Dutch advertisers are underinvesting by 20% in brand building

Peter Field mentioned the golden 60/40 rule in his presentation at the tenth Nima Marketing Day. And he gave marketers a stern talking-to. No more boring commercials! Too little branding, too much performance. However, the examples and data were from England. But what’s the situation in the Netherlands? Rob Revet and Martin Leeflang got together to find out.

Over the past three years, Dutch advertisers have invested an average of 40% of their media budget in brand building. In doing so, they are overwhelmingly ignoring the advice of effectiveness expert Peter Field to invest 60% of the budget in brand building. As a result, brands are less effective, which can threaten profitability and possibly even their long-term viability.

In his opening keynote at NIMA Marketing Day, Peter Field issued a stark warning. Marketers are investing too little—and in the wrong ways—in the mental availability of brands. As a result, the effectiveness of marketing is steadily declining. Field’s data and examples come from the United Kingdom. The question is: how does this play out in the Netherlands? Martin Leeflang, director of the research firm Validators, investigated this. Rob Revet, a strategist at the brand consulting firm Mark Stronger, responds to the findings.

Mental readiness determines success

Peter Field, who is internationally known as the “godfather of marketing effectiveness,” has published several studies with Les Binet on the effectiveness of marketing and brands. Their best-known recommendation is that, on average, marketing is most effective when 60% of the marketing budget is spent on brand building and 40% on performance marketing. Many marketers still ignore this optimal ratio, Field stated in his keynote, and continue to prioritize performance marketing. But performance marketing does not reach all buyers, and people remember it only moderately—if at all. As a result, the mental availability of brands decreases, and with it, the effectiveness of marketing.

“Binet and Field provide extensive and convincing support for their theories and recommendations,” says Revet. “That’s why it’s remarkable that many companies don’t adopt these theories. As a result, they focus solely on the small group of buyers who are currently making purchases and forget that there is a much larger group that isn’t planning to buy right now but will do so eventually. And when that group does buy, it’s important that a brand feels familiar and trustworthy and that it’s associated with purchasing motives or needs. That’s mental availability, and it strongly influences people’s preferences and purchases. If you don’t invest enough in that, you’re missing out on commercial opportunities, resulting in a weak brand and weaker business results.”

Gain Deeper Insights with Share of Content

Field logically backs up his recommendations and statements with data and examples from the United Kingdom. The question is whether Dutch marketers and brands are also ignoring his advice en masse. Researchers at Validators investigated this by calculating the Share of Content™ of Dutch brands. A Share of Content analysis does not merely examine total media spending and its distribution across media types, as is done in a Share of Voice analysis. It also examines the purpose for which media are used and the extent to which messages are rational or appeal to emotions. To this end, Validators coded all advertising messages the agency had tested since 2024 using 20 fixed variables. This was used to first determine whether a message had a brand, performance, or recruitment objective. Next, they assessed whether a message was more informative (for example: “yogurt with extra protein”) or appealed to emotions (for example: “feel good and fit all day long”). In total, the database contains over 100,000 coded advertising messages across 15 different industries. This provides an exceptionally clear picture of advertising practices in the Netherlands.

“This approach is actually much more nuanced than Field’s own approach,” Leeflang explains. “He bases the ratio between brand-building and performance on brands’ media spending. TV commercials count toward brand-building, for example, and search and social toward performance. That gets you a long way, but it’s not always accurate. A TV commercial can also drive action, and a social media post can contribute to brand building. With Share of Content™, we look at what is actually being communicated in individual posts. This gives you a clearer understanding of where brands are investing their money. We also have data going back a few years, which allows us to identify trends.”

Dutch brands ignore the 60:40 rule

Analyses by Share of Content™ in the Netherlands show that Field’s warning is well-founded. In virtually all categories surveyed, marketers are spending far more on performance objectives and far less on brand objectives. On average, 60% goes to sales campaigns and 40% to brand campaigns. Spending on labor market communication via mass media was virtually nil.

The only positive exceptions in this analysis are health insurance, with 69% of spending on branding, and other financial services, with 74%. In these categories—for which Binet and Field recommend an 80:20 split—branding investments are adequate. Brands in the food and dairy sectors also spend heavily on brand campaigns in mass media. According to Leeflang, however, it remains to be seen whether this breakdown holds up when all media spending is taken into account: “Spending on retail media is not tracked centrally. If you include those expenditures as well, the percentages might shift slightly.”

Brands are missing out on major opportunities

Dutch brands are overwhelmingly ignoring Binet and Field’s recommendations when they consider not only media spending but also the intended communication goal. “That is, of course, a problem,” says Revet. “It’s not as if Binet and Field’s recommendations came out of nowhere. We’ve known this for more than ten years. Moreover, these analyses show that things are going wrong not only strategically but also tactically. We think we’re investing in our brand by using TV commercials, but we’re actually using them as a sales channel to persuade buyers to make a purchase. That simply doesn’t work—neither for your brand nor for your sales. It’s much smarter to build your brand and thereby improve your performance.”

Field also had a warning for attendees of NIMA Marketing Day: brands seem to have forgotten how to create strong brand advertising. Leeflang: “You can gain insight into that as well through a share-of-content analysis. Sales, for example, relies on a rational approach that can be slightly persuasive. For brand-building, that’s disastrous; emotional communication works better. Our database shows that things often go wrong in this area as well. There’s still plenty of room for improvement there, too.”

Rob Revet & Martin Leeflang

Photo: Tânia Mousinho (Unsplash)

This article was previously published on MarketingTribune on June 26, 2026.