That’s why you shouldn’t focus solely on short-term returns, according to the Head of WARC Advisory, EMEA & Americas.

Imaad Ahmed leads WARC Advisory in EMEA and the USA. WARC Advisory support brands, agencies and media companies with tailored upskilling, evidence-based thought leadership and category benchmarking to help solve their specific marketing effectiveness problems.

CMOs, strategists and management groups turn to WARC for trusted advice and insights into categories and audiences, and to get a global outlook on marketing effectiveness, curated from over 120 countries and 130 product sub-categories.

“Businesses will always need to know how they perform against the rest of their category because business success is always relative to the competition, however you define who your competitors are,” says Ahmed.

He describes effective marketing as a means of delivering on objectives – whatever they may be – and a means of delivering commercial returns. Therefore, marketers should have a holistic perspective on how they contribute to the company’s overall success, rather than just focusing on the goals solely driven by the marketing department.

Return on investment is not always the most important

Ahmed warns against confusing efficiency with effectiveness. Although important, rapid ROI is not necessarily the most important goal.

“ROI can be used to understand what is efficient and what isn’t, often in the short term. The easiest way to increase ROI though is often cutting costs. Yet purely decreasing investment in advertising runs counter to much of the evidence behind how you grow a brand. To create longer term, sustainable impact, marketers should listen to the evidence of how brand-building is crucial for long-term growth and greater long-term efficiency in invested funds,” he asserts.

The strength of the brand ensures that customers choose your product or service when the moment of purchase comes, and it allows you to charge more for what you offer. Pricing power is an underrated strength of well-built brands.

Build strategic assets for your brand

In 2021, WARC, LIONS and The B2B Institute created a hierarchy of the six main types of effects that B2B marketing produces, from the least to the most commercially impactful.

“At the lowest level, it’s about triggering an immediate response from the target audience, such as website visits, content downloads, or event registrations. This level focuses on what delivers quick results, but often lacks a lasting impact on the brand.

“At the higher levels, the campaigns that work involve building strategic assets for the brand. This means developing brand associations and positive perceptions that compound over time to boost long-term brand growth. Such campaigns help position the brand as a key player in its category and provide competitive advantages.”

Powerful and effective communication

Ahmed highlights two examples from this year’s Cannes Lions festival (2024) that clearly demonstrate the value of simple yet effective communication in marketing.

It Has to Be Heinz

Over several years, Heinz developed creative campaigns with distinctive brand assets that made the product easily recognizable and memorable. One of the most notable parts of the campaign was when they asked people to draw a bottle of ketchup – an impressive majority of people in Heinz’s experiment unerringly drew Heinz bottles. By leveraging an easily recognizable and memorable distinctive asset which had been built up over time within this type of simple yet powerful communication, Heinz managed to make the brand synonymous with ketchup in general. This resulted in a global sales increase of 12 percent, along with a 3-point uplift in brand consideration and perception.

Meet Marina Prieto

The “Meet Marina Prieto” campaign from JCDecaux, an Outdoor media owner, won the Creative B2B Grand Prix. In an effort to revitalize outdoor advertising on Madrid’s subway, JCDecaux chose to use an unexpected character—a 100-year-old Spanish grandmother with only 28 Instagram followers. This caught the attention of commuters, who became curious about what the campaign was about. Interest in Marina Prieto quickly grew, and the campaign gained significant attention both on social media and in mainstream media. JCDecaux revealed the campaign concept at an Effies awards ceremony – where many brand CMOs and prospective OOH buyers were in the room – resulting in 185 new clients and a doubling of investments in outdoor advertising.

How to make a campaign more effective

To enhance the creativity and effectiveness of a campaign, Ahmed shared a few pieces of advice for marketers to consider:

• Emotional advertising: This builds associations between the brand, buying occasion and relevant feelings which prime the buyer to want to choose your brand. Remember, although rational, functional messages can work well to convert current interest in a product or service, emotional associations embed a brand in a buyer’s long-term memory far more strongly. Using cases from the IPA databank, Les Binet and Peter Field have found that emotional strategies generate seven times the very large business effects which rational strategies do in B2B.
• Distinctive campaigns: In the B2B market, where many brands often communicate in the same way and campaigns often look alike, distinctiveness is crucial for getting noticed, capturing attention and triggering the types of memory structures which influence buyers to remember and then hopefully purchase your product or service. Brands which don’t get remembered in buying situations, don’t get bought. Ahmed points out that going against category norms and using creative storytelling, and emotional elements can help build brand awareness, memory structures and create a connection to the brand. Shockingly, Amplified Intelligence have found that 85% of digital ads get less than the 2.5 seconds of attention needed to build or refresh memory structures. The B2B category would likely fare even worse. He emphasizes that “being distinctive is not just about being different, but about being relevant and memorable to the target audience, especially when the buying situation arises.”
• Leverage multiple Ps: Many marketers focus their work on promotion. Ahmed encourages marketers to think more broadly though about the other Ps as potential drivers of effectiveness – product, price, and placement. On pricing, he believes that marketers are often the best positioned within a business to understand customers’ perceived value of the product and can use these insights to frame the product’s value in the most compelling way. As well as communicating product quality, framing value also involves positioning your point of difference all the time, in every possible way, year after year. As the likes of magic numbers and Mark Ritson have discussed in the past, the ability to charge price premiums is an incredible profit lever for businesses.
• In B2B, marketers beware of the 95-5 rule: Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and The B2B Institute (at LinkedIn) has shown us that B2B marketers tend to fixate on tightly targeted media and often focus the majority of their marketing towards the 5% of the category audience who are in-market to buy a specific product or service right now. But that hugely overlooks the 95% who are potential future clients – not in-market now but who very well may be in the future. Advertising needs to build awareness, salience and memory links amongst those 95% so that when they do come into market, those memory links can be activated and the brand’s chances of being bought increase. Again, this points to the importance of brand building.
• Make a compelling Customer Promise and continually deliver it!
  WARC Advisory and The B2B Institute (at LinkedIn) recently launched new research into the value of Customer Promises in B2B. A customer promise is a direct and exclusive commitment made by a business to its customers which is memorable, valuable and deliverable. By studying over 700 B2B effectiveness case studies (all entered in industry awards), firstly they found that only 18% of B2B campaigns make a promise to the customer – this is a largely untapped opportunity in B2B. Furthermore, B2B campaigns with a customer promise at their heart are two and a half times more likely to report increases in brand health metrics and three times more likely to report market share increases than non-Customer Promise campaigns. Ahmed commented: “Not only do customer promise campaigns show impressive brand health and commercial advantages versus their non-customer promise counterparts but they also over-index at all budget levels, even lower ones. That advantage should be of particular interest to scale-ups and brands with limited resources.”

It is a well-established fact that creativity directly impacts marketing effectiveness.

“Insights from Kantar and WARC indicate that highly creative ads can be four times more profitable than low creative ads. Being boring is not only ineffective, but it’s also costly – the recent research from Peter Field, Adam Morgan and System1 on “The Cost of Dull” has shown us that,” notes Ahmed.

“Even in B2B marketing, where decision-making processes are often rational and complex, it is still people who make the decisions. Yes, B2B marketing must cater for the complexities of buyer groups where varying levels of knowledge and motivation are at play for the different decision-makers and influencers in that group. Nevertheless, across the buyer group, people are still heavily influenced by their emotions,” he concludes.