The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies

This publication is the eagerly anticipated update of Marketing in the Era of Accountability, examining the impact of timescales of effect, exploring the tension between long and short-term strategies for brands and businesses as well as providing evidence-based recommendations on how best to approach investment in advertising. Les Binet and Peter Field return to explore a vital new area: how campaign results develop over time. This report focuses on a growing tension that exists between short-term response activity and long-term brand-building. Increasingly, there is a tendency to use very short-term online metrics as primary performance measures and this has dangerous implications for long-term success. Anyone involved in the complex world of multi-channel campaign development and evaluation needs to have a clear understanding of how short-term and long-term effects are different.