Brand is the only growth asset that compounds

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Read time: 3 minutes.

Welcome to the 216th edition of The Growth Elements Newsletter. Every Monday and sometimes on Thursday, I write an essay on growth metrics & experiments and business case studies.

Today’s piece is for 8,000+ founders, operators, and leaders from businesses such as Shopify, Google, Hubspot, Zoho, Freshworks, Servcorp, Zomato, Postman, Razorpay and Zoom.

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Every CMO and CGO I speak to this quarter is staring at the same number.

CAC is up 40 to 60 percent in 18 months.

The acquisition motion that built your last three years stopped working.

Brand is the only growth lever still compounding, and your budget does not reflect it.

[1] What happened

AI fragmented attention across 12 surfaces inside 18 months.

Google. ChatGPT. Perplexity. TikTok. LinkedIn. Reddit. YouTube. Apple Intelligence. Brand-specific AI agents. Direct. App stores. Discover.

The cost data tells the same story across categories.

Paid CAC is up 40 to 60 percent across B2B SaaS, DTC, and consumer services.

CPMs are up on Meta, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Cold email reply rates are down 60 percent. Organic search traffic is down 30 to 50 percent.

Every channel got expensive at the same time.

[2] Why it happened

AI made it cheap to compete on every tactical channel. Every brand can publish daily. Every brand can run paid. Every brand can generate personalized outreach at scale.

The tactical differentiator disappeared.

What is left is memory.

When a buyer or an AI agent asks for the best vendor or product in your category, the model surfaces the brands it knows.

The brands it knows are the ones with unaided recall.

The brands with unaided recall are the ones who invested in earned media, founder voice, owned audience, and category authority for the last 24 months.

Performance buys you a session. Brand buys you a seat in the next purchase decision.

[3] What you do about it

Flip the budget. The right brand to performance ratio for most growth-stage companies in 2026 is closer to 50/50, not the 80/20 you inherited from 2022.

Performance still matters, it is just no longer the lead lever.

Invest in three durable assets. Founder-led content with original POV.

An owned newsletter list that grows through value, not paid acquisition.

A category position your team can defend in one sentence inside any AI answer.

Add unaided recall and direct traffic to your monthly board metrics. If they are not on the deck, brand is not actually a strategy in your company.

Final Words

[1] Pull your CAC trend over the last six quarters. Compare it to your branded search trend. The gap between them is the size of your strategy problem.

[2] Reallocate at least 20 percent of next quarter's paid budget to brand investments. Newsletter, podcast, founder content, community building.

[3] Add unaided recall and direct traffic to your board deck this month. If you cannot report them, you cannot fund brand.

That's it for today's article! I hope you found this essay insightful.

Wishing you a productive week ahead!

I always appreciate you reading.

Thanks,
Chintankumar Maisuria