A short summary about the importance of brands and brand building both generally and more specifically during and after a recessionary climate, such as we are very likely to enter. With an important watch-out around supply and demand.

1. Covid-19
Spending (on brand) through a recessionary climate
April, 2020

2. 2 Havas Media Group UK
These are certainly unprecedented times, with far-
reaching effects on people’s daily lives,
communities and the running of the nation.
Some categories have closed altogether. Some
businesses will be irreparably damaged. Some will
make changes that allow them to stay afloat during
the lockdown and prosper afterwards.
Short-term tactics are vital to keep the lights on.
But longer-term thinking is also critical to give
brands a chance of future success. And there’s a
wealth of insight available to help.
This document provides an overview of those
insights with references to help inform
conversations that you are your teams are having
with clients.
Introduction

3. About this document
The impact of Covid-19 on our daily lives and the wider
economy is unprecedented – certainly during our lifetimes
and recent memory.
However, our understanding about brands and the
importance of brand building both generally and more
specifically during and after a recessionary climate is
extensive.
This document provides a topline summary of some of
the key elements of what we know. It is necessarily light
but hopefully will give teams confidence and ammunition
when talking to clients.
It is split into six sections listed below.
1. Mental availability and its importance
2. The value of brand building
3. The importance of investing in brand building
4. The core components of reach, frequency and
repetition
5. The perils of going dark
6. Consumer expectations here and now

4. A note on the content
As mentioned, the content of this document is necessarily topline. Rest assured there is a wealth of material
available for anyone interested in reading more. The sources give an indication of where to start but further guidance
and direction can be given as appropriate.
Exploring all the different definitions and points of view about what ‘brand’ and ‘brand building’ mean is not the
purpose of this document. However, that topic can be picked up, if there is sufficient interest.
There are lots of reports and articles documenting what brands are doing and suggesting what they should be doing.
There seems little point in adding to that flow at the moment, so this document makes no reference to what specific
brands should be doing. It makes more sense for that to be within the scope of specific client teams.
Finally, I am very mindful that talking about the long-term to clients, who are desperately trying to keep hold
of their jobs and keep their businesses afloat, could be perceived as lacking empathy and understanding.
Please use and communicate this information sensibly and responsibly.

5. And on that final point

6. The critical question: is the challenge one of supply or demand?
Different scenarios will require different strategies:
1. Demand increases, supply is unchanged: higher prices, lower volume > Invest in brand to capitalize on increased
demand and to sustain demand in the long-term
2. Demand decreases, supply is unchanged: lower prices, higher volume > Invest in brand to stimulate demand
3. Supply increases, demand is unchanged: lower prices, higher volume > Invest in brand to stimulate demand
4. Supply decreases, demand is unchanged: higher prices, lower volume > Restrict brand investment to avoid excess
demand and manage challenge of supply
The challenge comes when both supply and demand decrease, as is happening in some categories now. In this
scenario, brand investment should be restricted to avoid the risk of stimulating demand that cannot be met.

7. Sources for reference
Beaumont, ‘5 steps to effective frequency’, Admap
Binet and Field, Marketing in the Era of Accountability, The Long and Short of It,
Media in Focus, Effectiveness in Context
Chappell, ‘The long-term impact of advertising’, Profit Ability
Dixon, Shapiro and Wolf, ‘How to win during and after a recession’
Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society
Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug
Field, ‘Marketing in a Downturn’
Godin, Permission Marketing
GWI, ‘COVID-19 research series 3: multi-market research’
Heath, The Hidden Power of Advertising
IPA, ‘Advertising in a Downturn’
Kantar Webinar, ‘COVID-19 – Impact on Brands’
Kantar Millward Brown, ‘What happens when brands go dark?’
Romaniuk and Sharp, How Brands Grow (Parts 1 and 2)
WARC ‘What happens if I stop advertising?’
WARC, ‘What we know about advertising in a recession’
WARC, ‘What we know about creativity and effectiveness’

8. 1. Mental availability and its importance

9. Our memory for brands
“For a small part of any day, we are buyers of brands and audiences for marketing activities. It’s easy to exaggerate
how long this is but, for most buyers on most days, buying (including thinking about buying) takes up little
time and (ideally) little effort. When we buy, we draw on a subset of our memory to help make each choice. The
thoughts and actions of buying are typically these:
• Instantaneous, without (much) conscious deliberation;
• Influenced by context, which defines which part of memory is triggered;
• Inconsistent, in that today’s retrieved thoughts are not necessarily retrieved tomorrow.
When buying, we search our memory for a reason: which is to identify something to buy, for that situation. […]
Buyers use specific thoughts to access relevant answers. This process is referred to as cued retrieval.”
Source: Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow Part 2

10. Cued retrieval
“What we (easily) think of largely determines what we buy, so what determines what we (easily) think of in a
particular instant? The doorway or cue used to access memory matters, as this determines the possible paths your
thoughts can travel down.
The cues themselves come from the external environment and our internal thoughts, sometimes at the same time. A
stimulated cue first activates brands directly linked in memory.
For managing brands, this means two things are necessary:
1. Knowing what cues buyers use when they think of options to buy;
2. Building strong, fresh links to these cues.
If your brand’s links aren’t strong, then a buyer can retrieve other options (usually your competitors’
brands).”
Source: Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow Part 2

11. Building mental availability
“A brand’s mental availability is its accessibility from memory across a range of situations and needs that buyers in
that category encounter. To be bought, a brand must first be thought of – the breadth (how many) and
strength (how strong) of the brand’s links to relevant cues determine the chance of this happening.”
Source: Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow Part 2

12. Why do people prefer brands that are ‘top of mind’?
“There are a number of possibilities from the literature of psychology and behavioural economics.
1. One is the relation between what psychologists have labelled ‘mere exposure’ and ‘affect’ – or as Robert
Cialdini sums it up in his book Influence, ‘For the most part, we like things that are familiar to us’.
2. The, the so-called ‘availability heuristic’, written about by Daniel Kahneman and others, states that things we
think of first or can picture most vividly are assumed to be most common and important. Applied to brands, this
implies that people assume the brand that comes to mind first is likely to be the biggest and most
popular.
3. And that in turn provides the reassurance that Cialdini labels as ‘social proof’ – we are reassured not just by
our own familiarity with a brand name, but by the assumption that many others also use it.”
Source: Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug

13. 2. The value of brand building

14. Brand building versus sales activation
Source: Binet & Field, Media in Focus
Rational messaging
Physical
availability
Short-term
Targeting
Emotional priming
Mental
availability
Short- & long-term
Broad reach
Sales ActivationBrand Building

15. Brand building is crucial for sustainable, long-term growth
“Long-term results cannot
be achieved by piling
short-term results on
short-term results.”
Sources: Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society; Binet & Field, The Long and Short of It (short-term = up to 6 months)

16. Brand building drives long-term effectiveness across sectors
Source: Binet & Field, Effectiveness in Context

17. Emotional campaigns yield stronger long-term business effects
Source: Binet & Field, The Long and Short of It

18. Brand building also drives short-term effectiveness
Source: Binet & Field, Effectiveness in Context

19. Emotional campaigns build brands more strongly
Source: Binet & Field, The Long and Short of It

20. Brand campaigns have the largest effect on salience
Source: Binet & Field, The Long and Short of It

21. 3. The importance of investing in brand building

22. Investing in share of voice remains a sound strategy
0%
2%
4%
6%
8%
10%
12%
14%
0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% 14%
Shareofvoice
Share of market
SOV > SOM
Brands tend to grow
SOV < SOM
Brands tend to shrink
No evidence that the
rule is changing
Sources: Binet & Field, Marketing in the Era of Accountability and Effectiveness in Context

23. But brand share impacts reliance on excess share of voice
Sources: Binet & Field, Marketing in the Era of Accountability and Effectiveness in Context
“Bigger brands get more help from a
host of non-advertising factors, such as
higher product quality, lower costs, bigger
NPD budgets, a bigger, more loyal
customer base, more word of mouth and
PR coverage, ‘network effects’, and so on.”
Brand market share Average excess SOV
0 – 5% +14.6%
6 – 10% +10.3%
11 – 20% +13.5%
21 – 30% +3.9%
>30% -2.0%
“Rule of thumb: that for every point of market share a brand seeks to gain, its
share of voice needs to be around 10 points above its market share.”

24. Brand should take the lion’s share of investment
“Brands should spend around
60% of their budget on brand-
building activity and 40% on
activation. The IPA data
tentatively supports this
hypothesis, suggesting on
average that a 60:40 split
appears to deliver maximum
efficiency and maximum
effectiveness.”
Source: Binet & Field, The Long and Short of It

25. But category context affects the optimum balance
Source: Binet & Field, Effectiveness in Context

26. And some sectors are out of balance, which in theory should
represent opportunities for brands
Source: Binet & Field, Effectiveness in Context

27. 4. The core components of reach, frequency and repetition

28. The importance of reach, frequency and repetition
“Our previous reports discussed the importance for marketers of talking to everyone in their market on a regular
basis. We suggested that therefore they need media that can reach as many people in their category as
possible as often as possible. This, in turn, suggests that scale is likely to be an important influence on media
effectiveness. The historical IPA data confirms that this is indeed the case.”
Source: Binet & Field, Media in Focus

29. The historic link between media effectiveness and reach
Source: Binet & Field, Media in Focus

30. Repetition is also important
“The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for
things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, the effect is sometimes called the
familiarity principle.”
This implies that repetition and frequency of exposure are critical for building familiarity.
“Frequency led to awareness, awareness to familiarity, and familiarity to trust.”
Source: Cialdini via Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug; Seth Godin, Permission Marketing

31. As is frequency of exposure
“Brand are defined in our memories by engrams – a network of connections. Any brand signal or message sent
from working memory is attached to the engram via a pathway. The more frequently as pathway is used, the
better defined it becomes.”
Source: Heath, The Hidden Power of Advertising

32. In the case of TV, frequency is notably important for
brand building
Source: L. Beaumont, ‘5 steps to effective frequency’, Admap
Depending on message and type of
brand to generate a significant uplift:
• For a new creative – 4 exposures
• Building familiarity – 3 / 4 exposures
• Established – 2 / 3 exposures
• Reminding – 2 exposures
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Volumeuplift(%)
Number of exposures in preceding 4 weeks
2. Building familiarity for new creative
style
1. Building
familiarity
3. Established
4. Reminding

33. Brand TV needs a number of viewings to have a significant
impact versus DRTV
Source: Thinkbox, ‘TV response: new rules, new roles’

34. And, where appropriate, pulsing is the best strategy
Lisa Beaumont describes three schedules for a non-seasonal brand, each deploying the same number of ratings
across a year – 2,600 TVRs (TV ratings) – but with different laydowns:
1. Continuous advertising delivering 50 TVRs/week for 52 weeks
2. Traditional bursts – 4 x 4 week bursts @ 650 TVRs with nine weeks off air between bursts
3. Pulsing, where 200 TVRs are aired per week, for 13 weeks, with gaps of three weeks between pulses
The pulsing schedule significantly outperforms the other options, generating 10% more sales than the
continuous schedule.
For a brand in a rut, where consumers’ purchasing was habitual, it was not until a heavy dose of advertising had
been seen that response appeared. Consequently, to overcome inertia, repetition is critical for this sort of brand.
Therefore, traditional burst advertising is most appropriate for brands like this.
Source: L. Beaumont, ‘5 steps to effective frequency’, Admap

35. 5. The perils of going dark

36. Consistent investment is important to avoid decay
“On average, uplifts in consideration following a campaign decline at 15% a week, meaning the uplift will have
decreased 50% in 5 weeks and will be back at pre-campaign levels in under 4 months.”
Source: Brand Science via IPA

37. In the short-term, going dark has limited effect on brand and
business metrics
“Analysis by Kantar Millward Brown of their
aggregate tracking data indicates that brands can
stop TV advertising with little harmful effect in
the short run.
The chart shows the net change in various brand
measures six months after TV advertising stops.
Net change is defined as the percentage of brands
experiencing increasing scores minus the
percentage of brands experiencing decreasing
scores.
This analysis shows that while communication
awareness levels (TBCA) drop away
significantly, the impact on image and trial is
minimal in the short run.”
Source: Kantar Millward Brown, ‘What happens when brands go dark?’, Millward Brown Knowledge
Points, July 2018 via WARC ‘What happens if I stop advertising?’

38. But, going dark can damage brand health in the longer term
“Two key constituent brand relationship metrics
– brand usage and brand image – suffered
considerably when brands ‘went dark’ (i.e.
ceased to spend on communications) for a period of
six months or more.”
Source: IPA, ‘Advertising in a Downturn’

39. Longer periods off-air are likely to weak brand health
“Longer periods off-air are much more likely to be
damaging. Millward Brown cite the example of a UK
insurance company who was a regular and
reasonably heavy advertiser but came off-air, with
only one subsequent burst two years later. Their
consideration levels plummeted over the next few
years.
We know that the bulk (58%) of advertising’s impact
happens in the long term (more than 6 months out) so
it’s not surprising that the impact of not advertising
should increase as time progresses.”
Source: Kantar Millward Brown, ‘What happens when brands go dark?’, Millward Brown Knowledge Points, July 2018 and
Chappell, ‘The long-term impact of advertising’ via WARC, ‘What happens if I stop advertising?’

40. The long-term impact of going dark on business
performance is significant
“A typical brand case study was shown where the long-term element of payback was over four times greater than the
short-term. The importance of this is considerable. Following a budget cut, a brand will continue to benefit from the
marketing investment made over the previous few years. This will mitigate any short-term business effects and will
result in a dangerously misleading increase in short-term profitability. The longer-term business harm will be
more considerable but will not be noticed at first.”
Source: IPA, ‘Advertising in a Downturn’

41. With the impact felt on recovery time and the bottom line
“The long-term effects of two different budget-cutting
scenarios were modelled for the brand.
In the first scenario the budget was cut to zero for
just one year and then returned to usual levels. In
the second scenario the budget was halved for one
year and then returned to usual levels.
Sales recovery to pre-cut levels took five and three
years respectively, with cumulative negative impacts
on the bottom line of £1.7m and £0.8m.”
Source: IPA, ‘Advertising in a Downturn’

42. Advertising investment reduces risk
“Cutting ad spend also carries the risk of damaging a
brand’s market share.
Reducing a brand’s share of voice (its proportion of ad
spend within its category) often results in an attendant
decline in its overall market share.
As such, if a brand cuts its advertising budget
relative to its competitors, it is at higher risk of
losing market share.”
Source: Field, ‘Marketing in a Downturn’ via WARC, ‘What happens if I stop advertising?’

43. The best way to ensure long-term growth is to maintain
advertising spend
“Overall, the best way to ensure long term brand growth
is to maintain advertising expenditure.
Analysis by Millward Brown of their aggregate tracking
data has shown that a brand is most likely to gain share
when its share of communication awareness is growing,
and when it is higher than its market share.
Advertising has a multiplier effect, but like any
multiplier it needs investment to work and the best
way to ensure long term brand growth is to maintain
levels of ad spend.”
Source: Kantar Millward Brown, ‘What happens when brands go dark?’, Millward Brown Knowledge Points, July 2018 and WARC,
‘What we know about creativity and effectiveness’ via WARC, ‘What happens if I stop advertising?’

44. This is especially true during a recession
“Advertising is among the areas most at risk of cuts
during economic downturns. However, the evidence
suggests that reducing ad spend in a recession is
associated with declining sales and weakened
company performance in the long run.
Malik PIMS analysed data from 1,000 businesses during
previous economic downturns to identify the best
business strategies. Its assessment of the return on
capital employed (ROCE) and changes in market share
during the first two years of recovery found that an
increase in investment in ad spend was generally linked
with business success in the long term.”
Source: IPA, ‘Advertising in a Downturn’ via WARC, ‘What happens if I stop advertising?’

45. Strong brands recovered x9 faster following the 2008
financial crisis
Source: BrandZ via Kantar Webinar, ‘COVID-19 – Impact on Brands’, 20 March 2020

46. 6. Consumer expectations here and now

47. Kantar reports that only a small proportion of the population
expect companies to stop advertising
Source: Kantar Webinar, ‘COVID-19 – Impact on Brands’, 20 March 2020

48. We don’t want brands to stop advertising but it mustn’t be seen
as exploitative or insensitive
Source: Kantar Webinar, ‘COVID-19 – Impact on Brands’, 20 March 2020

49. GWI suggests that 70% of the population agree that advertising
should continue as normal or are ambivalent
Source: GWI, ‘COVID-19 research series 3: multi-market research’
13%
24%
34%
17%
13%
Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neither agree nor disagree Somewhat disagree Strongly disagree
% who agree / disagree that brands should
advertise as normal

50. Thank you