What Role Does Marketing Play in Portfolio Growth for VC and PE Firms?
- Laura Derbyshire
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
Marketing isn’t a cost line. It’s a value-creation lever for investors.
There’s a familiar pattern across growth portfolios.
A company raises a solid round, the product works, the leadership team is highly capable, and the market opportunity is real. But then growth starts to feel a little heavier.
You start noticing that paid channels don't perform as well as they used to, CAC begins to creep upward, and sales cycles lengthen. Boards start asking for efficiency and leadership teams respond by optimising harder - usually through more performance spend, tighter targeting and narrower funnels.
What happens is that at the exact moment a portfolio company needs to expand demand, it often doubles down on harvesting the same audience. This is where marketing stops being tactical and becomes a blind spot in leadership, an oversight, and creates significant risks for investors.
Marketing’s Real Job in Portfolio Growth
Investors need marketing to do three commercially important things:
Increase mental availability
More buyers consider the brand across more buying situations.
Improve performance efficiency
Activation is more effective because trust already exists.
Protect future optionality
New audiences, pricing power, category expansion, and exit narrative.
This is supported by decades of effectiveness research showing that:
Brand investment amplifies short-term performance ROI and long-term profitability.
When brand is neglected, performance ends up doing a job it was never designed for: creating demand from scratch.
The Performance Trap Many Portfolios Fall Into
Most scaleups stall because growth decisions are made out of sequence. The common failure mode looks like this:
More performance spend → diminishing returns → rising CAC → pressure to optimise → narrower targeting → weaker future demand
This is the performance "The ROI Doom Loop".
When investors treat portfolio growth marketing purely as an execution function, this loop becomes invisible until growth slows materially.
Brand Is Not “Long-Term Only”
One of the most persistent myths in boardrooms is that brand is a “later” problem.
In reality, evidence consistently shows:
Brand equity acts as a multiplier on performance effectiveness
Over-investment in short-term activation leads to lower overall returns
The strongest commercial results come from balancing long-term brand building with activation
Brand and performance are not competing budgets - they are parts of the same demand system.
For investors, this matters because brand quality directly affects:
Speed to scale
Sales efficiency
Margin resilience
Strategic credibility at exit
Where Category Entry Points Change the Game
This is where serious advertising strategy becomes a portfolio growth lever.
Category Entry Points (CEPs) describe the moments, triggers and contexts that cause a buyer to enter a category and consider brands.
Instead of asking:“Which channels should we invest in?” Category Entry Points ask: “In which situations do we need to be remembered?”
This is how brands expand their relevance without guessing and reduce reliance on increasingly expensive performance channels. It can be a complete game-changer for scale-up growth, and not everyone is looking at it, so there is huge potential for market dominance and growth.
Category Entry Points in Action: Resilient Scaleup Examples
To bring CEPs to life, it’s useful to look at scaleups that have expanded demand sustainably, not just grown fast.
Octopus Energy
From price switching to everyday energy moments
Octopus Energy didn’t grow by competing solely on tariffs. Its category entry points expanded into:
“When I want a fairer, more transparent energy provider”
“When I care about renewables but want simplicity”
“When energy feels confusing and adversarial”
By anchoring the brand around trust, technology and customer experience - not just price - Octopus increased mental availability in everyday household decisions, supporting both scale and long-term loyalty.
Gymshark
From gymwear to identity and lifestyle moments
Gymshark’s early growth came from fitness communities. Its scale came from broadening relevance.
Key entry points included:
“When I’m committing to a healthier lifestyle”
"When fitness is part of who I am”
“When I want to belong to a community”
By moving beyond product features to identity-driven moments, Gymshark expanded demand without losing focus - a textbook CEP expansion.
Wise
Owning moments of friction in global finance
Wise didn’t position itself as “cheap transfers”.
It focused on moments like:
“When I don’t trust banks to be fair”
“When I’m sending money abroad and want transparency”
“When hidden fees feel unacceptable”
By repeatedly showing up in these moments of frustration, Wise became the default mental choice for international money movement - underpinning long-term growth and trust.
Gousto
From convenience to everyday problem-solving
Gousto expanded beyond recipes by anchoring around:
“When I want to eat better without planning”
“When cooking feels like effort, not enjoyment”
“When I want variety without waste”
These entry points reframed the brand as a solution to daily life friction, not just a subscription - increasing relevance and conversion efficiency.
Notion
From tool to mental model for work
Notion didn’t scale by listing features, it owned moments such as:
“When my tools feel fragmented”
“When my team needs clarity and flexibility”
“When I want to design how I work”
By anchoring around organisational chaos and creative control, Notion expanded from a niche productivity app into a widely adopted work platform = a powerful CEP play in B2B.
Why Category Entry Points Matter to Investors
CEPs are not a marketing tactic, they are a demand-expansion framework.
For investors, they:
Reduce reliance on marginal performance gains
Expand addressable demand without diluting focus
Improve pricing power and margin resilience
Strengthen growth narratives at exit
In short, Category Entry Points help portfolio companies grow outwards, not just harder.
Where OSER Brings an Unfair Advantage
We don’t start with channels or campaigns, we start with a growth diagnosis.
Through senior strategy leadership - including effectiveness and category thinking developed at the highest levels of global growth strategy - OSER helps scaleups and investors:
Identify the real growth stage
Map entry points that actually drive demand
Align brand and performance as one system
Scale intelligently, not reactively
This is how marketing becomes a value-creation lever, not a cost line.
The Questions Investors Should Be Asking Now
If you’re responsible for portfolio growth, here are few additional questions you might want to ask:
Are we expanding demand or over-optimising the same audience?
Do we know which buying situations we need to win next?
Is brand strengthening performance - or being asked to justify itself?
Do leadership teams have senior strategic marketing advisory?
If these answers aren’t clear, then growth risk is likely already building.
When treated strategically, marketing is one of the most powerful levers investors have to unlock sustainable growth, protect margin, and strengthen exit narratives.
If you’re an investor, board member or scaleup leader looking to unlock smarter growth across your portfolio, book a strategic growth conversation with OSER.
FAQs
Do VC and PE firms really need to care about marketing?
Yes. Marketing shapes demand, pricing power, sales efficiency and long-term valuation.
Is brand investment only long-term?
No. Evidence shows that brand investment improves short-term performance and long-term growth.
What’s the fastest way to unlock scale-up growth?
Clarity on growth stage, clear category entry points, and aligned brand + performance execution.
