What is it that makes marketing more effective?

Although there are many answers to this question, the one we focus on today is that of short-and long-term brand investment. This approach is when brands split their investments between short-term product-centric ads that push purchase, and long-term brand building ads that build an identity.

Last week we read about a brand living this two-pronged investment approach: Dove. While the brand’s famously emotional and culturally relevant campaigns are the bricks that built the strong brand we know today, the traditional ads that parallel these disruptive spots are equally as important in this brand equation.  In the article, Mark Ritson goes on to explain that it was these simple, product-focused ads that helped to boost mental availability and salience for the brand’s products.

The ratioed split of long and short-term media investment has potential to take your brand from good to great.

Too little investment in the short-term and your products don’t sell; too little investment in the long-term and your brand holds no purchase power in the absence of live media. While many marketers think you can’t get a long-term response to marketing without a short-term impact, it is just as true the other way around: only with a strong, healthy brand can short-term marketing be effective. In advertising, neither of these routes can be ignored.

When it comes to brand measurement, what’s needed is a system that not only identifies the short- and long-term response, but also includes the interactions between those responses. At Marketscience we have such a system. Specifically, we are able to isolate short-term impact (promotional and campaign) from long-term impact (brand based), thus giving you a more accurate and detailed estimation of media impact.

Although a 60:40 split in investment between long-term and short-term is the general rule of thumb, of course each case is unique and the best ratios may differ brand-to-brand.