The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies

by Les Binet, Peter Field

This publication is the eagerly anticipated update of Marketing in the Era of Accountability, examining the impact of timescales of effect, exploring the tension between long and short-term strategies for brands and businesses as well as providing evidence-based recommendations on how best to approach investment in advertising. Les Binet and Peter Field return to explore a vital new area: how campaign results develop over time. This report focuses on a growing tension that exists between short-term response activity and long-term brand-building. Increasingly, there is a tendency to use very short-term online metrics as primary performance measures and this has dangerous implications for long-term success. Anyone involved in the complex world of multi-channel campaign development and evaluation needs to have a clear understanding of how short-term and long-term effects are different.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

82 pages, Paperback

Published June 11, 2013

Reviews

[Laura Pugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This extended essay is a clear and insightful piece, expanding on 'The Era of Accountability' to examine in greater depth the elements that produce optimum marketing strategies e.g. brand and activation budget splits, prioritising loyalty or customer acquisition, channel choices. A must-read for advertisers and marketers!

[Will Peart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This must be mandatory reading for all marketers. Dispels myths, confirms common sense and provides evidence of that which is typically very difficult for many marketers to articulate and stand up for... longtermism, the power of emotion, brands and creativity.

[Mantas Gudauskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authors could explain more specifically (best with examples) what they mean with certain features like fame for example.

Other than that it's interesting research study. Coming from performance marketing background, you start to see that bigger branding campaigns gives you lift in CRs, though because it's hard to measure you ignore it.

But what authors suggest is to use econometrics to track those effects. To define what we mean by brand and brand measurement. To agree on important long term metrics and optimize towards those.

[Amanda Skaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Emotional priming has the benefit of amplifying the effects of activation messages …and, by so doing, boosts short-term behavioural responses. This is the basis of the brand response effect. Consumers cannot help but believe better of brands that that they feel emotionally closer to. ”

[Ania · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended to me in work, this book/publication changed the way I perceive marketing and strategies. Hard to start and a lot of data inside, but it is worth it, especially as it dispels myths and provides evidence for doing branding campaigns.

Main takeaways:
1. The campaign effects that occur in the short term are not the same as those that occur over the long term. Although there are no long-term business effects without short-term effects, the reverse is not true: long-term effects are not just the accumulation of short-term effects
2. Recruiting new customers is generally much more effective, especially over the long term thank doing loyalty campaigns for current customers.
3. Fame campaigns still enjoy very broad effectiveness... They are around for times as efficient as other types of campaign

And much more more insights, that would be valuable both for emotional and rational campaigns - in my opinion it should be mandatory reading for marketers and advertisers.

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably one of the best marketing papers I've read. Ever.

I wish someone told me about this paper whilst I was studying marketing at university. It probably would have helped me understand where marketing fits within the wider business context a bit better.

Binet and Field clearly communicate how long-term and short-term marketing strategies can work together, and they outline a suggested approach to divvying up the associated budget.

A few key takeaway I took are:

1. If you're wanting to continue to build brand your brand over the long term, focus on more emotive communications strategies rather than more activation communication strategies.

2. If you're wanting to drive short-term sales, focus on creating communication strategies that use rational or logic in their advertisements.

3. Long-term brand building has a positive effect on sales, however short-term activations does not have a positive effect on brand building over time. Primarily due to people being able to subconsciously remember emotive campaigns rather than rational campaigns in the long run.

I also found it insightful that Binet and Field used Kahneman's theories and applied it to the marketing industry. Having an understanding of behavioural economics or consumer psychology will aid in the creation of media planning.

I'd recommend anyone working in marketing should read this paper.

[Abbi Argos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for all marketers as well as anyone in senior leadership and holding the purse strings for the marketing budget.

While it is highly repetitive and quite long-winded, the gist of the essay is that:
- it’s cheaper to go after new customers than investing in loyalty programmes (those will likely just bring forward purchases that were already going to happen and probably reduce AOV from those customers)
- the best campaigns are hybrid: emotional, “fame” system 1 campaign to deliver long-term brand building over a period of >1 year and a more rational, system 2 activation level campaign running in parallel to support immediate/short term sales
- measurement of brand building activity should take place over at least a year (anything less and it will look like it’s underperformed)
- short term campaigns will have short lived success
- brand growth happens when SOV > SOM so aim to get Extra Share of Voice to grow the brand
- when you’ve got a “fame” campaign, don’t pull back on media investment


To supplement this essay, read How Brands Grow & Thinking, Fast & Slow

[Michael Thomson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise and conclusive empirical study on the effectiveness of long and short-term marketing campaigns on business effects and brand building. This is pretty much a whitepaper on the need for brands to be weary of using short-term sales effects as a north star measure of campaign success. The authors argue, through data gathered by the IPA, the importance of creativity, emotional effects and fame as drivers of long term sales effectiveness, profitability and growth.