Brand Growth Strategies: Empowering and Protecting Your Brand

Nike reports first-quarter earnings on Thursday with its stock near a 12-year low, around $36 and down roughly 43% this year. Consensus is $11.33 billion in revenue and $0.44 a share. The story analysts are telling is about tariffs, China, and a product pipeline that hasn’t yet moved the numbers.

Buried in the last report is a figure almost no one has built a headline around: in the fourth quarter, Nike’s demand creation spending fell 4% to $1.2 billion, “driven by lower brand marketing.”

The conventional read is discipline. CEO Elliott Hill told the Financial Times the restructuring “is taking longer than he’d anticipated,” and a turnaround running late needs cost control. Brand spend is the discretionary line, so trim it. That instinct sounds prudent. It is also the exact reflex that Mark Ritson diagnosed as the root of Nike’s previous strategic mistake.

Every CEO running a stalled recovery should recognize it in the mirror.

Binet and Field Warned Boards About the Line You Can’t See Working

Les Binet and Peter Field’s research for the IPA, the evidence behind The Multiplier Effect, found that brand building and sales activation are complements, and that the most effective consumer marketers weight spend roughly 60/40 toward brand. The reason the ratio erodes is not ignorance. It’s measurement. Activation pays back in the quarter, on a dashboard, with a click attached. Brand building pays back over years, through mental availability that shows up as easier sales at every future moment of purchase. Think of activation as cardio and brand as strength training: one shows on the scale this week, the other raises the metabolic rate of every workout that follows.

Because the quarter can only see one of those, budgets migrate toward it. Nike lived this. In 2024 Ritson wrote that under John Donahoe, marketing shifted from brand enhancing to sales activation, alongside a plan to push digital from 26% to 40% of the business.

He stated that “bad executives take from long to increase short.” Then Hill, in June 2025, raised quarterly marketing 15% to $1.3 billion, saying Nike “pulled the lever we could pull the fastest” to win back its brand voice.

A year later, the same quarter’s spend is down 4%. Nike’s full-year demand creation is still up 1% to $4.8 billion, roughly a tenth of revenue, so this is not a gutting.

What Taking 60% Out of Pinnacle Taught Me About Cuts

When I took 60% out of Pinnacle Global Network’s cost base, the board approved it because the request arrived with a written targeting rationale: which segments we were serving and which we were walking away from.

That document turned a cut into a choice. Every dollar removed traced to a segment we had decided not to chase, and every dollar that stayed traced to one we had.

The discipline that made it defensible was refusing to let the quarter’s scoreboard decide what survived, because in any budget meeting activation wins that argument by default. It shows up with evidence. Brand shows up with a promise.

I watched the opposite dynamic from the agency side at Bolt Goodly, where we built a nine-figure business largely on executing for clients. Under quarterly pressure, clients kept asking us to shift budget from brand to performance because we could prove the performance side in a week.

We were paid on what could be measured in-window, so we were poorly positioned to object with the data we ourselves had built. I stopped treating it as a client problem; it is a measurement-design problem every board inherits: budget flows toward whatever the reporting can see.

Brand Is Capital in Substance and Expense in Form

Here is the position I’d defend. Brand investment is the only major spend a P&L punishes in the year it’s made while it pays out across many. In economic substance, it is capital. In accounting form, it is an expense.

A board that manages it as discretionary expense will systematically cut its own future, especially when the future is what the plan depends on.

A stalled turnaround is the worst moment to make that trade, because a turnaround is itself a long-term effect. Nike’s recovery thesis is a brand thesis: win back the sport, the athletes, the communities.

Its own World Cup “Rip the Script” work reportedly drew over 78 million views against Adidas’s 7.8 million. You cannot fund a brand thesis on an activation budget and then judge it on an activation clock.

To be fair, Nike may be right. Shifting from blockbuster spots to athlete-led community storytelling could be a more efficient way to build the same asset, and the cut may be a reallocation, not a retreat.

I can’t tell from the outside. That is the point. In-quarter, neither can Nike’s board, and neither can yours. The governance answer isn’t a rule about percentages.

It’s that any change to the brand share of the budget should be presented to the board as a change to the ratio, with a stated horizon over which it will be judged, and signed by the CFO and the CMO together.

The Question for Your Next Board Meeting

The first line a board cuts in a stalled turnaround is usually the one the turnaround runs on. Thursday’s print will be a lagging indicator either way; brand effects don’t show up on the schedule earnings do.

So the question worth bringing into your own boardroom this quarter is simple: if your recovery plan is a brand thesis, why is it funded like a promotion?