If performance marketing is built to capture demand, why are so many brands still struggling to find new demand?
That was the big question behind our latest Performance+ Webinar with Affle. Because let’s be honest, there is only so much growth you can squeeze from the same high-intent audience pool before things get crowded, expensive, and a little too familiar.
In this session, Partha Sharma, our India Country Director; Gulrez Alam, CRO, India & Emerging Markets at Affle; and Diya Maria Prabhu, our Global Strategy Manager, unpacked what it takes to find demand earlier, measure it better, and scale it smarter.
Watch the full video here.
Download the webinar deck here.
What’s The New Marketing Reality?
1. Performance Needs Brand: Brands are chasing the same ready-to-buy people again and again. That makes growth harder and media more expensive. To grow, brands need to reach new people and build trust before they are ready to buy.
2. The Funnels are Messy: People don’t discover a brand in one neat journey anymore. They may see it on Instagram, hear about it from a creator, find it on Zomato, search it later, or see it in an AI answer. The journey is messy, so brands need to be easy to remember everywhere.
3. Creative is a System: Too many ads are only built for clicks. But people need a reason to care before they act. Creative needs to show what the brand is, what it stands for, and why it should stay in someone’s mind.
4. Audiences Now Include AI: Discovery is now shaped by platforms, algorithms, and AI tools. So brands need to be clear, consistent, and easy to understand. Not just for people, but for the systems helping people decide.
How do you Respond?
1. Move Beyond Last Click: If brands only optimize for last click, they end up chasing the same people with the same ads. The channel that gets the final click gets all the credit, while the earlier moments that built interest get ignored. Brands need to look at the full journey, not just the last stop.
2. Map Intent, Not Just Channels: Brands often ask, “Which channel should we be on?” when the better question is, “Where does intent show up?” For example, if someone is thinking about lunch, dinner, biryani, or dessert, discovery may not begin on a search engine. It may begin on Blinkit, Zomato, social feeds, creator content, or other daily-use platforms. The opportunity is to show up in more demand moments.
3. Expand Discovery Earlier: To find demand earlier, brands need to move beyond the same retargeting and lookalike pools. This means expanding discovery across the moments where people are forming needs, exploring options, and building preferences, even before they search or convert.
4. Read Broader Signals: Brands need to look at a wider set of signals, including context, behavior, content, time, device, app activity, and repeat engagement. These signals help identify when people are moving closer to intent, even if they have not clicked or converted yet.
5. Measure Differently: Finding demand earlier also means measuring it differently. Alongside conversions and ROAS, brands should track signals like branded search, direct traffic, repeat visits, audience growth, and engagement quality. These metrics help show whether the brand is becoming easier to remember, easier to find, and easier to choose before the final conversion happens.
Demand Creation & Demand Capture
Demand creation is the “planting the seeds” part. It helps more people know, trust, and remember your brand before they are ready to buy. If branded search is going up, that is a good sign people are starting to look for you by name. A search lift study is a simple way to check if your demand is growing over time.
Demand capture is the “picking the fruit” part. It works fast because it focuses on people who already want to buy. But that pool is small, and everyone is chasing it. So over time, competition goes up, CAC rises, and growth becomes harder to squeeze out.
Balancing Brand & Performance
The 60:40 rule is a good place to start, especially when there is not enough data yet. But it is not a rulebook. Some brands may need more performance if people already know them and demand is strong. Newer brands, or brands with products that need more explanation, may need more brand investment first.
The real answer is testing. Try different mixes, channels, creative routes, and frequencies to see what actually moves sales, search, visits, and audience growth. Sometimes showing an ad four times does not do much more than showing it three times. Sometimes, the fourth time is exactly what helps the brand stick.
There is no magic split that works for everyone. The right balance changes with the brand, category, season, goal, and audience. The point is to keep learning what helps you create demand and capture it better.
How to Find Demand as a New Brand?
For a new brand, performance cannot do all the heavy lifting. People need to know you before they choose you. That is why early growth should lean heavily into awareness, familiarity, and recall. A 70–80% focus on brand-building can help people understand who you are, what you offer, and when to think of you.
This matters even more in categories where people compare before buying. Someone may want the product, but still choose a competitor simply because that name feels more familiar. So new brands need to show up through content, creators, social proof, category education, organic visibility, and consistent brand cues across platforms.
Performance still has a role, but more as a testing layer in the early stage. The 20–30% performance split can help test intent through search, paid social, app campaigns, retargeting, and branded search. The goal is not brand or performance. It is to build enough demand so performance has something to capture.
Building Mental Availability
Mental availability simply means being easy to think of when the buying moment arrives. Without it, brands get stuck fighting at the last step, usually with discounts. One brand says 50% off, another says 51%, and suddenly everyone is in a very expensive race to the bottom.
It is not just about awareness. It is about linking the brand to real-life buying moments. If someone is stuck in traffic and their earphones stop working, which headphone brand comes to mind? That is mental availability at work. The more situations people connect your brand with, the more likely they are to choose you when intent shows up.
For new brands, this means building broad recall through video, social, content, and consistent brand cues. For established brands, it means reaching new people and showing up in more relevant moments. In one example, a design app moved from pure performance to a brand-led approach and started attracting higher-value users who better understood the product and were more likely to consider the premium version.
How to Find Demand as an Established Brand?
Established brands usually have demand. The tricky part is that demand often sits in the same old audience pools. So the question is not always, “Do people want us?” It is, “Where is new demand starting to show up?”
That starts with product-market fit. Is the product still solving what today’s consumers need? Or has the brand lost touch with newer audiences, newer occasions, and newer behaviours? Once that is clear, mental availability becomes easier to build because the brand knows which buying moments it needs to show up in.
The next job is to widen the demand base. That means looking beyond core users, metro-heavy audiences, and the same high-performing segments. Established brands need to test adjacent audiences, new geographies, local campaigns, smarter prospecting, and first-party data to spot where new intent may be forming.
And finally, staying relevant matters. Brands like Amazon, Netflix, Hotstar, and Flipkart keep advertising not just for today’s sale, but to stay in people’s minds for tomorrow. Legacy can help, but it cannot do all the work. Growth comes from constantly finding new people, new moments, and new reasons to be chosen.
Finding Demand Before It’s Obvious
1. Look Beyond Late Signals
Demand does not always begin with a search, click, or conversion. By the time those signals appear, the audience is already closer to purchase and more expensive to reach. The bigger opportunity is to identify demand earlier, while people are still forming intent.
2. Read Broader Context
Brands need to look at signals such as app usage, content consumption, time of day, device signals, and behavioural patterns. Travel content can indicate travel intent. Finance app usage can suggest financial planning. Gaming behaviour can point to entertainment demand before a direct search happens.
3. Reach People Earlier
Early signals such as behaviour, content, context, and app usage help brands show up before intent becomes obvious and competitive. Late signals like search, retargeting, and conversions still matter, but they are often more crowded. Finding demand earlier can support cheaper acquisition, stronger audience development, and better recall when the buying moment arrives.
In Summary
Finding demand is no longer just about waiting for people to click, search, or convert. It starts much earlier, in the moments where people begin to notice, remember, and trust a brand. The brands that grow will be the ones that widen the pool, show up before intent becomes obvious, and use performance not just to capture demand, but to understand where the next wave of growth is coming from.
