Don’t take shortcuts, focus on the right targets!

In a study made by Kantar called” Getting media right”, only 52% of marketeers believe that they have a good balance between long- and short-term marketing activities. 40% also report using short term sales targets as a measurement for campaign effectiveness. The reason for the short-term sales focus is that it’s easy to measure.  

Taking shortcuts to prove your initiative’s effect can be tempting, but the challenge when exclusively focusing on sales activities is that it only provides a short-term effect on sales and no effect on long-term brand building. Sure, it positively effects short-term sales volume, but it won’t necessarily affect profitability. The risk of only focusing on short-term activities in your marketing plan is that it negatively effects the price elasticity, and that customer demand becomes driven by price instead of preference. 

If you instead focus your marketing plan on a mix of long-term and short-term activities and targets, your long-term activities will also give effect on your short term. If you shift your objectives from salesincrease to profitincrease, it’s proven that the latter will give effect on the former, but the opposite relation will not. The classic illustration from Les Binet and Peter Fields’s “The long and the short of it”, where two lines in a graph visualize this relationship is still very relevant for marketeers.

Illustration from “The long and the short of it” by Les Binet and Peter Fields

Marketeers have everything to gain from shifting focus from short-term efficiency measurements to long term targets for the brand, and at the same time learn more about what parameters that drive the brand and how these develop over time. 

 Learn more about your brand parameter drivers with our smart marketing analysis tool Graviz Telescope!