This is not an opinion piece.

What follows is a summary of the science, independently researched, replicated across thousands of brands, and measured against hundreds of millions of dollars in real market outcomes. We are not here to tell you what we think. We are here to show you what the data says, and let you draw your own conclusions.

If your business is currently focused almost entirely on selling to your existing audience and running sales-driven campaigns, particularly in a difficult economic climate, this is the evidence you need to see.

Where Your Sales Actually Come From

Most business owners assume their marketing campaigns are the engine of their sales. The research says otherwise.

All of your paid marketing activity combined typically accounts for just 7% to 12% of your total sales. The remaining 82–90% comes from what researchers call base sales: the steady, underlying demand your brand has built up over time simply by being known, trusted, and remembered by people who weren’t ready to buy yet.

Base sales don’t spike in response to a campaign you ran last week. They are the accumulated result of years of consistent brand presence, showing up, being visible, and staying in the minds of people long before they need you.

When you stop investing in that presence, base sales start to erode. Slowly at first. Quietly. And with enough of a delay that by the time you notice, the damage is already significant.

Mutinex analysed 260 product lines in the current economic environment and found that 59% are showing declining sales volume year on year, with a median decline of 5%. The instinct in that environment is to cut brand investment and focus everything on immediate sales activity. The data shows this makes things worse, not better.

Brands that spend less than 60% of their marketing budget on brand building are twice as likely to see their base sales decline. And when base sales decline, your sales campaigns become less efficient, not more. You spend more money to get fewer results. The harder you push for short-term sales, the harder it gets.

Moving to short-term sales activation only accelerates the decline. When base drops, even your sales campaigns lose their power because there is less underlying demand for them to convert.

The Reach Problem Nobody Talks About

Here is a finding that reframes the whole conversation.

Research by Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, known as the 95:5 Rule, shows that at any given moment only around 5% of your potential buyers are actively looking to buy what you sell. The other 95% are not in the market right now. They might be in six months. They might be in two years. But they are not buying today.

Sales-focused campaigns, ads designed to get someone to act right now, only work on the 5% who are already ready. They do almost nothing for the 95% who aren’t.

But here is where it gets even more important for most businesses. The 95:5 rule assumes you are already reaching your entire potential market. Most businesses aren’t. Not even close.

If your current campaigns are realistically reaching, generously, 0.5% of all the people who could ever buy from you, then within that already tiny group only a fraction are actually in-market right now. You are spending money to reach a microscopic slice of your possible customers, and of those, only a handful are ready to buy.

You are not fishing in the ocean. You are fishing in a rock pool and wondering why the catch is small.

The answer isn’t to cast a better lure into the same rock pool. The answer is to find a way into the ocean, and that means reaching people who don’t know you yet.

The Science on Getting the Balance Right

Les Binet and Peter Field spent decades analysing thousands of campaigns across hundreds of brands for the IPA, the largest ongoing study of marketing effectiveness in the world. Their work, The Long and the Short of It, established something now widely accepted among the world’s best marketers: the optimal balance for most businesses is approximately 60% brand building to 40% sales activation.

Brand building is the activity that reaches people who aren’t ready to buy yet. It builds awareness, trust, and memory so that when those people do enter the market, your name is the one they think of. Sales activation converts people who are already considering buying.

Both matter. But the ratio matters enormously.

Brands that tip too far toward sales activation, especially under financial pressure, don’t just underperform while the pressure lasts. They underperform for two to three years after conditions improve. The damage compounds. And recovering it costs far more than it would have cost to protect it.

What About Focusing on Our Current Customers?

A very common response to all of this is: we’ll focus on the customers we already have. Better service, more communication, keep them coming back.

This is not a bad instinct. Looking after existing customers, giving them a great experience and making it easy to buy again, is something every business should do. It prevents churn and it should absolutely be part of the plan.

But here is what the science is clear about: keeping existing customers is not the same as growing your business.

One of the most replicated findings in marketing research, the Law of Double Jeopardy, shows a consistent pattern across every category studied. Smaller brands have fewer customers, and those customers buy less frequently. Larger brands have more customers, and those customers buy somewhat more often. The loyalty comes with the size. It doesn’t create it.

In other words, you don’t grow by deepening your relationship with the people who already know you. You grow by reaching people who don’t know you yet, consistently, over time, so that when they eventually need what you offer, your name is already in their head.

Look after your existing customers. Make it easy for them to stay and come back. But don’t mistake that for a growth strategy. They are not the same thing.

Creative Quality Is the Multiplier Most Businesses Ignore

Here is a finding that should stop every business owner and CFO in their tracks.

System1 and Effie, two of the most respected names in advertising effectiveness research, published a major study in 2025 called the Creative Dividend. They analysed 1,265 campaigns across the US, Europe, the UK and Ireland between 2007 and 2023, representing an estimated $139 billion in market share, with responses from over 200,000 people. They measured what actually drives profit from advertising.

Creative quality, how good, how interesting, how emotionally engaging your advertising actually is, has a profit multiplier of x12. It is the second most powerful driver of advertising profitability ever measured, behind only the overall size of the brand. For comparison, how precisely you target your audience, the thing most businesses obsess over, has a profit multiplier of x1.1. Barely above zero.

A broadly targeted, emotionally engaging, creatively excellent campaign will almost always outperform a highly targeted, dull, rational one. The creative is doing the work. The targeting is largely irrelevant by comparison.

When you layer creative quality with emotional resonance, consistent brand recognition, genuine entertainment, and years of consistent execution, the profit likelihood multiplier reaches x21.

The cost of getting this wrong: dull campaigns pay back 40% less than engaging ones. $4.40 return per dollar versus $7.10. That gap is not a rounding error.

The same research shows a pattern that has been building since 2011. As digital ad spending has increased and short-term sales thinking has taken over, the emotional quality of advertising and brand investment have both declined steadily, with a 91% correlation between the two trends. The entire industry has been slowly and collectively making the same mistake. Which means that for any business willing to do the opposite, the opportunity to stand out has never been larger.

Consistency Is Worth More Than Most People Realise

Brands that maintain a consistent look, feel, voice, and creative approach over time achieve an average return of 8.8x per dollar invested in advertising. Brands that change direction frequently, new messaging, new visual identity, new campaign approach every year, achieve just 2.1x. Same investment. More than four times the return, simply from staying consistent.

The reason is straightforward. People remember brands through repeated, consistent exposure. Every time you change your brand’s look or messaging, you are erasing some of what you have built in people’s memories and starting again. The research found that the least consistent brands grew zero distinctiveness during the study period. Not a little. Zero.

Broad-reach campaigns with high emotional content, run consistently over three or more years, result in 33% of campaigns reporting profit. Narrow-targeted campaigns with low emotional content over the same period: 0%.

Two Real Businesses. Two Different Choices.

The science is one thing. Watching it play out in real companies is another.

Nike made the shift that many businesses are considering right now. In the early 2020s they moved heavily toward digital sales tactics, cut back on brand advertising, and focused on direct-to-consumer conversion. Initially it appeared to work. Then their brand momentum started declining. Cultural relevance faded. Competitors closed the gap, not just in sales numbers but in how people felt about the brand. We wrote about what happened and what it means here.

Airbnb made the opposite call. When they returned from COVID they deliberately reduced sales-focused spend and prioritised brand. Revenue grew. Efficiency improved. CEO Brian Chesky publicly credited the shift as one of the most important decisions the company made. That story is worth reading in full.

Same science. Two different decisions. The outcomes speak for themselves.

The Tree

Think of your brand like a tree.

The fruit on it today is the result of water and care invested yesterday, last year, and the years before that. You can harvest it. You should. But if you stop watering the tree, it won’t grow new fruit. The branches thin. The yield drops. And by the time you notice, it takes years of reinvestment to recover what was lost.

The businesses that emerge strongest from difficult economic periods are almost never the ones that harvested hardest. They are the ones that kept watering while competitors went dry. When conditions improve, and they always do, those brands are already present in the minds of buyers entering the market. The ones that stopped are starting over.

What Best Practice Actually Looks Like

So what should a business do, especially one with a constrained budget?

First, protect what you have. Keep your existing customers happy. Make it easy to buy again. Provide genuine quality and good communication. Not as a growth strategy, but as a foundation. Churn prevention is not optional. It is a floor, not a ceiling.

Second, protect reach. Even low-frequency, broad-reach brand activity is better than none. Keep the brand visible to the widest possible audience. Presence compounds. Absence erodes. The data is clear: narrow targeting alone, no matter how well-executed, eventually reaches zero.

Third, invest in creative quality and build distinctive brand assets. Creative quality is the x12 profit multiplier. Emotionally resonant advertising with strong, consistent brand assets, colours, characters, sounds, typefaces, visual systems, dramatically outperforms generic, product-focused, rational work. Distinctive assets are not decoration. They are the mechanism through which your brand gets noticed, remembered, and chosen. The research shows brands with strong ad branding grow distinctiveness at 70% higher rates than those with weak branding. These assets need to be built deliberately and protected consistently, not refreshed every campaign cycle.

Fourth, earn media, not just paid media. Research-backed content, Digital PR, media placements, and authority-building generate the kind of reach, backlinks, and brand signals that compound over time. They build organic visibility and the mental availability that paid campaigns alone cannot create.

Fifth, run your sales campaigns efficiently within the right proportion of budget. The portion that goes to conversion-focused activity should work hard. Better targeting, cleaner paths to purchase. But it should be the minority of investment, not the entirety of it.

Everything in that prescription, broad-reach emotionally resonant advertising, earned media and Digital PR, research-backed content, consistent brand identity maintained over time, is not something we invented. It is what the science describes as best practice. It is what the world’s most effective brands do. And it is what a properly executed long-term marketing program is designed to deliver.

The science on this is not ambiguous. It is not our opinion. It is decades of replicated research across thousands of brands and hundreds of millions of dollars in measured outcomes, in every economic condition including this one.

The question isn’t whether this is true. The question is what you are going to do with it.

Sources

• Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It. IPA.
• Dawes, J. (2023). The 95:5 Rule. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.
• Sharp, B. & Romaniuk, J. (2010). How Brands Grow. Oxford University Press.
• Dyson, P. (2023). The Drivers of Profitability. Accelero.
• System1 & Effie (2025). The Creative Dividend: How Creativity Multiplies Profit.
• Mutinex (2024). Marketers and Money. mutinex.co
• Independent analysis of 260 product lines, current economic environment.

Further reading on Category Entry Points and mental availability: here.