Posted In: Uncategorized by
Simon Bollon,
April 2, 2026
By Simon Bollon, Managing Director
There’s a noticeable shift happening in marketing conversations right now. You can see it in articles, on LinkedIn, and in industry debates. Suddenly, there’s renewed talk about PR being ‘back’, about brands needing to proceed with caution when reading modern marketing literature and case studies, about above the line being a powerful tool many seem to have forgotten about or not realised.
And I’m here for it. Because it’s creating an uprising of realisation that a correction needs to occur.
It feels like a fight between those who believe in ‘brand’, and those steeped in ‘performance’. Performance has bullied brand into insignificance, but brand is fighting back.
Over the past decade, the rise of digital channels and performance marketing has transformed the industry. And in many ways, for the better. We’ve gained precision, speed, accountability. We can see what’s working in real time, optimise quickly, and demonstrate impact in ways that simply weren’t possible before.
None of that is a problem.
The issue is that, over time, this capability has started to shape behaviour, and not always in a healthy way.
And gradually, almost without noticing, we’ve shifted from being performance-led to being performance-obsessed.
We’ve started to prioritise what is easiest to measure, quickest to optimise, and simplest to explain. Not necessarily what is most effective at driving sustained business growth.
The deeper issue is our relationship with measurement itself.
We’ve become so reliant on it that we’ve started to treat it as the arbiter of value. If something can be tracked, it’s important. If it can’t, it becomes harder to justify, and often easier to cut.
But not everything that drives growth fits neatly into a dashboard.
The things that make brands famous, distinctive, and easy to choose — reach, creative impact, cultural relevance, brand memory — rarely show up cleanly in short-term performance data. PR doesn’t. TV often doesn’t. Most other above the line activity doesn’t.
And so, over time, those elements get deprioritised.
What replaces them is activity that performs well in the short term, because it is designed to. Lower-funnel tactics. Retargeting. Conversion optimisation. All valuable, all necessary — but not sufficient on their own.
The result is that we begin to optimise for what we can see, rather than what actually drives growth.
Or put more bluntly, we trade long-term business growth for the serotonin hit of short-term metrics.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the home and garden sector.
During COVID, the category experienced an unprecedented surge. Demand spiked, e-commerce accelerated, and performance marketing delivered strongly because there was so much demand to capture.
But that moment has passed.
Today, the market is flatter. Growth is harder to find, and competition for existing demand is more intense.
During this time, many brands have continued to squeeze the sponge of performance and expected to magically find more results. They doubled down on performance.
On the surface, this makes sense. But in practice, it often leads to diminishing returns.
If everyone is competing for the same pool of existing demand, then performance marketing becomes a zero-sum game. Costs rise, efficiency declines, and growth becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.
Doing more of the same doesn’t unlock growth. It simply intensifies the fight over what’s already there.
None of this is an argument against performance marketing. Far from it. When someone is in-market, actively looking, ready to buy, performance channels are incredibly effective.
Performance marketing is brilliant at capturing demand. It is far less effective at creating it.
And in a flat or declining market, demand creation is exactly what matters.
Because if you want to grow, you need more people to:
• Think about you
• Prefer you
• Come to you first
That doesn’t come from targeting alone. It comes from being known, being remembered, and being mentally available at the right moment.
To sell more, you still need to reach people, engage them, stand out, and give them a reason to be front of mind when the need arises.
The tools may have evolved, but the fundamentals haven’t.
What we’re seeing now across the industry is a gradual recognition of this imbalance.
Not a rejection of performance marketing, but a rebalancing around it.
The brands that are finding growth are not abandoning performance. They are complementing it.
They are investing in broader reach, not just tighter targeting.
They are prioritising creative work that makes them distinctive, not just efficient.
They are building brand memory alongside driving conversion.
One that recognises that growth comes from both creating demand and capturing it, and that these two things are fundamentally connected.
And importantly, they will be comfortable with a degree of uncertainty.
Because effective marketing has always involved investing in things that don’t pay back immediately, and don’t always show up cleanly in the numbers.
That’s not a flaw. It’s the nature of how brands grow.
It’s to step back and rebalance.
To combine the precision of modern performance marketing with the proven fundamentals of reach, creativity, and brand building.
Because ultimately, growth doesn’t come from squeezing more out of existing demand.
It comes from creating more of it in the first place.
It’s about restoring balance.
That’s the Great Rebalancing.
Privacy Policy
