There’s a growing issue in the Middle East’s marketing industry. It’s something we see worldwide, but here it’s particularly problematic: marketers are prioritising short-term metrics, especially digital performance, over long-term brand building.
In the rush to secure quick wins – clicks, conversions, and short-term sales – marketers are missing out on what truly drives sustainable growth.
The irony? Decades of research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, How Brands Grow, The Long and Short of It by Binet and Field, and countless other studies and research have already laid out the roadmap.
However, too many marketers ignore these evidence-based principles and instead chase the next shiny digital object.
The short-term trap
One of the biggest misconceptions we hear all the time is ‘I don’t want to do branding, I just want leads and sales’.
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how marketing works. Leads and sales are outcomes, but they are not strategies. You can’t achieve sustainable sales growth by focusing exclusively on short-term sales activation or digital performance marketing.
If you want long-term success, you need to build mental availability, targeting all buyers of your category, both present and future, making your brand easy to recall when customers are ready to buy.
Binet and Field’s 60:40 Rule is often cited as a solution to this, suggesting that 60 per cent of your marketing budget should be spent on long-term brand building, while 40 per cent goes to short-term sales activation.
But this isn’t a rigid formula. It’s a general observation. Context matters, category matters and the ideal balance varies depending on your brand’s size, category and market conditions.
Some marketers misinterpret this and apply it universally, which leads to misguided strategies but, more often than not, most are totally unaware of The Long and Short of It findings entirely.
Not one-size-fits-all
Grace Kite’s research adds an important layer to this conversation: as businesses grow, the balance between brand building and performance marketing must shift.
For smaller companies or startups, performance marketing makes sense – they need to see immediate returns, and their focus is survival. But as a company scales, brand building becomes increasingly crucial.
Larger brands should focus on building mental availability, ensuring that when customers are ready to buy, they remember your brand.
Key to growth
The data is clear. Brands grow by increasing both mental and physical availability. That means reaching more people, more often, across more buying situations. Sacrificing either is leaving present and future sales on the table.
Ehrenberg-Bass research has shown that brands grow by acquiring light buyers, people who buy infrequently or only occasionally. These buyers are essential to growth, yet many marketers remain fixated on loyalty and retention. In reality, loyalty is weak, albeit slightly higher the larger your brand is, yet people switch between brands all the time. Your goal should be to increase your reach and ensure your brand is available and memorable when these light buyers are in the market.
And this universally applies to all categories, including ones you might intuitively think are not so, such as luxury.
The marketing funnel fallacy
The marketing funnel is one of the most misinterpreted concepts out there. It’s a useful framework for understanding how people move from awareness to purchase, but it’s often taken too literally. Many marketers seem to think they can pull consumers down the funnel by showing them a series of carefully timed ads, as though they’re engineering some kind of advertising conveyor belt.
That’s not how it works.
Consumers don’t move down the funnel just because you’ve shown them a few ads. They move when they’re ready, which is often determined by life events or category entry points – situations like moving house, having children, or starting a new job. Your job as a marketer is not to ‘push’ consumers down the funnel. It’s to ensure that when they reach these moments, your brand is mentally available. It’s about making your brand easy to recall and easy to buy.
Beware of false precision
There’s another common misconception that marketers need to address – the idea that marketing is a precise, deterministic science. Many marketers look at their digital dashboards, see metrics like click-through rates or ROAS, and believe these numbers offer an exact reflection of reality.
They don’t. Marketing is not like engineering or physics. Human behaviour is complex and unpredictable. Just because your analytics tool gives you metrics down to three decimal points doesn’t mean those numbers are precise or meaningful in the grand scheme of things. Marketers often fall into the trap of thinking that because they can measure something, it’s accurate. But in reality, these metrics are directional at best. They give you a rough sense of what’s happening, but they are not definitive truths.
More importantly, many of these short-term metrics don’t tell you anything about long-term brand health. You can track clicks, conversions, and immediate sales all you like, but if you’re not measuring brand awareness, mental availability, or emotional connection, you’re missing the bigger picture. You need to focus on the metrics that matter for both short-term sales and long-term growth.
Large plays for large brands
If you’re managing a large brand, you need to stop playing small. The strategies that work for startups and small businesses don’t necessarily apply to bigger companies. Large brands should be focused on a broad reach, increasing mental availability, and growing physical availability across all channels.
Too many big brands in the Middle East are applying the wrong tactics – hyper-targeted, short-term digital strategies that might drive quick wins but won’t contribute to long-term growth. The truth is, big brands need to reach as many consumers as possible, not narrow their focus. If you want to stay relevant, you need to be in front of more people, in more buying situations, more often.
Shifting focus
The solution is simple, but it requires a shift in mindset. Here’s what marketers in the Middle East need to do:
1. Shift your focus: Stop obsessing over short-term digital metrics. As your brand grows, so should your focus on brand building.
2. Embrace sophisticated mass marketing: Your brand needs to be mentally available to a broad audience of everyone who buys your category. Stop relying on hyper-targeted campaigns that only speak to a niche group.
3. Use the funnel as a guide to diagnose but don’t take the concept too far: Consumers move through the funnel on their terms, not because of your ad sequence. Ensure your brand dollars are spent to address issues you have diagnosed in the funnel.
4. Understand metrics’ limitations: Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s accurate, meaningful or represents any form of insight. Treat digital metrics as directional, not definitive, and make sure you’re measuring what matters for long-term growth.
The bottom line? Long-term brand building and short-term activation aren’t opposing forces. They need to work together, but the balance depends on your brand’s size, category, and market context. When you get this right, you’ll stop chasing short-term wins and start driving real, sustainable growth.
By Chris Solomi, Chief Digital Officer, Omnicom Media Group (OMG)
