Peter Drucker wrote this in his 1973 book on management:
“You have to produce results in the short term. But you also have to produce results in the long term. And the long term is not simply the adding up of short terms.”
Business carries a bias toward short-termism in general, but particularly in marketing and advertising. There’s a fundamental tension between the goals of long-term brand building and short-term sales activation.
The age of digital marketing and measurement helped swing the pendulum even further to pressure marketers into making every piece of communication tied to immediate ROI. This approach can actually jeopardize overall effectiveness.
Ehrenberg-Bass professor John Dawes found that only 5% of B2B customers are actually in the market at any one time, so marketing focused primarily on sales activation misses the bulk of the opportunity.
This echoes the findings of Les Binet and Peter Field in The Long and the Short of It that marketers consider a 60/40 rule in their advertising plans: 60% focused on brand building and 40% on sales activation.
I was struck by this observation from Mark Ritson over the last week:
“You can do both at the same time in an ad but it rarely works well, because you aren’t just trying to satisfy long and short agendas in the same 30 seconds, you are also being both rational and emotional. You are targeting a smaller group and the whole market. You are communicating the overall brand message and a specific product benefit. You are trying to change memory structures and elicit an immediate response. You are aiming for the top of the funnel and the bottom. You are driving your marketing car in fifth gear and reverse at the same time.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
