Brand and Performance: Why the Best Strategies Need Both

Travel eSIMs have gone from a niche product to one of the most crowded categories in travel technology. When products begin to look similar, marketers face a different challenge: how do you become the brand travellers remember and trust?

During a fireside chat at Digital Marketing Asia 2026 in Singapore, M&C Saatchi Performance’s Global Business Director, Mila Strokova, spoke with Louis Sim, Global Marketing Lead at Nomad eSIM. The session, “When Performance Meets Preference: Becoming the Traveller’s First Choice,” explored how brand and performance marketing work together to build trust, drive preference, and support long-term growth.

The Product Gets You Considered. The Brand Brings People Back

Mila: eSIMs went from being a relatively new product to a very crowded category incredibly quickly. When everyone can offer connectivity, what actually makes a traveller choose your brand? Is differentiation coming more from the product itself, the brand, or the experience around the product? 

Louis: I think differentiation comes from the whole experience, which is really a combination of product and brand. 

In a crowded category, eSIMs can look very similar. So first, the basics have to be right: connection quality and ease of use. We spent a lot of time getting those right, and I’m glad we did. 

Then we can go beyond the basics: what else are you giving the customer? For us, that means value, rewards and more reasons to come back. 

And that’s where the brand comes in: being consistent in what we do and what we say. Ultimately, the goal is to give customers a better overall experience.

So in a nutshell: the product gets you considered, but the overall experience and brand give people more reasons to come back. 

Why Trust Happens Outside the Funnel

Mila: A lot of performance marketing is about finding people when they’re ready to buy. But travel starts much earlier, destination inspiration, planning, booking, researching. How do you make your brand part of that journey before someone searches “best eSIM for Japan”? 

Louis: I actually think this is a bit of a trick question. 

To be honest, what does “best eSIM” even mean? Some rankings are largely aggregations, and they don’t always tell you what actually makes an eSIM good. 

We marketers love the funnel, but people don’t always move through it that neatly. With eSIMs, someone might buy because there’s a good deal or because a friend recommended it. They can skip a lot of the traditional consideration process. 

So yes, performance helps us capture demand. But trust happens outside the funnel too. 

For us, that goes back to the fundamentals: network selection, network switching and performance testing to give users a reliable connection. That’s what we think a good eSIM should do. 

And people need to hear about your brand, see your brand, and know what you stand for.  The goal is to build familiarity before customers are ready to buy and ensure what the brand promises is consistent with the experience it delivers.

Where Brand and Performance Meet

Mila: Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters. As consumers ourselves, we don’t fall in love with a perfectly executed search campaign, right? It’s usually a great story, a visual, or something that makes us feel something. But as marketers, we’re under constant pressure to deliver quick wins, CPA, ROAS, conversions. Brand building takes longer and is much harder to measure. So how do you find the right balance between driving results today and building a brand that will drive growth tomorrow? 

Louis: Nice question. I think it’s hard, for sure. You need the right people. At Nomad, we deliberately hire both performance people and brand people. And honestly, the difficult part is getting them to work well together. And I think they should actually like working with each other, because they complement each other. 

Performance isn’t just performance. You still need good brand fundamentals and creativity to drive good performance. And brand isn’t just brand either. We still care about whether our brand work actually moves the business. That could be a landing page visit, a download, engagement, or other signals. Even partnerships should have some data behind them. We define what success looks like upfront. 

What I’ve seen in my roles is that when brand and performance stop caring about each other, things start to break down. Performance becomes too focused on the numbers, and brand can become disconnected from the business. And that’s when the magic of marketing disappears. 

So I think the sweet spot is something we have to work towards every day: brand making performance better, and performance making the brand better. 

A/B Testing Should Build Learning, Not Rules

Mila: How do you use A/B testing without falling into the trap of doing more of what already works? 

Louis: I think the trap is assuming that because something won once, it will always win. 

We do A/B messaging tests constantly. Over time, you build a pretty good understanding of what works for a market or a segment or an activation moment. But you know that it wouldn’t work every single time, because context changes: audience, timing, competition, call to action, even where the user’s head space is. 

What I’ve learned is that we use A/B testing to build learning, not rules. If the context changes drastically, or enough that we think it warrants testing again, we test. If it doesn’t, we use what we’ve learned. We want to use what worked, but stay open to finding something better. 

The Difference Between Attention and Brand Building

Mila: Have you ever seen a campaign that was great on paper but you felt wasn’t actually building the brand? 

Louis: If I were to answer, it would be Dumb Ways to Die by Metro Trains Melbourne. It succeeds at gaining a lot of attention and awareness about railway accidents, but it definitely does not build the brand. 

I saw an interesting video about AI recently. An AI robot was arguing with an influencer about her impact. She claims that she drives this amount of reach, followers and engagement, and that she is the most formidable creator. The AI asks: if we took away your handle and your face, and replaced it with someone else, would people remember you? 

That really stuck with me. Same for brands. And I think that’s the trap a lot of brands fall into. We get so focused on getting the message out that we forget to make sure the brand itself is memorable. We’ve all seen ads where you remember the joke, the celebrity, the song or the concept, but when someone asks you, “Which brand was that for?” you have no idea. 

Why Brand and Performance Work Better Together

Throughout the conversation, one theme emerged repeatedly: strong marketing is rarely a choice between brand and performance.

For Louis, sustainable growth comes from bringing the two together. Performance captures demand, while brand creates preference. And in increasingly competitive markets, preference is often what determines who customers choose and return to.

As he put it: “The sweet spot is brand making performance better, and performance making the brand better.”

As customer journeys become more complex, the challenge isn’t choosing between brand and performance, it’s finding ways to make them work together.

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