The Harvard Warning
A recent Harvard Business Review article revealed a striking trend: over the past decade, many companies have leaned almost entirely on performance marketing while neglecting brand-building. The result? Their growth has stalled or flatlined.
When I read this, I immediately thought about the coaching industry. What’s happening in big consumer brands is exactlywhat I’ve been seeing in our space.
What Performance Marketing Means (Per Harvard)
In Harvard’s definition, performance marketing is all about paying for results — leads, clicks, sales — through direct-response channels like search ads, social media, and affiliate campaigns.
It’s not “bad.” In fact, it can be powerful. But here’s the key Harvard takeaway:
When performance marketing becomes your only strategy, it cannibalizes the foundation of your business.
Every 90 days, cost-per-lead (CPL) fluctuates. Founders’ confidence fluctuates with it. The business becomes a hostage to ad platforms. Companies relying only on performance marketing struggle to attract customers organically or generate strong word-of-mouth. Without brand equity, you’re forever chasing, never attracting. Performance-driven clients often churn faster. They sign up on pain points but aren’t deeply invested in transformation.
When we helped Success Gyan cross ₹100 Crores, it looked like a victory. But when I went back to my hometown, I asked my sister, a Senior Consultant at Deloitte earning ₹25L a year, if she’d heard of Success Gyan. She hadn’t. None of her friends had either.
This is someone with real personal challenges that coaching could solve, yet she never saw a single ad. Why? Because performance marketing only targets who the algorithm thinks is interested. It doesn’t build national presence.
Chamath Never Said This Was the Endgame
Back when Chamath Palihapitiya popularized growth hacking at Facebook, the point of performance marketing was clear: validate ideas fast and cheaply. It was a tool for testing, not a blueprint for building an enduring brand.
Somewhere along the way, founders mistook the scaffolding for the skyscraper. They kept pouring money into ads as if that alone would create national recognition. It hasn’t, and it won’t.
The Growth Ceiling for Coaches
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Covid-era coaches often scaled to ₹10Cr with performance marketing. But breaking that ceiling has proven almost impossible.
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Post-2023 coaches are hitting ~₹3Cr, then stalling. Competition is fierce, differentiation is low, and ads alone can’t carry them further.
Meanwhile, I see coaches with two performance agencies… but no brand strategy, no design partner, no consistent identity. That’s like trying to build a skyscraper on scaffolding.
Why National Brands Don’t Play This Game
Think about Blinkit or Snickers.
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Blinkit’s positioning is: “The last-minute app.” Everyone instantly knows what it does.
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Snickers has hammered the same line for decades: “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” Billions of bars later, it’s still engraved in people’s minds.
These are pain-point messages too, but framed in a way that everyone can understand and remember.
Now ask yourself: if one-minute direct-response ads were truly the secret, why wouldn’t global giants like Snickers or Blinkit just crank those out instead of investing millions in brand campaigns?
If you think these are giants and they could afford to do this, can you think of a new startup brand that you have seen running ads like our industry, other than new coaches!
Here’s a small experiment:
Imagine you walk into a nearby store and ask the shop keeper, what cool drinks you have and he shows you these four cans. Which one would you choose?
It’s pretty difficult right? They all look and feel the same.
So you ask the shopkeeper, whats the difference between these four cans. And he says what the brand says in its marketing. Which one would you choose now?
It still doesn't tell you why you should choose one from the other. It still doesn't make it easy for you, the customer, to choose one.
Heres one more variation and tell me if this is easier for you to choose:
Now it's a cakewalk to choose a cool drink right.
I have always believed that a Marketing team's job is to make it easy for the customer to choose you but the way our industry has been marketing, it's becoming more and more difficult for customers to choose a brand because every coaching brand has the same messaging, runs ads on the same platform and even promising the same outcome, with no brand differentiation in their messaging or their look.
What Harvard Is Really Saying
Harvard doesn’t say ditch performance marketing. It says balance it. Use performance to validate products and generate revenue quickly. But to become nationally recognized, you need something else:
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New KPIs → from CPL to brand awareness, referrals, and recognition.
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New Strategy → brand positioning, not just ad optimization.
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New Mindset → evolution, not repetition of old tactics.
The Shift Coaches Need to Make
If you’re a successful coach today, your next challenge isn’t “more leads.” It’s legacy. Recognition. Category leadership.
Performance marketing got you started. But it won’t make you unforgettable.
It’s time to invest in brand positioning, the space your brand occupies in the minds and hearts of people, relative to everyone else. Consistent messaging. A clear identity. A story people carry forward for you.
That’s how you stop chasing. That’s how you start attracting. And that’s how you go from a successful coaching business… to a nationally recognized brand.
Case Study Here 👉 : https://www.skadooosh.com/pages/case-study-project-superpower
