Short-termism is APAC’s most expensive marketing strategy. Walk through any marketing leadership team’s quarterly review right now, and you will see something strange. By most metrics, the numbers are good, the campaigns are working, and the board is satisfied. Yet somewhere underneath all of that, in a corner of the room almost no one wants to look at, the brand is quietly losing definition.
Marketers are doing exactly what they have been told to do, and doing it well. They are hitting the quarter, proving the channel, cutting the slack, defending the spreadsheet. By every measure their CFOs were trained to care about, they are succeeding. And yet, when the CMO Survey looked at where marketing money was actually flowing in 2024, it found that almost 70% of budgets had been redirected to short-term performance tactics, up from 60% the year before – even though the same group of marketers said the optimal balance was a 50:50 split between brand-building and performance. We know better, but we are doing it anyway.
So why does it feel like the brand is disappearing?
None of this is irrational when you look at what marketers across APAC have been handed in 2026. AI is rewriting the rules of who reaches whom, which means every existing playbook is being rebuilt mid-flight. Regional budgets are tighter than they have been in a decade, partly because the global parent had its own budget cut. Geopolitics is making cross-border supply, pricing, and channel mix harder to predict than at any point since the pandemic. And on top of all of it, the planning horizon is no longer the year – for most marketers I speak with across the region, it is the next earnings call.
Faced with that combination, the rational response is to do what shows up in this quarter’s report. You spend on what you can measure, attribute, and put in front of the board without flinching, you move money toward the channel that closed the quarter last time, and you quietly let the slower work slip — the brand-building, the long-arc storytelling and the platforms that compound.
However, postponing brand work for a quarter compounds the costs of not building the brand, leaving many CMOs paying “hidden interest” on a balance most do not even know they are carrying. I call this Brand Debt.
The accounting is not theoretical. Kantar’s BrandZ analysis tracking brand value over a three-year period found that found that brands maintaining equity investment grew brand value by 72%, while those that deprioritised brand-building grew by only 20%. That gap is the interest rate on the debt, and it accrues whether the dashboard is showing it or not.
Like any other debt, you do not see it until you have to. It compounds quietly while you are busy hitting the targets that earned you the right to keep postponing it, and at some point, usually three to four years out, it comes due — in pricing power that has thinned, in CAC that no longer responds to optimisation, in distinctive assets your competitors are now using better than you, and in a brand the next CMO inherits that has stopped meaning anything specific to anyone.
The brands that survive 2026, by every quarter-on-quarter measure that defines survival in 2026, are often the ones building the largest Brand Debt balances. They look healthy on the surface, sometimes for years, and by the time the debt comes due, the conditions that made the debt rational will have changed, the team that made the trade will have moved on, and the cost of repayment will be a multi-year rebuild paid for by someone who was never in the room when the original decision was made.
This is an accounting problem disguised as a marketing one.
So what gets borrowed against, exactly?
The first thing is distinctiveness. Every quarter spent on “what works” tends to converge a brand on the same channels, formats, and creative grammar as everyone else in the category, until by year three the category reads like one paragraph in slightly different fonts, and the descriptions of competing brands in the latest landscape reports could be swapped without anyone noticing.
The second thing is pricing latitude. Brands that have stopped investing in meaningful distinctiveness end up competing on what is comparable, which is to say price, promo, convenience, speed of delivery and so on. While each individual promotion looks like it works, the aggregate effect – accumulated quarter by quarter – is a brand that has trained its customers to wait for the next discount.
The third thing, and this is the one most CFOs miss, is recoverability. A brand carrying low Brand Debt can recover quickly when conditions improve because the underlying assets are still there, while a brand that has been dismantled quarter by quarter has nothing to recover with. When budgets eventually loosen in 2028 or 2029, the rebuild starts from a much lower base than the original, and the cost of getting back is significantly more than the cost of having stayed.
So what does a CMO in emerging markets such as Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand actually do, in the conditions we are in, with the budgets we have?
Three moves are working for the brands that are quietly servicing their Brand Debt while still hitting their numbers.
The first is to audit the next quarterly plan for inheritance. How much of what is in there exists only because last quarter ended, and how much of it is genuine continuation of a longer arc? If the honest answer is that most of it is inherited from the previous cycle, that is Brand Debt accumulating in real time, regardless of how the campaigns are performing in isolation.
The second is to carve out a small, fixed percentage of every quarter’s plan — somewhere between 10 and 15 percent – for work whose payback horizon is longer than the quarter itself. Forget the old 60/40 brand-versus-performance argument from 2019. What we are talking about here is a deliberately small, deliberately protected line that buys you optionality in 2030, whether that is a long-arc creative platform, a codified brand asset, an owned channel, or any infrastructure you keep building rather than rent.
The third is to change what gets reported up. Most APAC marketing dashboards report what happened in the recent quarter and very few report what compounded over the longer horizon. A single line in the monthly review — “this quarter, we built or strengthened X, which will still be working three years from now” — changes the conversation more than any deck or dashboard, because it teaches the rest of the business that brand-building leaves a strong trace, and that trace is a measurable asset.
The math has been clear for some time: WARC’s Multiplier Effect 2025 reports 90% higher ROI for brands that balance long-term brand-building with performance marketing, versus a 40% ROI cut for those who over-rely on performance. Paying down Brand Debt is the higher-yield investment, even if it does not show up on the dashboard until later.
The most expensive marketing strategy in APAC right now is the one that perfectly hits its quarter while quietly running up a Brand Debt that no one is reading – one that even makes overspending cheaper by comparison.
The brands that survive 2030 will be the ones that, in 2026, paid down their debt diligently.
This thought leadership piece is written by Dennis Kam, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of JUNO.
The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT in Marketing 2026, a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for 2026 and beyond.
