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In this edition:

• Column: How To Build Lasting Brands While Winning In The Short-Term

• Inspiration: Pedro’s Super Bowl Top 3 Ads

Column: How To Build Lasting Brands While Winning In The Short-Term

Over the past few weeks I’ve been revisiting some of Les Binet’s and Peter Field’s work on the long and short term effects of marketing.

It’s quite fascinating to see such massive amounts of data and evidence continuously validate Binet’s and Field’s work from 2013 to this day.

In one their iconic graphs, which also came to be one of the most important ones in the history of marketing, they visually show how simple, yet deeply insightful, their findings were:

Sales activations (or performance marketing) have immediate short-term effects on revenue, but also happen decay away very quickly.

Brand building initiatives, on the other hand, are much more long-term and have large effects on profitability, while decaying much more slowly.

In other words, in the short-term most of the sales you see are driven by activations, whereas in the long-term most of the profit comes from brand-building.

This isn’t to say that you should only do brand-building OR sales activations — in fact, you need to do both.

Sales Activations vs Brand Building

Before we get into what’s the optimal ratio of short vs long-term initiatives brands should invest in, let’s dig a little deeper into the different ingredients from each.

Sales activations, by definition, need to activate buyers that are currently in the market to purchase. This means that:

• It requires much more tighter targeting to find those buyers;

• It needs to engage the intellect and communicate benefits rationally;

• And it requires some sort of response mechanism to complete the sale.

On the other hand, brand-building initiatives, which drive results in the long-term, require you to talk to buyers whom might buy from you in 2 to 3 years from now. So, you need to:

• Have much broader reach to cover a larger section of the market that’s outside of the “bottom of the funnel”;

• Engage their emotions with much more humanly relevant and universal truths that speak to people more generally;

• And finally, it needs to be memorable so it can create lasting memories that might influence sales in the long-term.

In other words, these are very distinct types of communication that, when used effectively, complement each other and drive marketing effectiveness.

The Optimal Ratio

Les Binet’s research based on thousands of data points suggest that the optimal ratio between long-term brand-building and short-term sales activation is about 60:40.

While this ratio might vary depending on category and life-stage of a brand, what the he’s observed recently with the emergence of a digital economy is that sales activations are becoming much more efficient.

This means that, as activations become more efficient, they require less budget. Therefore, the optimal split is shifting away from sales activation and toward brand-building.

So, in a digital age, brand building initiatives have become more important than ever. Brands that understand this simple insight have an upper hand over their competitors — while they’re wasting away money on driving short-term sales, you’re building long-term profitability, which in volatile times like ours serve as an insurance against downturns and keep customers loyal to your brand.

The Mental Availability Continuum

When long-term brand building becomes the lion’s share of brands’ budgets, it’s important to understand the different levels of “mental availability”.

Mental availability is a term to describe how much space does your brand occupy in customers’ minds. This can be measured a variety of ways (even leveraging share of search queries as a leading indicator of it), but ultimately it’s a crucial determinant of whether people do or don’t buy your brand.

When new brands start out, they’re fighting for awareness. Do people know that we exist?

As brands grow their mental availability, they begin building more salience (people know who you are or have heard of you).

Until eventually, if done consistently over time, your brand reaches fame status.

Fame is interesting because it gets people talking about your marketing, effectively creating an army of advocates that are essentially constantly “selling” your products to their personal influence.

In other words, the more mental availability, or share of mind, your brand has the bigger the returns you’ll experience with your marketing.

Just Do It

Let’s look at a classic example of this 60:40 ratio in action.

Nike spent much of the 90s building its brand with campaigns like “Just Do It”. They started out with a deeply human insight that everyone is an athlete when excuses are thrown out the window.

This effectively put the swoosh on the map because people could relate to this campaign. It rung true with almost everyone, and made it memorable through a combination of effective creative features (music, comedic relief, unfolding scene, sense of place, etc.) that left a lasting impression in consumers’ minds.

But they didn’t stop there.

They kept hammering at this insight from all sorts of angles — they sponsored Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and several other famous athletes to bring to life the mentality of “Just Do It”.

Over time, Nike became a household name because it consistently reminded people of why they exist. It carved out a share of consumers’ minds unlike any of its competitors.

But they also had to drive sales in the short-term to keep the lights on. This meant that they needed to have news to share and get people excited about them.

By tapping into the brand equity they had built over the long-term they were able to drive immediate sales through informative product innovations and seasonal offers by targeting “warm leads” and people that were in the market for new shoes.

As you can see, this one-two punch between sales activation and brand-building is how epic brands grow over time.

While the concept sounds simple, in practice it requires strategic insights that are true to your brand and memorable creative that will yield the large effects one desires.

Inspiration: Pedro’s Super Bowl Top 3 Ads

It's really tough to judge other people's ads when you know how hard they've worked to get there. Customers are the only true critics in our arena.

Everyone involved with Super Bowl marketing should pat themselves on the back — you've just done what most marketers only dream of.

I've watched all 59 ads, and "rated" them from 1-10 on USA Today Ad Meter. Safe to say they were all spectacular (with the exception of the political ads and movie trailers... it's just not the place).

But... I only gave three clean 10s:

Doritos Dinamita

By Goodby Silverstein & Partners

Creating iconic characters that leave a mark in culture is incredibly difficult. PepsiCo has already done it once with Mountain Dew's Puppy Monkey Baby (and we can't forget Budweiser's Frogs). But Doritos Dinamita has managed to do it again. Two hilarious characters (Dina and Mita) with enough depth to them that it's hard to believe it was accomplished in under 60s.

Volkswagen

By Johannes Leonardo

For ad nerds like me, VW holds a soft spot in our hearts with the 1959's "Think Small" campaign. But with tonight's ad they've managed to capture their entire history until now with a subtle layer of nostalgia that was chef's kiss. A new chapter has begun for this iconic brand.

Dunkin’

By Artists Equity

They didn't hold back: distinctive accents, cultural references, celebrities, Tom Brady, a jingle, comedy, effective usage of the teaser, a bit of surprise. I mean, was there anything left in the chamber? Not to mention that Dunkin' has one of the most iconic brands in the world - that orange and pink carries some weight (no pun intended).

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • The Marketing Unicorns Redefining Brand Experience

  • The Proven Ingredients of a Memorable Ad

  • Why Data Is Diminishing Marketers’ Ability To Understand Their Audiences

PPA

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.