Long-term brand building is ‘the ultimate strategic BOGOF’

Short-term promotional ads don’t do much for long-term brand building, but long-term brand-building advertising has a significant impact on short-term sales – what Professor Mark Ritson calls ‘the ultimate strategic BOGOF’.

Why it matters

The 60:40 investment rule between brand building and activation first proposed by Les Binet and Peter Field was never meant to be a simplistic either/or, top of the funnel vs bottom of the funnel approach. 

In his regular Marketing Week column, Ritson charts the development of thinking around the pair’s seminal work The Long And The Short Of It and adds his own update, based on data from System1.

He finds an asymmetry between the long and short. The conclusion is that while the short does not deliver the long, the long does deliver the short.

Takeaways 

• Ritson’s Law: Any popular marketing concept will be criticised in direct proportion to the degree to which marketers don’t understand it.

• The better an ad is at building a brand, the more likely it is to also deliver short-term sales (in nine out of 10 cases examined by System1).

• System1 suggests that CMOs reframe campaigns as ‘lasting’ rather than as ‘long’.

Sourced from Marketing Week