How New Balance's CMO Turned Around A 15-Year Decline

A case study in brand marketing for quants

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.

That was until a LinkedIn writing experiment in 2022 that unintentionally created an inbound sales pipeline.

Now as a consultant, I rely almost exclusively on brand marketing—my LinkedIn posts, Podcast, and this Newsletter—to help potential clients find and trust me. It’s not as easily measurable in the short term, but it works—and I have no plans to stop.

My story about a little consulting business you’ve never heard of won’t change your mind about brand marketing.

But, New Balance’s story—how a new CMO came in and turned around a 15-year revenue decline by materially REDUCING direct marketing spend—might.

A 15-Year Decline At New Balance

Everyone assumed New Balance — the “dad shoe”—was finished.

I can’t fathom being in the CMO’s seat at that time.

I was in a head of marketing role where I witnessed a 15 month revenue decline, and the atmosphere there was grim. All but the most optimistic on the team figured it was game over for the business. The idea of turning things around with “brand marketing” was beyond laughable.

New Balance did what many companies do when they’re in a jam. In April 2020, they found a new CMO (Chris Davis).

Chris Davis (source: https://stories.complex.com/new-balance-reinvention/)

And, you guessed it, Chris wanted to turn the company around with brand marketing.

He approached the CEO and asked “are you cool if we swing for the fences, here?”

And the CEO, after seeing nothing work for the last 15 years, agreed.

Chris wanted to revamp how the public viewed New Balance. In his mind being a “dad shoe” was a death sentence that the even best performance marketers couldn’t fix.

Chris Davis’ Radical Brand Bet

He did what many CMOs & CEOs don’t have the stomach for.

He flipped New Balance’s existing marketing mix—70% direct response, 30% brand—to the exact opposite.

In the face of 15 years of revenue decline, and a mandate from the CEO to turn it around, he proposed SCALING DOWN directly asking people to buy shoes.

Instead, he wanted to SCALE UP the public’s opinion about New Balance’s vibe, what they believe in, and ultimately, their opinion on New Balance’s shoes.

In this setup, any quant that proposed scaling back performance channels—paid search, paid social, affiliates, catalogs, etc—in favor of woo woo brand TV commercials and influencer deals would have been laughed out of the room.

But this was Chris. New Balance hired him for a reason. He had a big vision for what the brand could mean to people. And what it could do for its revenues.

Chris tapped into streetwear culture. He convinced cool, high-profile people to wear the shoes. To talk about the shoes. To make the brand and the shoes convey a much bigger message.

(You can read about the gory details here. Warning: it’s a 3800 word article / 20 minute read).

New Balance magazine ad (source: https://stories.complex.com/new-balance-reinvention/)

Waiting For Results: Patience Paid Off

For the first 18 months after the pivot, revenue kept sliding.

Imagine the pressure: skeptical quants snickering, executive eyes on monthly reports, and no immediate payoff. But Chris stayed the course, driven by a vision that brand perception, not short-term conversions, would ultimately drive growth.

As this played out, Chris had his finger on the pulse. He spoke to influencers directly. Customers. People on the streets.

He found enough evidence that things were turning to keep New Balance committed to the bet.

And it worked. Big time.

Their revenues have been up and to the right ever since. (Hear more about New Balance’s turnaround on Alex Hormozi’s Podcast, The Game E793).

Brand Marketing Lessons For Quants

1. Brand marketing benefits take time to materialize

Chris didn’t flip New Balance’s spend from 70% direct response to 70% brand because he liked making TV commercials or signing influencers, he did it because he knew it would sell shoes.

But he also knew it would take time to have an impact. New Balance saw 18 months of revenue decline, after Chris got to work, before the turnaround. Chris knew he had to place the right bets, stay patient, and buy enough time before the data proved him right.

2. Brand marketing amplifies direct response marketing

This is the big lesson for the quants. Brand marketing is performance marketing in disguise, because it improves:

• Click-through rates (higher awareness and recognition)

• Conversion rates (stronger intent)

• Pricing power (customers pay a premium for brands they trust)

• Loyalty (repeat purchases and resistance to competitors)

All of this is directly measurable if you create the right experiments.

3. Nailing the give-to-ask ratio

Brand marketing is “giving”. Whether that be through education, entertainment, inspiration, or some other means.

Performance marketing is “asking”. Typically through direct-response ads.

Studies like Binet and Field’s ‘The Long and the Short of It’ advise a balanced mix—60% brand and 40% direct—to maximize long-term returns.

Alex Hormozi, a GTM influencer, recommends giving 3X more value (brand) than you ask for (direct response). (Fun fact: TV stations still live by the 3:1 give-to-ask ratio when determining how much show vs. commercial content to run).

4. Brand marketing is an art form

A textbook CMO could have come in and noticed that New Balance had a brand (perception) problem. She could have known that their 70% / 30% mix weighted towards performance needed to be flipped. But few could have done what Chris Davis did—create a vision for the new brand, and execute it brilliantly with a team of external influencers.

Brand marketing feels more like art than science, and it’s territory I rarely explore with clients given the “performance” nature of my work.

P.S. - Lessons here inspired by Hormozi’s Podcast, referenced above.

Closing Thoughts

I spend 100% of my professional time with direct response marketers. In that environment, it’s easy to feel like performance media is the only thing that drives revenue.

But, my recent experience building a consulting business has shown me brand marketing can drive revenue, too.

And, reading through New Balance’s story helped see something even more fundamental:

Brand marketing IS performance marketing.

The thing is it looks and feels a little different.

It works on a long time lag, and it’s difficult to measure. It isn’t easily taught or learned, because the number of possible strategies is vast (art not science). And without a solid brand foundation, even the best performance campaigns will under-perform.

That leaves the thoughtful marketer 3 big opportunities:

1. Be more patient than your competitors - the business world operates on a quarterly OKR framework. Build a better marketing program by extending your time horizon.

2. Be more curious than your competitors - most performance marketers I speak with aren’t curious about the impact of brand media on their performance spend. Be more curious and design the right experiments—it could be your hidden advantage.

3. Acknowledge the value of “art” within your program - knowing the right give-to-ask ratio isn’t enough. Collaborating with a team of brand professionals that understand how to deliver the gives could make the difference between a business that flatlines and one that grows for the next 50 years.

Lastly, New Balance’s story helped me internalize the value of brand marketing:

No amount of copy testing, conversion rate optimization, or bid optimization is going to make cool people buy “dad shoes” in increasing volumes, year over year. But, the right amount of brand marketing, done in just the right way, over a long enough period of time, might.

About the author: Carlos Caro is the founder of a New Market Growth, an agency focused on helping fintech lenders generate explosive growth on affiliate marketing channels like Credit Karma, Experian Marketplace, LendingTree, and others.

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