Business
"Creativity Makes a Brand the Topic," Says Marcos Braga
The co-founder of Amigos do Mercado analyzes the impact of market share loss and explains why performance marketing alone cannot sustain a brand.
Marcos Braga, co-founder of Amigos do Mercado, discusses the importance of long-term advertising and creativity in brand building. The advertising executive explains how big ideas maximize media investment and highlights the risks of losing market share when cutting communication budgets.
Marcos Braga, CEO and co-founder of Amigos do Mercado, spoke in a conversation with Bruno Gimenes on Marketing - The Podcast about the role of creativity in advertising and the need to maintain brand building beyond performance media. The full episode also covers other topics related to Braga's career and the broader communication ecosystem.
In the video above, Braga and Bruno discuss how advertising investment and continuous positioning sustain companies' long-term relevance.
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Creativity versus performance in capturing public attention
Contrasting media focused solely on immediate conversion with high-impact initiatives, Braga argues that only creativity can insert a brand into consumer conversations. For him, merely pursuing distribution efficiency or clicks does not build connection: "Advertising has the power to bring your brand into conversation circles, right? And only creativity does that—not performance. It's not about finding the most efficient way to distribute your content, reach more people, and get more clicks. It's about becoming the topic of conversation, you know?"
Braga argues that strong creative concepts make media investment more efficient because they eliminate the need for excessive repetition to drive recall. He points to the Burger King campaign featuring fighters Popó and Wanderlei Silva as an example: "Because it's one thing to be exposed to an ad 200 times, right? It's another thing to be reached 20 times a year, but by a killer message, right?"
The cost of losing market share when cutting brand presence
The conversation also touches on the risks established companies face when they slash their communication budgets. Bruno mentions Nike's loss of ground in segments like running and basketball amid the rise of new competitors. Elaborating on this point, Braga details the proportional financial impact of a market downturn, citing Coca-Cola as an example.
According to Braga, reducing investment does not halt sales immediately, but it erodes share and brand recall over time: "No, and I'll tell you more: it won't stop selling, it will just sell 5% less. Do you know how much 5% of Coca-Cola's sales is? It's a massive amount of money. Because it will lose share. It will lose brand recall and so on, right? So the company won't shut down because of that, but what it loses is far greater than what it would have invested in advertising."
Braga emphasizes that even companies without direct rivals today need to keep investing in branding: "That's precisely when you have to build your brand even more, because otherwise someone comes along, catches up with you, and walks right past you."
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