Lent, Branding & the Pursuit of Thoughtfulness

This morning, I had breakfast with a dear friend and fellow marketer. We were both hovering somewhere between reflective and restless, the way you get when you're in transition and looking toward the next chapter of your career.

We needed good coffee, great conversation, and something with way too many calories.

When the server came over to take our order, I asked, "Is there any meat in that?" I'm not Catholic. I'm Protestant, so giving up meat on Fridays during Lent isn't required, but it is something I try to do. This ritual is personal, and it's less about sacrifice than a deliberate act of thoughtfulness. How can I be more intentional for one day of the week during one short season of the year?

That question kicked off a conversation that lasted through many coffee refills and landed us between honest and uncomfortable, talking about the importance of branding.

Conviction Over Metrics

How did a conversation about giving up something for Lent lead to a conversation about giving up branding?

Branding is undeniably the hardest marketing activity to measure, and because it's hard to measure, it's often interpreted as not working. So, in a weird Lenten segue, we asked ourselves if we should give up a branding program like I’m giving up meat on Fridays. Intentionally and thoughtfully.

Gulp.

The pace of marketing makes considering giving something up feel impossible. We all want more. More content. More video. More channels. More campaigns layered on top of campaigns. More leads. More events. More advertising. More, more, more.

But branding has a catch. The pressure to prove marketing's value in real time has pushed teams toward what's measurable and often at the expense of what's meaningful. A paid campaign can show you cost per click by morning. But brand awareness doesn't work that way. Trust doesn't work that way. The kind of familiarity that makes a prospect choose you doesn't show up in typical reporting, but branding is real, and it drives revenue.

The problem is that branding works on a timeline that many organizations aren't structured to honor. Quarterly reviews, annual budgets, and leadership teams trained to ask "what did marketing generate this month" are all built around immediacy. Brand building is not immediate. It's cumulative. And when you measure something cumulative against an immediate benchmark, it will always look like it's failing.

Give Branding Time

Protecting a branding program takes more than budget: it takes conviction. The ability to say, with confidence, that the work is doing something even when you can't yet draw a straight line to revenue.

That conviction is earned through patience and observation, not through another attribution model. It means tracking brand health metrics like awareness, preference, and share of voice alongside your performance numbers, and treating them as a separate story worth reading carefully. It means giving a campaign enough runway to build something before you pull it and redirect the spend. It means resisting the instinct to add more before you understand what the current effort is doing.

Most of all, it means agreeing internally on what you're trying to build, not just what you're trying to generate this quarter.

The Part Worth Sitting With

My friend and I left that diner with more questions than answers, which felt right for a conversation that started with a question about breakfast meat. But we do know we'll keep making the case for it, because the cost of losing that argument shows up later in ways that are hard to ignore, including thinner pipelines, longer sales cycles, and loss to the competition.

Lent isn't about resolution. It's about creating conditions to see more honestly, to notice what you've been rushing past, and to ask whether something deserves more of your attention before you pile the next thing on top of it.

Branding deserves that attention. Not because it's soft or philosophical, but because it is the foundation that makes everything else work harder. The brand that shows up consistently, patiently, and with a clear point of view doesn't need to shout. It gets remembered. And in a market where everyone is adding more, staying the course is its own competitive advantage.

What would you give yourself permission to tend to this season, even if you couldn’t measure it by next Friday?