60/40 rule

The 60/40 rule is the heuristic that brands are on average most effective spending roughly sixty percent of the communications budget on brand building and forty percent on activation. The number comes from analyses of effectiveness databanks and became influential because it turns an abstract principle into a usable budget split. But it is a median across hundreds of cases, not a law of nature: the optimal ratio shifts with category, price level, purchase cycle and the brand's stage of development. The sensible reading is not sixty-forty as dogma, but as a starting point and a correction for the structural tendency to over-invest in short-term activation because it is easier to measure.

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