Turning off ads doesn't mean no more orders, if you have a real brand.

There is a simple test that most shop owners hesitate to perform: turn off all advertising for two weeks and observe. If orders nearly disappear, it is not a marketing budget issue. It is a sign that the business is operating without a real brand, only a paid distribution pipeline.

Advertising costs are continuously rising due to structure, not cycles.

Many in the retail industry still view rising advertising costs as a temporary fluctuation. The truth is that the structure of digital platforms is designed to maximize revenue from sellers, not to maximize sellers' profits. As more shops compete for the same display position, the cost per competitive impression will rise, with no natural stopping point.

When floor fees account for 40–45% of revenue and advertising costs continue to rise, sellers' profit margins are fundamentally squeezed from both sides. This is why more and more retail businesses are looking to build their own channels and create a real brand. Not for idealism, but out of necessity.

Strong brands create active demand.

Paid advertising creates stimulated demand: customers do not know you exist until they see a banner. Strong brands create active demand: customers actively seek your name when they have a need. This difference may seem small, but the cost impact is significant. An active search costs almost nothing. A purchased impression has a price.

Byron Sharp, in his research on brand growth at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, points out that brands grow by expanding the number of people who remember them at specific buying moments. That recall does not come from a single ad exposure. It accumulates through consistent touchpoints, real experiences, and well-told stories, then anchors in long-term memory.

A brand is the gut feeling customers have about a product, service, or company, not just a logo or slogan.

Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

That perception cannot be bought with an advertising budget. It is built through consistency over a long enough period.

Why "doing good content" is still not enough to break free from dependence.

A common misconception: if the content is good enough, customers will come on their own. However, good content without clear positioning will not accumulate. Customers will view it and forget, as there is nothing to anchor in their memory other than an interesting piece of content. For a brand to have pull, three things must come together.

• Specific positioning: you are the best choice for whom, in what situation, and for what reason. It’s not about "good quality, reasonable price" because that’s what everyone says.
• Consistent identity assets: colors, typography, imagery, tone of voice, must be distinctive enough to be recognized and consistent enough to accumulate. According to research by Marq and Demand Metric, up to 85% of organizations have an identity system, but only about 30% execute it consistently; that gap is where brand assets leak.
• The operational experience is a commitment: a brand is behavior, according to Wally Olins. If you promise fast delivery but the logistics are chaotic, no design can save that.

Lessons from brands that have tried and failed.

Allbirds is a frequently mentioned example in the D2C (direct-to-consumer) retail space. They raised $39 million, have a clear product story about sustainability, and built a genuine community of supporters. However, when they expanded too quickly and diluted their positioning with too many product lines, their stock value plummeted by over 99% from its peak. It wasn't because they lacked a brand, but because they couldn't maintain consistency while scaling.

In the Vietnamese market, Coolmate is a notable counterexample. They built a structured D2C model with a consistent tone, focusing on a narrow segment of men needing quality basics, and invested in post-purchase experience. The result is a brand with real pull, not solely reliant on advertising budgets for survival.

Budget: a 60/40 ratio and why it works

Les Binet and Peter Field, in their long-term research for the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), analyzed hundreds of campaigns and proposed an approximate ratio of 60% of the budget for long-term brand building and 40% for short-term activation. The reason is that these two types of investments create two different effects and cannot replace each other.

Short-term activation, meaning performance advertising, generates orders today. Building a brand creates conditions for short-term activation to work more effectively tomorrow. Familiar brands have higher conversion rates from ads because customers already have a baseline level of trust. The paradox is that investing in a brand makes performance spending more effective, rather than competing with it.

A common issue in Vietnamese retail is that nearly 90–100% of the budget goes to performance and nearly 0% to brand building. This model can generate short-term revenue, but it does not accumulate anything that can withstand the next increase in platform fees.

A practical starting point for retail businesses.

No one builds a brand with a single decision. However, there are practical starting points that do not require a large budget immediately.

• Measure current active demand: the ratio of direct traffic, brand name searches, and repeat orders are three indicators of what the brand is accumulating beyond advertising.
• Check for consistency: do product images, caption tone, packaging experience, and customer response tell the same story, or is each channel saying something different?
• Narrow before you broaden: a narrow and deep positioning is often more effective than a wide and thin positioning, especially for brands in the early accumulation stage.

A brand is not a solution that you turn off today and see results tomorrow. But it is the only thing that can change the cost structure in the long run. When customers seek you out because they know who you are, every advertising dollar you spend will work more effectively, and each time the platform raises fees will be less dangerous.