Ecommerce Brand Building: Why Famous DTC Brands Spend Less on Ads

There's a belief in ecommerce that brand building is something you earn the right to do. First you get profitable. Then you scale. Then, once you're doing $10M+ in revenue, maybe you start thinking about brand awareness campaigns.

This sequence is backwards, and the data proves it.

The cost of being unknown

Run this thought experiment. Two DTC skincare brands sell the same product at the same price point. Brand A has been running Meta Ads for three years with a pure direct response approach — discount offers, product-benefit creatives, retargeting loops. Brand B has spent 18 months investing 20% of its budget in brand-building content: YouTube videos, creator partnerships, PR, distinctive visual campaigns that people actually remember.

Both brands now bid on the same Meta audience. Brand A's ad shows up in someone's feed — they've never heard of it. The ad needs to introduce the brand, explain the product, build credibility, and close the sale in a single scroll. Conversion rate: 1.2%.

Brand B's ad shows up. The person has seen Brand B's content before, maybe on YouTube, maybe through a creator they follow, maybe in a PR feature. They recognize the packaging. They know the brand name. The ad only needs to close the sale. Conversion rate: 3.4%.

Same CPM. Same product. Same audience. But Brand B's CPA is a third of Brand A's — not because of better ad creative or smarter bid strategy, but because the audience already knew who they were.

This isn't hypothetical. Airbnb reported a similar pattern when it shifted budget from performance to brand marketing in 2021. Their traffic didn't drop — it shifted from paid to organic and direct. Marketing spend decreased as a percentage of revenue. The brand awareness campaigns were doing what performance campaigns couldn't: creating demand rather than capturing it.

What "brand building" actually means for ecommerce

The ecommerce industry has a definition problem. When most DTC founders hear "brand building," they think about their visual identity: their logo, their color palette, their packaging design, their Shopify theme. That's branding, and it matters, but it's not brand building.

Brand building in the Ehrenberg-Bass / Byron Sharp sense is about two things:

Mental availability — the probability that a buyer thinks of your brand in a buying situation. When someone needs a new moisturizer, does your brand come to mind? If not, you don't exist in that moment, no matter how good your product is.

Physical availability — the ease with which a buyer can find and buy your product. For ecommerce, this means search visibility, marketplace presence, retail distribution if applicable.

Most DTC brands have decent physical availability (they have a website, they might be on Amazon) but almost zero mental availability. Nobody thinks of them unprompted. Every customer acquisition starts from scratch.

Building mental availability requires three things:

1. Reach. Your marketing needs to reach people who are not currently in the market for your product. This is the part that feels wasteful to performance-oriented founders. Why would you spend money reaching people who aren't going to buy today? Because only 5% of your addressable market is "in-market" at any given time (the 95-5 rule, from research by John Dawes at Ehrenberg-Bass). If you only reach the 5%, you're fighting over a tiny pool with every competitor. If you reach the 95% early and consistently, you're the brand they think of when they enter the market.

2. Distinctive assets. Your brand needs to be identifiable without someone reading your name. This means consistent color palettes, typography, packaging shapes, sounds, characters, or visual motifs that your audience learns to associate with you. Liquid Death's tall can. Glossier's pink. Allbirds' wool texture. These are distinctive assets — they make every impression compound instead of starting over.

3. Category entry points. You need to associate your brand with the specific situations, needs, or motivations that trigger a purchase in your category. A protein bar brand that's linked to "afternoon energy crash" in people's minds will be recalled in that moment. A protein bar brand that's linked to "healthy snack" is competing with everything from apples to yogurt. CEPs should be specific and ownable.

The mechanics of fame in a DTC context

Fame doesn't mean viral videos or massive influencer deals. In ecommerce, fame operates at a smaller scale — you need to be famous within your addressable market, not famous generally.

For a DTC apparel brand targeting 25–35-year-old men interested in streetwear, fame means that a meaningful percentage of that audience has heard of you, recognizes your visual identity, and has a positive association. That might be 500,000 people, not 50 million. The absolute scale is small, but within your target audience, you're the brand they think of.

This is achievable without a massive budget. It requires consistent reach within your target audience over months, distinctive creative that people actually remember, and showing up in places where your audience already pays attention (the right creators, the right publications, the right platforms).

When we developed the Heavy Metal Artwear brand campaign, the product was a limited-edition artist-designed apparel line. Heavy Metal Magazine already had decades of built-up brand equity — distinctive visual language, a loyal community, cultural credibility in sci-fi and fantasy. The campaign didn't need to build brand awareness from scratch. It needed to activate existing fame and extend it to a new product category.

The activation campaign used a three-phase structure — tease, drop, aftermath — that treated each piece as a cultural event rather than a product listing. The limited edition framing (666 units per design) created urgency, but the real work was done by the brand positioning: wearing Heavy Metal isn't buying a t-shirt, it's wearing art, exhibiting taste, joining a community.

That positioning wouldn't have been possible for a brand with no existing mental availability. Which is exactly the point: brand equity is what makes marketing mechanics work. Without it, a "limited edition drop" is just a small batch of products nobody cares about.

The measurement problem (and how to solve it)

The reason brand building is underfunded in ecommerce is that it's harder to measure than direct response. You can see yesterday's ROAS. You can't see yesterday's brand awareness.

But "harder to measure" doesn't mean "impossible to measure." Here's what to track:

Branded search volume is the simplest proxy for brand awareness. Go to Google Search Console and look at impressions for queries containing your brand name. If this is growing month-over-month, your brand building is working. This is free, available immediately, and directionally accurate.

Direct traffic in Google Analytics is another signal. People who type your URL directly or have you bookmarked are people who know your brand. Watch the trend, not the absolute number.

Organic social follower growth rate — not vanity follower counts, but the rate at which new people find and follow you without paid promotion. This indicates organic interest.

Blended CAC trend is the number that matters most. If your blended CAC (total marketing spend ÷ total new customers) is declining over time even as you scale spend, brand building is contributing. This is the number that proves the ROI to your CFO.

New customer conversion rate on cold campaigns — if brand awareness is growing, your cold campaign conversion rates should improve over time because fewer of your impressions are truly "cold." Track this monthly.

Share of Search is a proxy for Share of Market. Calculate it by looking at your brand's search volume relative to your competitors' brand search volumes. James Hankins and Les Binet have published extensively on this metric. It's imperfect but directional, and it's free.

None of these metrics give you the certainty of a 7-day attributed ROAS number. That's fine. The brands that insist on measuring everything through last-click attribution are the brands stuck on the treadmill.

What this looks like in practice

A practical budget allocation for a DTC brand doing $1M–$5M in annual revenue:

Take 15–20% of your total marketing budget and allocate it to reach-optimized, brand-building activities. This can include video-first Meta and TikTok campaigns optimized for ThruPlay or video views (not conversions), YouTube pre-roll and Shorts, creator partnerships where the goal is reach and association, PR outreach to relevant publications, and community building (events, user-generated content programs, ambassador networks).

The remaining 80–85% stays in performance: Google Shopping, PMax, conversion-optimized Meta campaigns, email/SMS, retargeting. But the performance campaigns will work harder over time because the brand campaigns are pre-heating the audience.

This is not a binary switch. You don't stop running conversion campaigns to "do brand." You run both, because they compound. The brand layer makes the performance layer more efficient, and the performance layer generates revenue that funds the brand layer.

The competitive gap

Search Google for "ecommerce brand building." The results are thin. Most content that ranks for this query is about visual branding — logo design, brand guidelines, Shopify theme selection. There is almost no content about applying Ehrenberg-Bass-style brand building to DTC ecommerce.

This is a gap in the market, not just for content but for services. The ecommerce agency landscape is dominated by performance shops. Agencies like Common Thread Collective, Structured Social, and Pilothouse are excellent at managing ad accounts. They optimize ROAS, manage feeds, run creative testing programs. But none of them offer the strategic layer that addresses why CAC keeps rising.

That's the position we occupy at based.marketing. The brand strategy work — positioning, CEP mapping, distinctive asset development, fame-first media planning — comes before the performance work. Not instead of it. Before it. Because the strategy is what makes the tactics efficient.

Where to go from here

If you've read this far and you recognize the treadmill problem in your own business, start here:

Audit your branded search volume in Google Search Console. If it's flat or declining while your ad spend is increasing, your current strategy is extracting demand without creating it.

Read our ecommerce marketing strategy guide for the complete framework, including channel-by-channel execution and measurement setup.

If the brand-building principles here resonate and you're looking for the B2B equivalent, our B2B Brand Building guide covers the same territory with B2B-specific applications.

And if you want to talk about applying this to your brand specifically — send us your brief.

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