Brand = Demand: The Financial Case Your CEO Cannot Ignore

Most CEOs and boards underestimate the financial power of brand until it is too late. But the math shows that brand strength is one of the fastest ways to accelerate revenue and protect margin. Sadly, in B2B, brand is still treated like a four-letter word (I can’t recall who said that). And instead of investing in brand building, it keeps Marketing trapped in the outdated MQL vortex (my term).

But the market has evolved. Buyers have evolved. Marketing must evolve too.

What is brand but another word for trust? 

While as marketing leaders, we all instinctively know that brand equals demand, there’s now actual data that vindicates us: 86% of enterprise buyers end up choosing a vendor or product they were already familiar with before they even started the buying process (from Pavilion 2024 B2B Buying Report). 

But if almost all of your enterprise buyers are choosing from vendors they already know, what does that say about your demand capture strategy?

You cannot capture demand you never created in the first place.

To me, the 86% figure means that most buyers are settling for "the safe choice" by picking the products or suppliers they're most familiar (and comfortable) with. In other words, the brands they trust. So if that's today's reality, then vendors have to adjust away from the incessant focus on demand capture.

The marketing effort must switch to more demand creation, content and thought leadership, and even B2B influencer marketing. All of this leads to stronger brand development and a stronger downstream demand for your products / services when the customer is ready to buy.

Brand equity is dollar equity

But how do you convince your skeptical board that this is the right path? For one thing, stop talking about brand in terms of soft terms like ‘sentiment’ and ‘awareness’ by themselves. Instead frame those points around the dollar impact of your brand equity. 

Why does that work? 

Because brand equity is the dollar value of a brand. It represents how much more people are willing to pay, choose, or advocate for a company's products because of the brand itself, beyond just the product features.

In B2B, brand strength drives three crucial outcomes: higher closed-won rates, faster deal cycles, and stronger price realization. Each directly shapes top-line performance, and that’s something everyone from the CEO to the board understands.

The math behind brand equity

To give you a better idea, let’s quantify this using a model by seeing the impact of brand on win-loss rates, deal cycles and pricing. While these numbers are just theoretical, you can see how different brand positions translate into real financial impact. 

But first, let’s start with some assumptions:

• Average deal size: $250,000

• Annual number of opportunities: 400

• Baseline win rate (neutral brand): 25%

• Baseline sales cycle: 6 months

• Baseline price realization: 100% of listed price

Scenario 1: Brand Drag (5% negative impact) = a weak brand (low recognition and/or poor sentiment) lags competitors and erodes deal outcomes.

Scenario 2: Neutral Brand (no impact) = a recognized but undifferentiated brand performs at baseline.

Scenario 3: Brand Lift (5% positive impact) = a strong brand tilts the playing field.

Here’s how it plays out: 

And this doesn’t even account for other business impacts such as reduced churn, more referrals, etc. (Although there are all kinds of caveats here, including the possibility that competitors are also investing in their brand, diminishing the impact of your efforts.)

Nevertheless, a strong brand (5% lift) delivers 22% more annual revenue than a weak brand (5% drag), which amounts to over $5M annually in this model. And remember, that gap compounds year over year, quietly reshaping the business.

Real-world example of brand as a competitive advantage

To make this point more real, let me give you two real-world examples from the healthcare and life sciences space, which is the world I largely operate in. Edwards Lifesciences (Irvine, CA, USA) and Illumina (San Diego, CA, USA) both show how brand strength directly shapes business outcomes. Edwards' reputation for innovation and clinical excellence in structural heart therapies like TAVR has allowed it to command premium pricing and drive faster clinical adoption globally. Similarly, Illumina’s dominance in genomic sequencing stems not just from technical leadership but from its trusted brand, making it the default choice for researchers and institutions worldwide. In both cases, brand equity translates into real competitive advantage,  accelerating revenue, protecting margins, and making each company's respective market leadership harder for competitors to challenge.

Moreover, when I ran Marketing at Lexitas Pharma Services, we grew brand awareness from 17% to 53% in one year, leading to 194% revenue growth and a ~4x increase in RFPs per quarter. And while lots of credit goes to our strong sales leadership, it would simply not have been possible without building up the brand (our strategy was to take advantage of the strong personal brand of our CEO, but that's a whole separate post for some other day.)

This is why I believe that brand is not a soft metric. It is a measurable driver of revenue outcomes. It wins deals, accelerates revenue, defends pricing power, and protects margins. Companies that treat brand as a competitive advantage unlock opportunities that their rivals leave untapped. 

Hi, I'm Abdul, the healthcare and life sciences marketer, and co-founder of Sirona Marketing. If you need marketing support, let's talk. And if I can't help, I probably know someone who can. 

Disclosures:

1. “What is brand but another word for trust?” is a quote from my former CEO Neil de Crescenzo. 

2. No AI was harmed in the writing of this article. But it was used to help me brainstorm titles, review and strengthen my article, and generated the graphic. The thinking and writing behind the article is my own.