Ratio
Brand-building "long" messaging and conversion-focused "short" messaging differ are materially different from each other, and have to be balanced appropriately for the brand to maximize effectiveness.
"Brand building dominates long-term growth and involves the creation of memory structures that prime consumers to want to choose the brand. This priming effect also improves pricing power and so, over time, has a strong impact on profitability. Sales activation dominates short-term sales uplifts and involves behavioural prompts that nudge consumers to want to buy now: promotional messages, seasonal or other occasion-related prompts and minor new product news are the main messages used. They are focused on a particular behavioural response that may involve an intermediate response action, such as clicking a web link. They have little effect on long-term growth and pricing power, so their impact on profitability is modest at best, but they can produce powerful short-term sales spikes." — [[The Long and Short of it.pdf]]
"~60:40 split between brand-building (emotional, future demand) and activation (rational, current demand); the objective is to achieve equal share of voice within brand and activation" — [[The Long and Short of it.pdf]]
"In this latest analysis we observe that the all-context “60:40”rule sweet-spot is in fact 62:38 brand:activation" — Effectiveness in Context
"While emotional campaigns are more effective in generating long-term business effects, rational campaigns can still produce powerful short-term sales effects." — [[The Long and Short of it.pdf]]
"The optimal ratio between brand-building and activation activity varies by brand life-stage/size—activation more important in the first year, then brand increasingly more important." — [[The Long and Short of it.pdf]]
"Campaigns that try to focus on both the "long" (brand-building) and the "short" (sales activation) generally produce fewer business effects than a combination of campaigns that are partitioned" — Binet & Field via Can you achieve long and short at the same time?
"Only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market to buy right now, emphasizing the importance of long-term marketing strategies to influence future buyers, not just current buyers" — The 95,5 rule is the new 60,40 rule
"ROAS metrics are wrong and shouldn’t be used for budget decisions... in a published Analytic Partners ROI Genome report, we quantified that 35 cents of opportunity is lost for every $1 spent when prioritizing budget decisions from these siloed metrics and measurement approaches." — Marketing Truth 1, Effectiveness is as important as efficiency
"Disposable income falls in a recession, but brand-building is about securing a share of future spending by building attention. When recessions turn into recoveries, history shows that it’s the brands who don’t “go dark” who recover faster and stronger." — Mark Ritson
"By sticking to a years-long strategy that saw it shift away from promotion-led marketing towards brand-building, frozen food brand McCain successfully boosted its image, reduced price sensitivity and increased sales and profits." — How brand and advertising reduced price elasticity for McCain
"There is a 'performance penalty', where overinvesting in performance advertising reduces revenue returns in the range of 20-50%... Shifting from a performance-focused to a more balanced advertising portfolio can lift overall revenue returns by 25-100%, with a median uplift of 90%" — The Multiplier Effect
"Only 12% of the best short-term ads deliver in the long-term" — The Multiplier Effect
"Strong brand and activation effects (Fig 10). Brand building is essential for effectiveness, but strong activation effects are also needed for maximum effectiveness. Similarly, whilst brand building is essential for ESOV Efficiency, strong activation effects are also needed for maximum efficiency." — Effectiveness in Context
"The optimum balance of brand building to sales activation for online brands is rather higher than for offline brands" — Effectiveness in Context
"Although we have seen high-consideration purchases grow from 41% to 65% of brands over the digital era, this has been entirely driven by growing levels of rational consideration in purchasing. Primarily emotional purchases have fallen from 48% to 34% of brands. On balance this is likely to have made brand building more difficult and therefore brand building needs an increased optimum budget allocation." — Effectiveness in Context
"Purchase intent is a spectrum, not a binary condition. There are people who are genuinely interested while being unsure if that interest warrants further action – the commercialized/capitalistic version of the mythical undecided voter." — A Better Way To Think About the 95-5 Rule