"Do more of what works." It's a phrase many marketers hear from sales teams and commercial leaders whenever budgets come under scrutiny. Yet determining exactly what works is rarely straightforward.

On 22 Oct 2026, I attended Cvent CONNECT Europe, Cvent's flagship European conference, which brought together close to 2,000 event and marketing professionals to explore how organisations are using events to build brands, generate demand and drive business growth. Financial Marketing Insights (FMI) had been asked to moderate a panel on the long debated question of Performance Vs Brand - and we had a great line-up: Christoph Woermann, FCIM, Chief Marketing Officer of the Corporate Bank at Deutsche Bank and Myllisa Patterson, Vice President of Demand Generation at Cvent, excellently moderated by FMI’s MarTech Lead, Claire Cordell. While the session began with the familiar question of brand versus performance, it quickly became clear that neither panellist viewed the two disciplines as opposing forces. Instead, both argued that events can play a unique and ever-growingly important role in bringing them together.

The Importance of Brand

To kick things off Christoph was asked to define what a brand actually is, and rejected the idea that branding begins and ends with logos, advertising campaigns or visual identity.

"A logo is what you see. A brand is what you expect," he said.

He went on to describe brand as both the understanding people have before engaging with an organisation and the memory they retain afterwards. Every touchpoint in between, whether digital, physical or human, contributes to closing the gap between those two moments.

This was where events entered the discussion. Rather than viewing events as standalone marketing activities, Christoph positioned them as critical moments within a broader brand journey. Events bring together people, products, information and experiences in a way few other marketing channels can, creating opportunities to reinforce a brand promise and leave a lasting impression.

As he put it, events are "a crucial part of the overall brand journey" because they help organisations deliver on the expectations they have worked so hard to create.

The Importance of Alignment

Reflecting on Deutsche Bank's own brand transformation, Christoph described being asked to take global responsibility for the organisation's brand during a period of significant change. His response was immediate: "I didn't want to be a glorified campaign person."

For Christoph, branding was never simply about launching a new ad campaign. Instead, he argued that effective brands connect purpose, vision, strategy, business goals, culture and customer promise into a coherent whole.

One of the most striking insights came when he discussed internal alignment. Deutsche Bank spent years embedding its refreshed positioning within the organisation before taking it to market. The reasoning was straightforward: if employees do not believe in the brand promise, customers eventually notice the disconnect.

"Culture is behaviours repeated at scale," he observed.

That culture must be reflected consistently, from boardroom decisions to customer interactions - and made explicit to every new starter. External messaging, however polished, cannot compensate for experiences that fail to match expectations. Christoph summarised the challenge with a memorable line: "All of this has to be one handshake."

Measuring What Matters

While Christoph focused on brand transformation and culture, Myllisa approached the discussion from a different angle: measurement.

As a demand generation leader, Myllisa argued that marketers frequently undermine brand-building activity by using the wrong success metrics. "The trap we often fall into," she explained, "is that we say we're going to measure awareness and track awareness, but then we want to look at everything through the lens of how much pipeline we created."

Instead, Myllisa advocated a more disciplined approach in which each stage of the funnel is measured against its own KPIs. At the top of the funnel, the primary question is reach: how many people did we put our message in front of? From there, marketers should assess levels of engagement, identify which audiences are becoming known prospects, and ultimately measure progression towards conversion and revenue. The Cvent team also tracks progression into Marketing Accepted Leads (MALs), providing a clearer view of how effectively attention is being converted into meaningful engagement.

Importantly, she was not arguing against commercial accountability. Her point was that awareness and engagement activities often create value by increasing the likelihood of future conversion. Once someone has had an initial interaction with a brand, they become easier to engage, easier to nurture and more likely to progress through the funnel. That, in turn, improves the efficiency of marketing investment.

By defining success at every stage, organisations can understand both immediate performance and longer-term brand impact without forcing every marketing activity to justify itself through short-term pipeline creation.

Designing Events for Both Brand and Performance

One area where the two panellists appeared closely aligned was the importance of intentional event design.

Myllisa highlighted practical elements that can influence both brand perception and commercial outcomes, from venue layouts and attendee experiences to real-time content distribution and post-event follow-up. Simple features that make an event more accessible or enjoyable can strengthen brand perception while simultaneously increasing engagement levels.

More broadly, she argued that successful event programmes require alignment between brand and demand generation teams long before attendees arrive. Clear primary and secondary objectives help ensure that everyone is working towards the same outcome and using measurement frameworks that reflect those goals.

The discussion suggested that events are uniquely positioned to support multiple objectives simultaneously. A keynote session may increase awareness among one audience segment while generating qualified commercial conversations with another. The challenge is not deciding whether events should deliver brand or performance outcomes, but understanding how different event activities contribute to both.

Rethinking the Event Marketing Curve

One of the most memorable ideas from the discussion came when Christoph challenged the traditional view of the event lifecycle. Many marketers, he suggested, still think of events as a bell curve, with a lengthy build-up, a peak during the event itself and an extended follow-up period afterwards.

In practice, the reality is often far more abrupt, “more of a sharp cliff edge”.

If an organisation waits weeks to publish a carefully crafted event summary, the moment of maximum relevance has already passed. Audiences are most engaged while the event is taking place and immediately afterwards, when discussions, presentations and reactions are still fresh. Rather than treating post-event communications as a lengthy tail, marketers should focus on capturing content in real time and publishing it quickly across digital channels.

The implication is that event content can no longer be an afterthought. The most effective teams arrive with a content strategy already in place, capturing attendee reactions, keynote takeaways, interviews and social content throughout the event and distributing it while the audience is still paying attention.

Summary Takeaways

Although they approached the topic from different perspectives, both panellists arrived at a similar conclusion: brand and performance are not competing priorities. They are different ways of looking at the same customer journey - and events in particular have a unique ability to shape perceptions, create memorable experiences, generate engagement and deliver measurable commercial outcomes simultaneously.

There was an additional context hanging over much of the discussion. Throughout Cvent CONNECT Europe, AI was a recurring theme, with speakers exploring how technology is transforming marketing and event experiences. Yet several conversations also touched on the opposite trend: in an increasingly automated and digital world, people place greater value on genuine human interaction. The appetite for face-to-face meetings, conversations and shared experiences remains remarkably strong.

Perhaps that helps explain why the brand versus performance debate feels less relevant than it once did. Events create something that many digital channels struggle to replicate. They allow people to meet and experience a brand, not just see it.

As organisations increasingly automate customer interactions, in-person events remain one of the few opportunities for genuine human connection. That may make them more important in the age of AI, not less.