"Bothism is Not Just for Big Brands: Why Medium-Sized Companies Should Embrace It Too"

With Q4 upon us and peak consumption about to manifest, a lot of businesses are going to be making sure that they act to capture and convert as much demand as possible. For growing, medium sized brands, part of the challenge is going to be to match or surpass growth rates seen at earlier stages in their journey. Gotta keep that CAGR looking sweet.

The temptation for many will be to engage in a performance pile-on. To chase incremental improvements in the conversion of likely buyers, and in the process, to accept higher customer acquisition costs in furtherance of sales volume. But the better choice is to look beyond the short term, and to introduce balance through brand investment. Q4 is the perfect time for ‘Bothism’.??

The concept of “bothism”—the balance between long-term brand building and short-term sales activation, originally coined by David Thomas—is sometimes thought of as only being relevant for large brands with deep pockets engaged in ding dong battles for market share. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, medium-sized companies are often the ones that benefit the most from adopting a bothism approach.?

Short-term marketing efforts, like promotions and performance based media buys, will only drive the portion of the audience that’s already in the market to buy. But you can’t ‘activate’ buyers who don’t know who you are. So Q4 is the perfect time to invest in brand spend, to get your company and product known, to take steps to ensure you are front of mind with your audience at the point when they become in market for your product.

This suggests that a significant amount of marketing spend should be focused on brand-building, which primes future buyers to think of your brand when they enter the market. If you spend all your budget on short-term tactics, you’re only capturing the small fraction of buyers in-market today.

For those asking, "But what if I can't afford to invest in brand activation?", the answer is you can't afford not to. As the well established godfathers of marketing effectiveness, Les Binet and Peter Field have pointed out "Although long-term effects always produce some short-term effects, the reverse is not true."

For medium-sized businesses, bothism represents an opportunity to break through the clutter and create consistent growth. As Tom Roach explains in his brilliant piece The Wrong and the Short of It. "Long-term growth always has its roots in the short term. The two are connected, influence each other, and if you get the two working perfectly in harmony together, you’ll achieve the strongest, most sustainable growth possible".

What can medium-sized companies do to embrace bothism?

1. Balanced media spend: Instead of putting 80-90% of your budget into performance marketing (e.g., Google Ads or Facebook), consider splitting it more evenly between brand and activation. A 60-40 split, in favour of brand spend, as proposed by Binet and Field in their work The Long and the Short of It, is a good rule of thumb.
2. Brand-building across multiple channels: You don’t have to have a Super Bowl budget to invest in brand-building. Press, TV, radio, podcasts, and OOH are still effective. And even in digital, formats like video ads or native content can play a dual role of engaging users emotionally while driving more immediate response. The recent research from Dr Grace Kite and the team at magic numbers demonstrates the synergies, and improved results that come from running across mutliple channels.
3. Consistency and creativity: Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, emphasizes how humans respond to repeated stimuli. Consistently seeing a brand over time builds familiarity and trust. This has recently been the subject of brilliant research from Andrew Tindall and the team at System1 , demonstrating that consistency leads to better business outcomes, stronger brands, and greater profits.
4. Invest in creativity: Bothism doesn’t just mean doing more; it means doing it smartly. Creative campaigns that resonate emotionally, combined with tactical performance marketing, will do more to accelerate your brand’s growth than pouring all your money into short-term efforts.

References:

The wrong and the short of it, Tom Roach - https://thetomroach.com/2024/06/15/the-wrong-and-the-short-of-it-again/

The long and the short of it, Les Binet, Peter Field - https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/the-long-and-the-short-of-it-balancing-short-and-long-term-marketing-strategies

It's the little things that count, Dr. Grace Kite - https://magicnumbers.co.uk/articles/in-brand-building-now-its-the-little-things-that-count/

Compound creativity, Andrew Tindall - https://system1group.com/compound-creativity-system1-ipa

and for good measure, the course that accelerated my interest in all things marketing effectiveness... MiniMBA in Marketing with Mark Ritson - https://mba.marketingweek.com/marketing/