honestly, we decided not to put it in, but we should have. We asked everybody their growth rate, and we asked them to give us a numeric number, not a range. So they told us if it— right. So if you look at the growth rate, even though we ended up bucking it in the— I think it's page 42— you know, most of the companies here were growing between 11% to 30%. So it wasn't super high growth, and it wasn't low growth. But next time we will actually show this, the content by growth rate. So, hey, let's, let's jump to slide 13, cuz this really gets into the heart of what we were trying to do. And the question we ask is, you know, if you were forced to categorize your entire marketing budget to either brand or demand, and they typed in the number, what does that split look like? And it must equal 100%. Well, 70% at median was demand generation. And 25% at medium or brand. And for those of you asking, well, 70 plus 25 doesn't add up to 95%. It's because we didn't use average or mean.

It doesn't add up to 95%.

In fact, it doesn't add to 100%. It's because it's median.

There you go. Yeah, correct. You're adding 2 medians, so it's not necessarily guaranteed to add to 100. I got that. So, so just to make it easy though, I am going to say 80/20 just to— for my own little brain. You can call it 75/25, but Um, so you're basically saying that the survey said in real life they're spending— I'm gonna round it— 75% on demand to 25% on brand. What do you make from that?

It tells me that demand is where the money's made. More importantly, it's where you keep your job as the head of marketing, because it's much easier to align outcomes like pipeline opportunities and even new revenue To your demand gen budget, things like your paid media, et cetera. So, and we'll get into that, but I think it's really what gets measured gets money.

So, and because of this, Ray, I think it's important that when you ask a marketer to say, how much are you spending on demand versus brand and to type in 2 numbers, they've been trained to put anything under demand that they can, because they know that brand gets extra scrutiny. So if you said like, somewhere in our emails, right, you said like where to put people, put content marketing. And to me, I'd absolutely put it under demand generation. And you can argue it helps branding because it does, because you're getting your story out there and your message and your logo on the COVID page. But in reality, I'm going to measure that by lead generation, and I would put it under demand. So, so I think the point being that all demand generation, all demand generation activities affect branding, right? Every time you touch someone, you're modeling their impression about you, you're changing their impression about you. Um, and, and, and lots of brand activities directly and indirectly help demand generation. So we fully understand these 2 things impact each other. But the, the way you ask the question and the way the system has trained marketers, I believe what you're getting is what I would call pure brand. Like, because if it's not pure brand, I'm going to put it in demand. If it's hybrid, you know, even if it's 70/30 hybrid, if it's hybrid I'm going to put it in demand, uh, rather than brand. So that's what— that's the way I interpret this, uh, is I kind of mentally insert the word pure before brand, knowing now how you ask the question.

Well, then there was the next question, which once again forcing it— and by the way, we could have tried to say, okay, of these 10 marketing programs, what percent goes to SEO versus brand advertising versus social media, etc.? But Nobody categorizes everything the same way. So we just did this forced brand or demand. And the second question we ask is, if you were trying to force your marketing budget to brand or demand on an ideal basis, not what it is, but how you would like to allocate it, it changed dramatically where at median, 50% said they would go to demand gen, which is 20% lower than the actual, and 40% would go to brand. Which is 15% higher at median than actual. So this really kind of said, why is that? And to me, the one thing that jumped out at me was, well, everyone says the number one challenge right now is generating pipeline, so they're going to do everything they can to try to generate pipeline. And it's really hard to prove how pipeline is attributed to brand spend. So I think there was bias in how people actually provided this. Because they are trained to show more spend on what drives outcomes directly.

Yeah. So on the prior question, Ray, I actually think next year, if you do this, it could be interesting to give them a taxonomy of programs so they know what you consider brand versus demand. You might even do both, to be honest, just ask a top-down question and then come at it bottom-up. Say, how much of your budget do you spend on these types of programs? Make it add to 100 and then either silently say, Now you can do the taxonomy and say, how much is brand versus demand? Or you can point out the contradiction to them if there is one. Or you can force them into your taxonomy, which is the hardest because they may not have the numbers available. But I do think you should try to get more granularity on this question because it's a question people are very interested in. And right now the answer is only semi-interpretable in my mind. And I interpret it the way you do, which is by default marketers put everything that's not nailed down into demand. That's why they'll try and protect demand when the budget cuts, which come, which I know we're going to talk about later. Um, and your point about, basically your point about, if you think of demand gen as short-term marketing and branding as long-term marketing, which is one good way to think about it, you know, remember what John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead, right? Like if you put all your money in brand and none in demand, i.e., all in long-term and none in short-term, Then the beneficiary of your brand investments is going to be your successor, right? So, so there's a reason people behave the way they do in terms of allocation and spend.

Got you. Well, let's move on to what one of the things we were really trying to understand is with all this challenge around driving pipeline and the preferred approach to invest more in brand, how are companies really putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak? And that is, we asked, how much did you increase your brand budget over the last 12 months? And 51% reported they did increase it, and 23% of those actually said they increased their brand investments by greater than 20%. So I kind of walked away saying, well, once again, we don't know exactly where they invested it, but they are starting to invest more in brand. And honestly, I would consider things like AA AEO, answer engine optimization, might've been one of the reasons you saw more brand investment, 'cause it's hard to really say that's direct demand gen, but I don't know for sure. I don't know what you think about that.

I don't think it's hard to say it's demand gen at all in my mind. It's very much about demand gen to me. Look, some forms of AEO, like I think it's pretty well known at this point that a big PR hit in a major publication is really good for your AEO. So PR is good. for AEO, right? So that PR investment would probably go into brand. But even if you're doing it, maybe you're doing more on PR in order to help AEO, but AEO itself to me is demand. But this is why I think you should— you need to do something next time when you run this to help clarify the taxonomy so that people know what they're supposed to answer. And you have to be careful that you don't overdo it so they don't have the data at hand and can't answer at all. I get the fundamental challenge. But in any case, I'm not surprised at people spending more in brand. It's the general wisdom out there is that performance marketing channels are getting optimized, i.e., beaten down, right? One person's optimization is another person's suffering, right? So as Google gets better and better at squeezing every dollar out of you and cost per click and cost per lead, then you're going to want to use that channel less, right? And you're going to feel like that channel is not working or it doesn't work for certain words anymore than it used to because the conversion rate's too low. So there's a strong sentiment out there that people should be putting more on brand. And, and I think this is validating that. Yeah.

Well, and we asked another question and we asked, you know, how do you find brand and demand gen impact each other? And specifically they said that 73% said that brand investments make long-term demand generation more efficient and 63% actually said that brand investments directly fuel demand. Now, measuring it is a whole different topic, but it was interesting to see that so many people believe that brand directly impacts demand efficiency. The next slide, 19, the next question we said, hey, if you had to cut your budget, what area would you protect? Single choice.

Yeah.

55% said demand gen. 19% said events. Only 11% said brand. So 5x more people said when push comes to shove, I'm saving my demand gen budget versus brand. Now maybe I shouldn't be shocked at that, but it tells me the relative importance of the 2 different things.

Yeah, I think it's because they like being employed, right? Um, so this is not shocking at all to me. I'm almost shocked it's not higher than 55%. Um, so So yeah, I mean, look, as I said, without the, without the short term, there is no long term. So you guys, as CMO, you need to make sure you stay employed. You need to make sure sales has a chance to hit their pipeline coverage and demand gen more directly turns more directly and more quickly turns into pipeline than other forms of marketing. Once again, Ray, this is the last time I'll beat this drum, but I have a taxonomy thing because I consider events demand gen.

You know, I can't believe it. We're at the end of this. And there's one thing I really wanted to make sure we talked about. And that is, and John Miller really wanted to put this in here. He goes, I want to know if people track how much money they're investing of their marketing budget to end market buyers, i.e., leveraging intent data versus they just don't know. And it was interesting. 61% of people said, we don't know. So 39% said, we actually know how much of our marketing budget is being spent on end market buyers. So what did you think of that question and our findings there?

To me, this is a telltale question of what I call the demand creation versus the demand capture crowd. There's a podcaster who no longer does marketing podcasts, Chris Walker, who is very big on that distinction. One of his disciples was Alice DiCorsi at Cognism, who I work with. And she also— she produced a lot of content on this very topic as part of Cognism's content marketing. So I've seen a lot of that. And look, the people who make this distinction are saying, wait a minute, there's something fundamentally different between making somebody want to buy something, right? And whether you do that quickly or slowly is a different question. But is the purpose of the marketing to make somebody want to buy a thing, or is it to find people who are out shopping for a thing already? And they would call the former one demand creation. And sometimes I go, there's fast and slow, like on nurture. I always think there's fast nurture and slow nurture, right? Like if somebody says, no, I'm not interested now, but 3 years from now, once I finish replacing my ERP, I might buy a new planning system. Okay, that's a slow nurture candidate, whereas fast nurture is more like somebody's like, I'm on the fence, I might prioritize this next year, I might not. And then you pummel them with, here's why this matters to you right now, right? Very different marketing message as opposed to, oh, you're out shopping for a planning system, come in and make sure I'm on your evaluation list, right? So these are different types of programs. I do agree with this cleavage between demand creation and demand capture. I do believe that when CMOs set out To do a program, they know which one they're doing, right? If they're using intent data to get a list, then they're clearly doing a demand capture program, right? So let's do the messaging that maps to that. But in terms of actually making this a dimension in their budget, I wasn't— I was actually surprised that 40% could say yes, because just to continue this monologue, sorry, marketing budgets have a lot of dimensionality already, right? Like, I need to track pipeline, let's just say. Yeah. Because that's the ultimate purpose of these campaigns, right? I need to track it by geo. So I might have 3 US regions and 3 international ones. So I got 6 geos. I've got to track it potentially by product. So say I'm a multi-product company, a little bigger, I got 4 products. So now I got 24 targets, right? And now they're quarterly. So they're 96 targets. Oh, and now you want me to track it by new versus expansion ARR? It's 192 targets, right? Like the dimensions explode quickly. So I think it's really easy to say, hey, marketing, you should track the budget, right, by all these dimensions. But, but you better go spend a, you know, when people want to do this, I say, you get ready to spend half a million dollars on Anaplan. Because if you want to budget with that much dimensionality, then you're going to need it. You're not going to be doing that in Excel. I think they know when I'm doing a campaign, I know what the purpose is, but it doesn't mean I've got my budget that way. Right. I just know I've got budget to spend in North America. It's for this quarter. It's for new ARR. And that's where the budget dimensionality stops. Now, what do we want to do? Okay. One of the campaigns is to go get high-intent people and convince them to evaluate us. Another campaign is to get people who are lower intent or unknown intent, uh, and try and get them in the market.

Right. And G2 said now, instead of having 5 to 7 vendors in the final kind of review process, it's now down to 3 to 4. So being, being aware of your solution is critical to getting the buying committees Kind of prioritization.

Yeah. And I worry more and more, Ray, back to AEO, that maybe ChatGPT is making that shortlist.

Agreed.

Right. Certainly the longlist. If I were buying something right now, the first place I'd go is give me a list of 5 vendors in this category. So I think AEO is going to get critical to making longlists.

Totally agreed. I'm going to, I'm going to summarize this with slides 28 and 29. We asked, what are the primary measurements you use to report demand generation ROI? And of course, pipeline number one, 79%. Dollar-based number of opportunities, 70%. New ARR, 69%. Right? Things we would expect. But then on brand, when I asked what the primary outcome measurements were there to report brand investment ROI, website visitors number one at 73%. Branded search term performance, 61%. Inbound leads, the only thing even close to pipeline was only at 35%. So. I came out with this belief that we don't have a belief problem in brand, we have a measurement problem. That was my takeaway from the whole benchmark research.

Yeah, I think you got a survey problem, um, because I wouldn't, I wouldn't use almost any of these, right? And I think this is multiple choice, this was not open-ended, right?

Correct.

Um, because I would look at awareness, opinion, consideration rates using market research. I would look at direct traffic, not just branded search terms. I would look at lift, which we haven't even talked about, right, where you run experiments where you put billboards in Columbus but not in San Diego and you compare the results, right? I would look at self-reported sources, which is how did you hear about us, including word of mouth, which is ultimately a synonym for brand. Mentions in sales calls. Gong talks about this in Udi's recent book— not that recent, but his book about a year ago, Courageous Marketing. He talks about customers, including them, using— they'll run a campaign and then go look at all their call logs and mine them for how often it gets talked about. And then AEO as well. So just wrap this up. We're way over our normal time. It'd be good if readers give us feedback on whether you like that or not, because we shoot for 22 to 24 minutes and we've now done several episodes approaching 29. Doesn't matter to me and Ray. I'm curious if it matters to you. Maybe people are getting more steps on the treadmill thanks to us right now, Ray. In any case, let's wrap this up. Look, on this report, look, my takeaways overall are just one, we know that CMOs want to spend more on brand. And this validated that. We know why, because, because classical demand gen channels and performance marketing channels are getting saturated. Surprisingly, 45% said they don't measure brand metrics, and they aren't that hard to measure. So we may need to do an episode, Ray, on this because it's just not that hard, right? It's different, but it's not that hard. And you're typically not going to do it with CRM reporting, and that, that's what makes it hard, right? If you view your reporting universe as CRM reporting or even marketing automation system reporting, Um, you're not going to be able to measure brand as effectively, but there are other ways to measure. The other thing I'd say just for marketers out there is like, you know, I have a 95/5 or 90/10 rule, which is always use 5% of the budget to measure the other 95, or maybe 10% to measure the other 90. But it's crazy to spend 100% of your budget without spending money on measurement. So be ready to invest in measurement because it controls how effectively, you know, you spend that 5 to see how effectively you spend the other 95. It's a super important principle. And I always use it in my marketing career.

I love that. That's, that's a great way to end up. And thank you for all the insights how we can make this better for the industry next year. Thanks, Dave.

Thanks, Ray. The Metrics Brothers AI, SaaS, and More is a production of the Metrics Brothers Growth and CAC and a member of the Benchmarket Podcast Network. By accessing this podcast, you acknowledge that the Metrics Brothers make no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information provided. Or the humor content of the jokes told. Ray, information, opinions, and recommendations presented are, according to our spouses, probably wrong and provided for information purposes only. This podcast should not be considered professional, or for that matter, unprofessional advice. We disclaim any and all liability for any direct, indirect, indirect, misdirect, incidental, special, ordinary, consequential, inconsequential, or other damages arising out of any use of, or God help you, reliance upon the information presented here. Ray Grothreich is based in New York City and available on X at Ray Reich. Dave Kellogg is based in Silicon Valley and available on X at Kellogg. Schenectady, which is French for unspellable, is not our actual production location. Thanks for listening.