The Research That Settled the Debate
Les Binet and Peter Field's work for the IPA, drawing on decades of effectiveness award data, found a consistent pattern: marketing investment split roughly 60% to long-term brand-building and 40% to short-term sales activation produced the strongest long-run commercial results. The exact ratio varies by category, business stage, and buying cycle, but the principle is robust. Brands that under-invest in long-term brand work to chase short-term performance eventually run out of pricing power, organic demand, and the kind of mental availability that makes performance marketing cheap.
The finding sounds obvious in the abstract and is constantly violated in practice. The reason is institutional, not intellectual. Performance metrics report weekly. Brand metrics compound over years. The quarterly review favors whichever line moved this quarter, regardless of what it cost the next ten.
Mental Availability and Distinctive Assets
Byron Sharp's work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reframed brand-building around a simple, hard-to-argue-with idea: brands grow by being thought of by more people, in more buying situations, more of the time. This is mental availability — the probability that your brand comes to mind when a relevant buying need shows up. It's built through consistent reach over time, not through brilliant single campaigns or precision targeting.
The companion concept is distinctive brand assets — the colors, characters, sounds, shapes, and verbal cues that let buyers recognize the brand instantly, often before they consciously process the message. The discipline is to identify the assets that already work, codify them, and use them with relentless consistency across every touchpoint over a long period. Most brands fail at this not because they don't have distinctive assets but because every new marketing leader wants to refresh them.
Share of Voice vs Share of Market
The third building block of the long-term framework is share of voice (SOV) — the proportion of category advertising spend that belongs to your brand. The pattern repeated across categories is that brands whose SOV exceeds their share of market (SOM) tend to grow, while brands whose SOV falls below their SOM tend to shrink. The gap between SOV and SOM is called excess share of voice, and it's one of the most reliable predictors of future market share movement that brand measurement offers.
This is a hard sell in environments where the spend question is framed as "what's the attributable return on this campaign." The honest answer is that brand-building spend builds the next several years of demand, most of which won't show up in last-click attribution. The brands that protect their excess SOV through downturns — when competitors retreat and voice gets cheap — tend to come out on the other side with meaningfully larger market share.
