Should a barber be running performance ads?
Perhaps the most tiresome debate in marketing is the apparent opposition of brand and performance marketing. Of course the two are complementary and the debate should have moved on with the empirical and well-articulated work of Binet and Field in The Long and the Short of It. But still we return to the conversation again and again…
So if you find yourself needing to be convinced (or need to convince others), let’s try coming at it from a different angle: in-market vs. out-of-market audiences.
Whatever your category, from haircuts to milk, B2B SaaS to digital news subscriptions, there will always be an audience who are ready to buy now and another audience who don’t need you today, but will need you in the future. It’s the basis of the funnel. A fundamental truth that hopefully everyone can agree on.
Here’s a simple formula for understanding the mix of your in-market vs. out-of-market audience. Let’s take men’s haircutting as an example. You’ve looked at the data and see that men who regularly get their hair cut, go to the barber on average every 7 weeks.
And your research reveals that there’s a 2-week period when a man looks at his hair and thinks "I need a haircut". So for every 7-week cycle, there’s a 2-week window where that guy is in-market. For the other 5 weeks, no amount of short term marketing is going to make a lick of difference.
2 weeks / 7 weeks = 28.6%
Therefore, a broad audience of “men who regularly go to the barber” are in-market roughly 30% of the time and out-of-market about 70% of the time. Not necessarily a hard analog to a brand/performance budget split, but you arrive at a similar data-driven and logical conclusion to what The Long and the Short of It might suggest. And it reinforces why you’d need different objectives. Build salience for the 70%. Convert the 30%. Don’t get yourself in a twist by doing anything else.
Now think of your category. Do you know the equivalent of the 7-week haircut cycle / the 2-week window? It applies to everyone, and a good mix of first-party data and research will let you discover it.
