Ask most insurance or financial services marketing teams where their budget goes and the answer tends to be the same: demand generation, lead capture and pipeline activity. The things that produce a number at the end of the quarter and give you something to show in the board pack. It’s understandable, but it’s also quietly expensive.

Only 5% of B2B buyers are in the market at any given time, which means demand-focused strategies, however well executed, are competing over a tiny slice of the available audience while the other 95% form views, build shortlists and develop preferences entirely without your influence. By the time that majority is ready to buy, the brands they consider are largely already decided.

The shortlist problem

Research by 6Sense found that 80-90% of B2B buyers have a preferred vendor in mind before they begin formal evaluation, 90% of those buyers ultimately select from their initial shortlist, and the first-ranked vendor wins approximately 80% of the time.

That’s not a demand generation problem, it’s a brand problem. If you’re not on the shortlist before the brief is written, targeted outreach won’t reliably get you there. You’re not losing at the bottom of the funnel; you’re losing before it exists.

In commercial insurance and specialty lines, where broker relationships and market reputation carry considerable weight, this dynamic is especially pronounced. A managing agent or capacity provider that has invested consistently in brand presence, through thought leadership, event visibility and a clear point of view, is far more likely to be in the conversation when a broker is placing a complex risk than one that has relied solely on relationship management and inbound enquiries.

Where the money is going instead

Most FS marketing budgets tell a different story to the research. According to BenchmarkIt’s 2026 Brand vs Demand Benchmarks Report, 70% of marketing budgets currently go to demand generation while just 25% goes to brand building. When marketing executives were asked what the right split should be, they said the ideal is 50% brand to 40% demand, with the remainder allocated to other activity – a significant gap between what they know to be right and what they’re actually doing.

The pressure to prioritise demand is understandable. Brand investment is harder to attribute in the short term, CFOs want conversion data, and quarterly targets don’t reward the managing director whose consistent LinkedIn presence means three brokers put them on a shortlist 18 months from now. But the cost of under-investing in brand compounds over time. Firms that focus exclusively on demand generation find themselves spending more each cycle to reach buyers who don’t recognise them and starting every new business year from scratch.

What good brand investment looks like in insurance

Brand building in FS doesn’t mean expensive advertising or abstract positioning exercises. In practice it tends to look like a series of lower-cost, high-consistency activities that accumulate credibility over time.

Consistent thought leadership on issues that genuinely matter to your audience, whether that’s regulatory shifts, emerging risk categories or changing broker expectations, positions your firm as a source of informed perspective rather than just another provider. In a sector where trust is the foundation of every transaction, that positioning does real commercial work.

Sector event presence done well, is another form of brand building that FS tends to undervalue. BIBA, the London Market events calendar and specialist roundtables are not just networking opportunities; they’re brand touchpoints that shape how your firm is perceived by the people who will eventually brief or select you. And the website remains a brand asset most FS firms are dramatically underusing. In a market where buyers complete the majority of their evaluation before speaking to anyone, how your firm presents itself online is often the deciding factor in whether you make the shortlist at all.

The measurement problem is solvable

The most common objection to brand investment is that it’s hard to measure and it’s true that brand building produces softer signals than a demand gen campaign. But brand impact is measurable; it just requires different metrics. Share of voice in your target market, branded search volume, spontaneous recall in buyer surveys and pipeline velocity for accounts with meaningful brand exposure all tell a more complete story than MQL volume alone, even if none of them map neatly onto a single revenue figure.

The more fundamental point is that brand and demand are not rivals for the same budget. They serve different parts of the same buyer journey. The 60/40 split, with 60% going to brand and 40% to demand, is the ratio most cited in research as optimal for sustained B2B growth. It is not the ratio most FS firms are running.

Most brands invest in brand. Far fewer commit to it.

The issue in insurance isn’t that brands aren’t spending. Larger players in personal lines invest seriously in brand, and firms of all sizes go through rebrands and refreshes regularly. The problem is what happens next.

Brand investment too often gets treated as a one-and-done exercise. A new visual identity launches, there’s a moment of internal energy, and then the organisation reverts to its default of demand generation, pipeline activity and short-term targets. The brand sits on a style guide page rather than being embedded into how the firm communicates, shows up at events, creates content and builds relationships over time.

Sustained brand building is not a project. It’s a practice. The firms that understand that, and resource it accordingly, are the ones that find themselves on shortlists they didn’t have to chase.

brandformula helps insurance and financial services brands connect, transform, and thrive. Want to talk about where brand investment could be working harder for your firm? Get in touch.