The case for putting brand awareness at the heart of your media strategy
There's a conversation that happens in almost every marketing meeting across the UK. Someone pulls up a dashboard of cost-per-click data and conversion rates. Someone else asks why the brand isn't growing. And often, nobody connects the two.
It's one of the most expensive mistakes in media planning today; treating advertising purely as a sales tap while neglecting the brand-building work that makes any short-term tactic worth doing in the first place. If nobody knows who you are, no amount of lead generation spend will save you.
In 2013, Les Binet and Peter Field published The Long and the Short of It, drawing on 30 years of IPA Effectiveness Databank data across 996 campaigns. Their central finding: long-term brand effects and short-term activation effects are fundamentally different, and you cannot get one by stacking up the other.
Pricing power and sustained profit growth take years of consistent investment in how people feel about your brand. Worse, discount-led direct response actually increases price sensitivity over time; you're training your audience to only buy from you when there's a deal on.
Binet and Field identified an optimum budget split: 60% brand-building, 40% activation. Brand channels, TV, out-of-home, display, and radio, build the emotional associations and mental availability that make people choose you when the moment to buy arrives. Activation channels convert that latent demand into transactions.
Strip away the brand investment, and the activation spend starts working harder and harder for less and less return. You're fishing in an increasingly empty pool.
In 2007, McDonald's was facing declining visitor traffic. Their response was to put almost their entire budget into short-term promotional activity, value deals, price-led messaging, 100% activation. It wasn't working.
So, in 2008, they restructured. Two promotional strands to drive short-term footfall, two brand-building strands ('trust' and 'favourites') to rebuild emotional connection. Over four years, the proportion spent on brand building grew from zero to 28%.
Sales grew strongly from day one and kept growing as brand investment increased. The econometric modelling showed that the majority of long-term growth came from the brand-building pillars, not the promotions. And crucially, McDonald's still hadn't reached the optimal 60:40 split by the end of the period. More growth was still on the table.
Binet and Field's data show emotional campaigns consistently outperform rational ones over any meaningful time horizon. In the first six months, rational persuasion-led campaigns can edge ahead on direct response, but rational messages are forgotten quickly.
Emotional campaigns build associations that stick, working through what Kahneman calls System 1, the automatic thinking that drives most purchase decisions. Over three or more years, emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to deliver significant profit growth. The most powerful of all are fame campaigns, which work so compellingly that people talk about them. Think John Lewis at Christmas - around four times more efficient than average, and they reduce price sensitivity for years.
Short-term metrics are immediate and easy to report. Brand effects are slower and harder to measure. So budgets follow the available data, not the data that matters most.
If your media plan is heavily weighted toward lead gen with minimal brand investment, you're targeting the same small pool of people who already know you, while competitors build mental availability with everyone else. The brands that win in the long term do both: emotionally resonant brand work that builds fame and trust, supported by smart activation that converts that fame and trust into revenue.
If you want to have a conversation around how we can help you with your planning and strategy please reach out to the BBJ&K team.
The 60:40 rule is a growth strategy, not a constraint.
Sources
1. Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).
2. Binet, L. & Field, P. (2007). Marketing in the Era of Accountability. IPA Databank.
3. McDonald's (2012). IPA Effectiveness Awards Case Study. Available via WARC / ipa.co.uk.
4. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Allen Lane.
5. Heath, R. (2012). Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising. Wiley-Blackwell.
6. Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow. Oxford University Press.
7. IPA Effectiveness Databank. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. www.ipa.co.uk
