How to use brand storytelling as a vehicle for performance

Brand marketing vs. performance marketing is a common debate among digital advertisers.

Brand marketing focuses on building the image of your brand; why your brand exists, who your brand is for (and who it's not), and the emotional associations people form with your brand.

Performance marketing is all about driving leads, converting customers, and ultimately doing both of these in the most cost-efficient way.

But do brand and performance marketing really have to be opposite approaches? We used to think creativity and analytics were opposites too, until creative strategists came around and proved otherwise.

So it shouldn’t be too surprising that the brand vs. performance conversation is wrong too. The better approach is brand plus performance. Some would even argue brand is performance (more on that below).

This blog covers:

• Why brand is important
• How to sell brand marketing to your team
• How to make performance creative that builds brand

Based on conversations at the 2025 Creative Strategy Summit between;

• Mirella Crespi, Founder & CEO of Creative Milkshake
• Sarah Levinger, Founder of Tether Insights
• Lee Joselowitz, Co-Founder of The Quality Edit & Quality Media
• Matt Duckor, VP of Content at HexClad
• Ashley Rutstein, Founder @StuffAboutAdvertising 

What is brand marketing?

Mirella Crespi runs a performance creative agency. So why does she care about brand?

If you get too focused on performance and direct-response tactics, you can optimize yourself into a corner:

• Fake urgency 
• Deeper discounts
• Too reliant on offers

As Mirella told us, "Brand marketing actually makes performance marketing easier."

Brand is the reason people buy your product instead of a cheap knockoff. Brand efforts compound over time, letting you charge more and reducing the amount of work needed to earn a sale. 

Why is brand marketing important?

One of my favorite quotes of the whole summit came from Sarah Levinger:

Think about it. The clothes you wear, the car you drive, the phone in your pocket – these all say something about you.

Maybe you drive a minivan because you want to be safe and reliable. Maybe you drive a sports car because you were becoming too safe and reliable.

Your job as a marketer is to figure out what kind of mirror your brand is holding, and then position it so the reflection is clear. Show your customers exactly which pieces of themselves you’re offering.

How to connect brand and performance marketing

Lee Joselowitz refuses to accept the idea that marketing should be focused on either brand or performance.

At the end of the day, we’re all performance marketers. If you’re not creating customers and driving sales, you’re not going to last very long. But that doesn't mean you have to go all-in on performance tactics.

Brand storytelling can actually be a vehicle for performance. It helps you stand out from a sea of sameness, which will do good things for performance metrics.

Example: How this DTC brand combines brand and performance marketing

HexClad is a 9-figure DTC cookware brand. As the brand has grown, they’ve invested into marketing channels outside of paid media, like;

• OOH
• Email
• Website
• Retention
• Connected TV

They had specialized teams working on different channels doing great work, but in silos. They wanted to create a more consistent brand experience.

It started with a simple question, “How do we bring one idea to everything?”

What they didn't want was to create fluffy brand-building ads that might get attention but wouldn't acquire customers. Instead, they've been experimenting with brand by building cohesive campaigns for offer cycles.

Here’s their 2024 Mother's day campaign. You can see that each channel (paid, retention, website) is consistent, but doesn't match the others.

Now compare that to their 2025 campaign. Email headers, website pop-ups, paid ads, they’re all using the same message and visuals with some channel-specific tweaks:

How to measure brand marketing

Matt shared that they actually cut spend significantly on Meta this year compared to their 2024 Mother’s Day campaign. They also produced 25 assets instead of 75.

Despite those cuts, the 2025 campaign brought in similar Meta-attributed. On top of that, they saw:

• 23% lift in conversion rate
• 56% increase in add-to-cart
• Average time spent on the collection page jumped 1.5 → 3.5 minutes

These promising results are why HexClad is repeating this tactic now for every offer cycle. Pinning brand moments to sale periods was a safer bet than a purely brand-focused campaign, and it's paid off for them.

You’d be making these assets anyway for BFCM, back to school, whatever sale periods your brand usually targets – why not unify them?

Making a unified campaign for brand and performance marketing

A good unified campaign requires a good unifying idea. You have to ask yourself, what’s a compelling angle that only our brand can say?

For HexClad, they thought about what their brand is. Typical Mother’s Day campaigns for cookware use bright pinks, pastels, and flowers. That doesn’t fit HexClad’s brand at all, so they went for darker, moodier visuals to stand out.

The central idea they came up with was that Moms are more than just Moms, they’re people. They can be sophisticated, have fun, and do things that don’t involve their kids – like having a martini at the end of the day. 

The idea and visuals came together as a challenge to their customers: you can do better than flowers for Mom. They took that idea and built out mood boards for the visuals:

Then they booked a studio, got the shots they needed, and helped in-house teams turn those shots into channel-specific assets. For example, on Meta they kept the proven offer-based language and direct response elements that worked in the past.

These assets rolled out in a cohesive, coordinated way across channels. Overall, the process wasn’t nearly as expensive or complicated as you might think. 

Connecting brand marketing to performance metrics

This was one of the most common questions at the 2025 Creative Strategy Summit. Getting leadership to approve of brand efforts can be hard, but it’s not impossible.

Start small

Matt didn't pitch a $50K campaign. He pitched an under $10K studio shoot handled in-house. It only took one day, and it fed multiple channels.

Scoping out the resources needed also makes the idea less scary by reducing unknowns. If leadership knows the actual cost, they can make a calculated risk rather than blindly agreeing to a potential cost.

Reduce risk

Injecting brand into a performance-focused campaign like a Mother’s Day sale makes it safer to validate the idea. The risk is lower since bottom of funnel ads based on deals and discounts generally convert well either way. 

Make it measurable

Sarah's advice: "If people are really metric-focused, tag your more brand-heavy ads so you can measure how they perform specifically and show that data to prove it's working."

(👀 FWIW This is super easy to do in Motion with manual tags, and it's only going to get easier as AI tagging updates roll out.) 

You can still measure the effect of brand efforts with performance metrics, at least to some extent. Look at the results of the HexClad campaign – add to cart and conversion rate are not fluffy brand metrics!

Flip the risk

Leadership often gets hung up on the risk of investing in brand and forget that not investing in brand is also a risk.

Remember what Mirella said about brand? Without a true brand, you end up in a race to the bottom. You have to offer bigger and more frequent discounts to attract customers, eating into profit and killing margins.

It may actually be riskier to not invest in brand.

Learn more about brand vs performance marketing

The 2025 summit is recorded and available on our Youtube channel if you want to hear more from the speakers about brand vs performance marketing in DTC advertising.