This week has seen the world once again facing the prospect of global recession. Supply chain adjustments and margin pressures have businesses scrutinizing every line item. For marketers, pressure intensifies. Budgets face cuts; the mandate shifts from growth to efficiency and ROI.
Here's why cutting awareness is a missed opportunity:
Cutting Brand Awareness budgets seems easy since it's harder to measure the impact than Direct Response. But it’s also a missed opportunity.
When competitors pull back, ads get cheaper and less crowded (see 2008, 2020). By keeping or even boosting awareness, your brand’s message stands out even more.
Marketing science shows a strong correlation between Share of Voice (SOV) and Share of Market (SOM). Maintaining and growing SOV while competitors shrink creates "Excess" Share of Voice (eSOV). eSOV predicts future market share growth. (Binet & Field, 2013). Our data consistently supports and enables this for brands.
Recessions end. Investing in awareness now builds familiarity that pays dividends later. Kellogg's overtook Post during the Great Depression by doubling advertising. The principle remains: downturns forge leading brands.
But let’s be real. Seizing the SOV opportunity requires selling finance on full-funnel efficiency, especially for demand-capture. Margin pressure means efficiency is essential for survival and growth. Data must support efficiency and provide leading indicators of brand impact, requiring short-term period-on-period and long-term YoY trend data (Les Binet's 'long data').
Cutting budgets isn't strategic; maintaining spend blindly isn't efficient. Understand what works, what’s saturated, and crucially, how awareness drives funnel efficiency. Every single business with future growth ambitions now has this urgent need now to flip the conversation to marketing as investment, not cost. This is going to be a very challenging conversation for those using last-click & MTA, which cannot measure how customers discover brands and products.
Warren Buffett said, "When the tide goes out you see who isn’t wearing pants."
We'll soon see the difference between strategic leaders and the tactical & reactive. While others focus defensively on cost-cutting, you can play offense. With strategic brand building, fueled by ‘long and short’ measurement insights, you can:
The measurement struggle is more real than ever, but so is the potential. It requires courage, strategy, and the right, full-funnel measurement expertise.