What happens to your CAC when you add brand investment?

Monthly marketing spend

The total you spend on customer acquisition each month across all channels — paid media, agency fees, production, tools, sponsorships. If you are transitioning from performance-only, use your current total. The calculator holds this constant across the 36-month view; the split between brand and performance is what changes.

If your spend is seasonal (retail Q4 skew, B2B end-of-quarter), use your 12-month average. The J-curve pattern is the same shape; only the absolute customer counts scale.

Current CAC — the performance-only baseline

Blended CAC, not channel-level. Total marketing spend ÷ new customers acquired, across all channels combined. Channel-level CAC (paid search CAC, paid social CAC) is optimised inside a channel; blended CAC is the metric that tells the truth about the system.

Where to find it:

• Your finance system — marketing spend line ÷ new-customer count from CRM
• DTC / e-commerce: Shopify or Amplitude — new-customer cohort ÷ trailing paid spend
• B2B: HubSpot / Salesforce closed-won ÷ demand-gen spend for the same period

Use a 3-month average, not a single month. Single-month CAC is noisy — cohort attribution lag, one-off campaigns, seasonality. The average smooths what the calculator needs to model as a baseline.

Brand-to-performance split — how much to shift

Binet & Field's evidence base (The Long and the Short of It, IPA) points to roughly 60% brand / 40% activation for mature categories with established brands. That is the default here. But the right split depends on where you are:

• Early-stage brand, unknown category: 40–50% brand to start. Below 40% the brand investment is too small to move the needle in a reasonable window.
• Established brand, competitive category: 55–65% brand. This is the Binet & Field range.
• Category leader defending share: 65–75% brand. Mental availability is your moat.
• B2B with long sales cycles: 46% brand per LinkedIn B2B Institute research (John Dawes), slightly below the B2C benchmark because activation lift is proportionally larger over the longer cycle.

The slider is capped at 80% because a 100% brand / 0% performance mix stops being a J-curve and becomes a brand-only bet — a different exercise. Some performance is always required to convert the demand that brand builds.

Category pace — why the J-curve is longer for some businesses

The J-curve has the same shape everywhere. The timing of each phase depends on how long buyers take to enter the market and how frequently they re-enter it.

• FMCG (fast): stall 1–4 months, flywheel 5–12, compound 13+. Buyers cycle through the category weekly or monthly; brand equity reaches them fast.
• DTC & subscription (default): stall 1–6, flywheel 7–15, compound 16+. This is the pace the Lesson 05 worked example uses.
• B2B SaaS: stall 1–9, flywheel 10–24, compound 25+. Contract cycles are 12–36 months; even accounts that saw your brand today won't buy for a year.
• Considered purchase (car, mortgage, enterprise capital equipment): stall 1–12, flywheel 13–30, compound 31+. Buyers cycle every 3–10 years; the compound phase is a two-to-four-year investment horizon.

The calculator plots 36 months for all categories. For B2B SaaS and considered-purchase, the compound phase is only partially visible in the 36-month window — the full effect keeps compressing CAC into year 4 and 5. Frame the CFO conversation to the right horizon for your category.