Les Binet and Peter Field: The Long and the Short of It
In their book The Long and the Short of It, Les Binet and Peter Field analyse the IPA’s Databank of 996 campaigns entered into the IPA Effectiveness Awards between 1980 and 2010.
Here’s 8 lessons from the study for those who haven’t yet read the book.
60:40: The IPA data suggests that the optimum balance between brand building and sales activation is around 60:40. Brands should spend around 60% of their budget on brand-building activity and 40% on sales activation.
Emotion: Emotional campaigns produce more brand effects and more business effects than rational ones. Over the longer term, emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to result in top-box profit growth.
Long term: The total number of business effects rises steadily as the campaign length increases. The longer a campaign runs, the more investment has been put behind it and the more time it has to generate effects.
Penetration: Loyalty campaigns targeting existing customers are dramatically less successful in business terms than campaigns aimed at recruiting new ones. In terms of the average number of business effects, the former are almost three times as effective as the latter.
Reach: The most effective and efficient campaigns talk to the whole category. Taking the widest sensible view of the prospect pool is better than tight targeting. The broader the reach, the broader the effects.
Salience: Campaigns that create very large salience effects were almost twice as likely to result in both top-box short-term sales growth and long-term share growth as campaigns that failed to generate this salience.
Share of voice: The most important driver of long-term growth is share of voice (SOV). Most stable brands’ SOV lies close to their market share (SOM). Those that sit above it tend to grow and those that sit below it tend to shrink.
Fame: Fame campaigns (those that get talked about) report the greatest profit growth and report very large improvements on all metrics including sales, share, price sensitivity, loyalty, and penetration.
The book contains much more information on (and statistical support for) all 8 of the above findings. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety.
You can pick yourself up a copy here.