TL;DR - For 15 years, New Balance watched its revenues decline. Consumers saw its sneakers as “dad shoes”—safe, comfortable, but uncool. Traditional direct-response marketing wasn’t reversing the trend. In April 2020, a new CMO, Chris Davis, arrived with a bold idea: flip the marketing mix from a 70% reliance on direct-response ads to a brand-led approach. It was a big gamble that took nearly 19 months to pay off, but when it did, New Balance emerged as a revitalized global brand.

The Quant Mindset

I spend most of my time around direct marketers. At banks. The vibe here is super clear:

For each $1.00 they spend, they want to generate $1.10, $1.50, or more, in tangible returns. It’s an arbitrage game.

Buy media. Scale winners. Kill losers. Rinse and repeat.

It’s a math game, and it’s tailor made for quants.

Here’s a question I rarely hear from them: “How much of our of budget should we spend on brand marketing?”

The quants leave that question up to the CEO & CMO. For the quants, the brand team is handed a pile of money to spend on TV and magazine ads that may or may not produce any tangible returns.

Here’s what many think but few say:

Brand marketers are cost centers. The company is required to do brand marketing—because the powers that be said so—but it’s not something that actually delivers ROI for the business.

Why Brand Marketing Terrifies Quants

The quants think brand marketing benefits:

1. Are hard to measure

2. Materially lag spend

This makes quants queasy. So they dismiss brand marketing as worthless.

I used to think this way, too.