Your marketing money has two jobs. The Hum is brand communication: one consistent presence, running all year. The Pulse is sales and acquisition advertising: loud bursts, tied to moments. Most budgets fund one and starve the other. Hum & Pulse is how we run both, on purpose, as one system.
Every dollar you put into communication is doing one of two jobs, and the jobs run on different clocks by design. The mistake isn't choosing one. The mistake is running both on the same rhythm.
Builds who you are in the market's memory: the consistent look, voice and story that make people know you, remember you and trust you before they're ready to buy.
Asks for the sale now: the promotion, the offer, the launch window. It talks to people already in the market and gives them a reason to choose you this week.
This isn't a style preference. The two-job split is one of the most consistently replicated findings in marketing effectiveness research, and three numbers carry most of the argument.
95 : 5. At any given moment, around 95% of your potential buyers are not in the market. Sales ads talk to the gold dots. The hum is how you win the teal ones, so that when their moment comes, yours is the name already in their head. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2021.
The 60/40 benchmark. Across 996 real campaigns spanning thirty years, the businesses that performed best over the long run put roughly 60% of budget into brand and 40% into activation. They grew more, held their prices better and paid less to win each customer. Treat it as a benchmark rather than a law: it flexes by industry and situation, but the direction is consistent. Binet & Field for the IPA, 2013.
Why the split pays. Illustrative, based on the pattern documented by Binet & Field. Activation buys real spikes, but most of that attention is rented by the offer and expires with it. Brand communication compounds like interest: this year's hum makes next year's pulses cheaper, because the person seeing your promotion already knows you and needs far less convincing.
There are real benchmarks, not just feelings. For most established companies, somewhere between 7% and 10% of revenue is the rational starting point. Then adjust for your industry and your position: crowded, consumer-facing categories cost more to be remembered in, and challengers have to out-communicate their size.
Marketing spend as a share of revenue. The banded range is the rational starting point for an established company. A percentage scales to your reality automatically: a BBD $2 million business and a USD $200 million business are being asked the same thing. Sources: Gartner; The CMO Survey; US Small Business Administration.
Let's be honest about how budgets are actually set here, because any regional CFO already knows it: almost nobody sets marketing as a percentage of anything. In most companies the number is last year's number, nudged up or down by how the year is feeling, or simply what's left after every other line has eaten. So the benchmarks above land in this discussion as theory. Treat them as a guide rather than a mandate: they tell you what the rest of the world considers rational, and that this region runs well behind that convention.
The realistic move is smaller, and it has three steps.
Marketing is usually the first thing cut, and the record on that habit is poor. If the choice is genuinely marketing or payroll, make payroll. The problem isn't the survival cut. It's the habitual one: shrinking the budget every year while expecting better results every year.
of the time, executives cut marketing before any other department when budgets tighten. The CMO Survey.
of 4,700 companies studied through three recessions came out stronger. What set them apart: they cut selectively and kept investing in marketing while competitors slashed. Harvard Business Review, 2010.
The deck is stacked against the smart executive. A sales ad produces a report by Friday; brand produces a feeling, and feelings don't survive board meetings. But measurable and valuable are not the same thing. The cost of a neglected brand is measurable too. It just shows up next year, on different lines of the statement: rising advertising costs, growing price pressure, deals that take longer to close, customers who need more convincing every time.
Knowing the research is not the same as running it. Hum & Pulse turns the evidence into an operation: four stages that take a business from "where is the money actually going?" to a marketing year the whole company can see, run and prove.
We map where your marketing dollars and hours went over the last twelve months, sort them into hum and pulse, and show you what your current rhythm is costing.
We set the target: the hum-to-pulse split for your situation, the channels that carry each, and the budget sized against the benchmarks.
The year on one page. The hum activities, the pulse windows and the deadlines that feed them, in a document a board can read.
The calendar runs and the proof discipline runs with it. Pulses report on their own results. The hum reports on its own clock.
A campaign proves itself inside its window. Enquiries, sales, cost per result. If a pulse doesn't pay, the calendar says so quickly.
The cleanest measure is the quiet weeks. If enquiries still come in when nothing is on sale and no campaign is running, that's the brand working. If everything goes silent the moment the ads stop, you've been renting attention.
The Operating Calendar is the hero deliverable: an illustrative year shown here. The hum never breaks; the pulses land where the moments are. When a quarter gets tight, the calendar is what protects the hum from being raided, because a plan the whole business can see is harder to quietly cut.
We'd be interested to hear your thoughts and your own thinking around this: where it matches what you've seen, and where it doesn't. Reach out to discuss further. We'd be happy to chat.
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