Tracksuit's Michael Rochon breaks down the 15/85 rule, the 60/40 split, and why brand measurement is no longer a guess.

"Why are the CPAs floating up?" 

Michael Rochon asked that question for years without a concrete answer. During his nearly five years in client success at Rokt, so many of his clients — regardless of vertical — would start to see CPAs creep up.  His job was defending ad spend, not brand budgets. Every time a long-running campaign lost efficiency, his team blamed the algorithm or network costs. Their impulse was not to turn to brand. 

Brand has always been hard to measure and even harder to value, but teams can stay ahead by tracking it every month instead of defending it once a year.

Now, as US Head of Growth at Tracksuit, an always-on brand tracking company, Rochon spends his days looking at the data that would have answered his own question years ago. 

He finally has the receipts.

Key Takeaways

• A climbing CPA can be due to a lack of brand investment rather than performance marketing
• Only 15% of buyers are in-market today; brand builds future demand with the other 85%
• Brand data living in the marketing department rarely reaches the people who need it most

The mystery behind the rising CPA

Rochon's team kept running into the same pattern. A campaign would perform well for months, sometimes years, and then the cost per acquisition would start climbing for reasons nobody could name.

"A campaign that had been running for a long time, if they didn't explore some kind of drastic change, the CPAs would float up over time," Rochon says. "We'd be like, what's different? We looked internally. We thought it's our algorithm, it's our network cost, it's this other thing."

The cause had nothing to do with the algorithm. Every one of those campaigns had burned through the customers already close to buying, with no future audience nurtured in advance to replace them. Nobody caught it, because the team wasn't thinking about brand.

We've watched the same pattern play out with brands we've built campaigns for. A channel starts underperforming, and the instinct is to test new creative, tighten targeting, or chase a cheaper platform. Rarely does anyone check whether the brand itself has enough new people who've heard of it.

Brand health used to be nearly impossible to check in real time. Now it isn't, which changes what checking the algorithm should actually mean.

Rules for brands playing the long game

These are four reflections from Rochon, a marketer who used to sit across the table from brand, and now sits on the same side.

Build ahead of demand

Only about 15% of the people who could buy from any brand are actually in the market right now. The other 85% aren't ready yet, but they will be. James Hurman coined that group as future demand, and Rochon thinks most growth-stage brands treat it like an afterthought instead of the main event.

"This is going to run out, and you need to be ready with brand investment, brand point of view, brand dollars before it does," Tracksuit’s US Head of Growth explains, "so that the other 85 percent, when they're ready, already knows about your brand."

That future demand gap widens even further in B2B, where research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute puts active in-market buyers closer to 5 percent at any given time.

Coupons don't build belief

Discounts can move the 15 percent who are already shopping. They can't do much for buyers who don't know the brand exists yet.

"Coupons are great,” he adds, “but consumers aren’t buying a brand they've never heard of because they got a coupon.” That tracks with outside research on how people actually decide: WPP Media found that roughly 84% of purchases go to brands buyers were already biased toward before they started shopping, a bias no discount can manufacture on its own.

Every fast-growing brand eventually hits the same wall: the easy customers run out, and the CFO starts asking hard questions about the discount budget.

We've watched challenger brands hit this wall almost on schedule. The growth curve looks incredible until it flattens, and by then it's too late to start building the brand story that would have kept new customers arriving.

Brand data belongs to more than marketing

Most companies still file brand health as a marketing report, something reviewed once and filed away. Rochon sees a bigger opportunity in getting that data in front of people outside marketing entirely.

"The companies that do it well explain brand health data in terms the broader executive team understands, not just the marketing team.”

We've seen a single data point from brand tracking reshape how a sales team pitches, or where a company sets price, once the right person outside marketing saw it.

Whoever touches the customer owns the brand

Rochon takes the idea one step further. He thinks the people who should own a brand's promise aren't the ones who write it. They're the ones standing in front of customers every day. 

"If you have a brand that touches customers, your client-facing representatives are who need to own it," he says. "Any misalignment between what your brand says and what someone experiences lands with them. So that person needs to know what the company values and what it stands for."

A brand is only as strong as its weakest conversation. That conversation rarely happens in the marketing department.

Where brand measurement goes next

Survey data, social listening, and direct customer feedback already live in separate corners of most companies. Rochon is now working to fold a fourth signal, AI search visibility, into that same picture.

"Right now, those are three separate streams of data," he says. "Pulling them together into one picture of what  people are experiencing and what they tell you, that’s step one."

He also expects brand work to get more inventive as AI takes over the repetitive parts of performance marketing.

"As we free up time and resources on the performance side, brand will get super creative again," Rochon says. "That's the stuff that people will love and remember."

Brand used to be the argument marketing made once a year and hoped would stick. Now it moves by the month and ties straight to decisions the rest of the company actually makes. That kind of visibility is worth building toward, one measured month at a time.

FAQs

What percentage of buyers are actually ready to purchase at any given time?
Research on future demand suggests only about 15 percent of potential buyers are in-market at any moment, with the remaining 85 percent representing future demand a brand needs to build toward.

Why would a well-run performance campaign lose efficiency over time?
A campaign can exhaust the customers already close to buying, and if there's no brand investment building new demand behind it, cost per acquisition creeps up for reasons that look like a targeting or platform problem.

How do companies actually measure brand?
New tools make this easier than it used to be. Platforms like Tracksuit provide always-on measurement across the funnel, and standards like the Care Index give brands a way to benchmark investment against performance. Brand measurement is turning into a baseline expectation for companies, the same way performance tracking already is.

Who should own brand experience inside a company?
According to Michael Rochon, US Head of Growth at Tracksuit, ownership belongs with whoever actually interacts with customers directly, including client-facing representatives, not only the marketing or brand team.