By Suzana Lay, Head of Brand Team & Planning Director
The IPA’s recent report Go Big or Go Home proposes a ‘thinking big’ approach to an issue that perplexes many of us – how to unlock real business growth.
With its premise that advertising effectiveness is being undermined by a fixation on short-termism and underinvestment, the report argues that marketers should focus on market share growth, profits and shareholder value.
Fixation on the short-term is something that The Grove has been warning against for years. For SMEs, who make up 90% of the UK’s advertising market, ‘go big’ should not be read simply as an instruction to spend like a large brand; it should be read as a challenge to think beyond short-term efficiency and apply brand-building principles with greater focus, consistency and commercial discipline.
Rather than going or thinking big, which can often be interpreted as a budget argument, we would urge SME advertisers to ‘think smart’, same principles, different application – We’ll pass on the going home part.
The SME growth strategy is balancing demand capture and demand creation
The problem with short-term thinking is that it focuses on your existing customers or those that are actively in-market. It’s all about immediate demand capture. In recent years, we’ve seen advertisers ploughing money into capturing existing demand through search, lead generation, retargeting and performance media. These are all excellent ways to convert sales, but you eventually hit a ceiling if you don’t invest in demand creation, or rather brand building.
Long term growth comes from brand building – attracting the customers of the future. The darlings of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) market learned this the hard way a few years ago when their purely lower funnel, online/social approach started to dry up and they had to invest in traditional media to grow their customer bases.
And, as we’re fast learning, brand building is not just about appealing to wider audiences, it’s also about shaping the signals that increasingly influence digital discovery, from search behaviours and publisher coverage, to reviews and social conversation. It’s not influencing the algorithm directly, but it is influencing the world the algorithm observes.
So, if you’re looking to drive longer term growth, brand advertising is now twice as smart.
AI drives the focus on shorter-term tactics
And while the world of AI discovery on the one hand is necessitating the need for longer term, brand advertising, it’s also offering the – sometimes false – promise of quick, easy returns.
AI is making marketing execution faster than ever. Today, advertisers can generate creative in minutes, launch campaigns at rapid pace, and optimise media automatically. But AI doesn’t answer the fundamental questions of ‘what market position are we building?’, ‘what makes us memorable?’ and ‘what future demand are we creating?’.
The reality is that as tactics become faster, strategy – smart thinking – becomes ever more important.
Media planning is about being in the right places at the right time
Smart thinking in media is often about getting the fundamentals right – showing up in the right places, with the right messaging at the right times in order to drive brand awareness and demand.
Effective media planning is not simply about reaching people, it’s about building positive associations. It’s classic marketing thinking, but the environment in which people encounter a brand, shapes how they perceive it.
This is where media planning – smart thinking – becomes an exercise in building mental availability. The objective is not simply to generate immediate response but to create memory structures that increase the likelihood of being considered in the future. Quality media – print, newspapers, respected online publishers, OOH, TV – are all effective at achieving this.
Growth comes from consistency, not just campaigns
But this effectiveness comes not just from smart thinking, but smart activation. This means being in it for the long game. All too often we see advertisers approaching media in tactical bursts. A campaign is launched; leads are generated and then activity slows until the next campaign cycle begins. This can be very effective in retail, but must be part of a broader, longer-term approach to brand building.
The most successful growth businesses are not always those spending the most. More often, they are the businesses that maintain a consistent presence in the market over time. They continue investing in visibility, brand building and customer relationships even when there is no immediate return to report on a dashboard. Consistency also allows media investment to compound. Brand awareness improves search performance, so it actively supports demand capture.
Think in business outcomes, not media metrics
One of the strongest points from the IPA research is that marketers have become obsessed with measuring what is easy rather than what matters.
This has focused advertisers on short-term media metrics: ROAS, CPC, Cost per lead, CTR and conversion rates. Useful, but incomplete. Growth metrics are: market share, penetration, pricing power, profit and long-term business effects.
Tracking the wrong media metrics will inevitably hamper your efforts at driving business growth. When you track the wrong metrics, you risk spending marketing budget on the wrong media activities. If you’re running a brand awareness campaign, but tracking ROAS, you won’t know if your media spend is driving attention or engagement. You might be getting great returns but are failing to drive brand awareness.
Clearly, smart thinking in media is nothing new. In fact, it’s as old as marketing itself. But as we get tempted – and confused – by the latest shiny tech, and as competition intensifies, it’s all too easy to seek sanctuary in short term gains. This is why staying true to longer term – smart – thinking and (whisper it) traditional, brand building is more critical than ever.
Photo courtesy of Daniel Stiel @Unsplash
