Brand AND Performance - CPG Marketing Delivering Both Short-Term Campaign Activation & Long Term Revenue Growth

Effective CMOs know that marketing drives sales, but performance doesn’t build brand. Yet the majority of advertising teams are completely disregarding Binet and Field’s recommended 60/40 split of brand and activation as best practice.

Under ever-increasing pressure to deliver leads to sales teams and ROI to the C-Suite, advertising leads are choosing to focus on campaign performance and associated metrics rather than actual business value. Short-term activation is currently receiving 80% of the total average advertising budget, missing any chances to build brand connections with the overwhelming 95% of customers not currently in-market to purchase.

Ten years on from the groundbreaking publication of The Long And The Short Of It, Binet reflects, ‘The performance marketing revolution shaped a decade of marketing where everyone was told brand building was an old fashioned and inefficient way of thinking, and that the smart way to go was to use big data to serve these activation messages at the last moment. But when you have a strong brand, people will be more responsive to your performance marketing: they’re already warmed up.’

Fundamentally, marketing needs to build and continually reinforce a long-term brand as a solid foundation; any activation without brand is wasted advertising spend. Marketing leaders know this - so why are so few implementing it?

Here the powerhouses behind some of the world’s most profitable CPG brands share how they have created both short-term performance gains and marketing-driven revenue growth over decades.

The Best Examples of FMCG Advertising Performance Success Combined With Long-Term Brand Growth

1. Diageo & Johnnie Walker - Refreshing Brand Heritage Around Customer Values & Advertising Hyper Personalisation Over Decades

The world’s best-selling Scotch whisky brand of 2023, Johnnie Walker accounts for more than one-fifth of all sales in the category globally. Kantar named the Diageo-owned label as a first-time entrant into the top five most valuable UK brands, joining Vodafone, HSBC, Shell and BP, after reaching $10.9 billion in value – an increase of 17% on its 2022 level. The reason behind the short-term sales uplift and long-term value? A successful heritage brand refresh strategy with customers at its heart.

The biggest in parent company Diageo’s portfolio, the Johnnie Walker brand continually faces the challenge of upholding its legacy whilst acquiring new customers of every generation. The spirit giant not only believes that brand investment fuels performance, but actually embeds this belief from the very top of the business down, with continual brand investment over time at the core of company growth. To balance short-term ad performance with long-term brand building, the Johnnie Walker marketers approached repositioning from a customer point of view, understanding what the brand’s heritage really meant to consumers - not just legacy-based assumptions - and carrying their most important values through to every campaign and touchpoint.

Revitalising one of the oldest brand mascots in the world and surrounding messaging is no easy task - but Johnnie Walker’s marketing team rose to the challenge. The old-fashioned dapper ‘Striding Man’ image appeared everywhere from product labels to magazine ads to digital billboards. The mascot’s ‘Keep Walking’ message originally stemmed from the Industrial Revolution’s focus on forward momentum and celebrating economic and financial gains. For customers in recent years, linking ‘Keep Walking’ to personal achievement had become too suggestive of ‘greed’ and ‘power lunches’. The brand needed to resonate with more outward-looking, diverse consumers whose purchases more closely reflected their personal beliefs and choices. 

Johnnie Walker decided to keep the metaphor of progress but reinterpreted ‘Keep Walking’ as a society-wide call to action, to better align with customer values - and harnessed a unique, timely opportunity to connect with its target audience. On the eve of the US election night 2016, the brand aired a minute-long advertising spot featuring an adaptation of the lyrics to the 1940 folk song ‘This Land is Your Land’. The bilingual, inclusive advert represented many minority groups to make a bold statement of diversity, acceptance and equality amid the polarising national debate on immigration policy. This single ad campaign shifted brand identity from representing personal progress to representing pioneers who break out of the status quo to push boundaries and help others alongside them. The advertising campaign drove short-term sales success - total North America sales grew by 8% with global sales growing by 6% in that fiscal year alone - and set the pace for the longer term brand value and sales growth enjoyed by the company over the next seven years.

‘Leading a brand is like running a relay: marketers must take the baton from those who built it in the past and prepare to pass it on to those in the future’, says Johnnie Walker’s Global Brand Director, Jennifer English. Subsequent ‘Keep Walking’ campaigns have been deployed and adapted to the changing political climate, utilising the Striding Man mascot for just the final few seconds of ad time, and keeping messaging and consumer values as the priority. English continues, ‘Good ideas stand the test of time. I absolutely expect Keep Walking will be around for a long time to come, I think it’ll be around longer than me.’

For Diageo, brand guardianship means thinking carefully not only about the brand heritage itself, but also about inheritance from past marketers and what the current team will pass on to future in-house advertising specialists. ‘Brand-building is a total business mentality’, states Diageo’s VP and Global Head of Marketing Effectiveness and Embedded Analytics, Gina O’Halloran. 

Balancing brand and performance to skyrocket record short-term sales and long-term value has been driven, according to O’Halloran, through receptive advertising at the moments that matter: ‘When we think about what makes our advertising effective, we need to think about what does the consumer spark to? We use first-party data to really understand everything from the customer’s persona: not just what they put in their basket, but hundreds of data points about how they like to transact through their online cart and in-store. We build up understanding of what the consumer sees throughout their purchase journey: when they see ads, do they see someone who looks like them, doing what they do every day in the way they do it, voiceover that sounds like them, music that resonates, at their own specific journey stage? If all these advertising elements mirror the customer, they are much more likely to purchase.’

Diageo harnesses a powerful combination of personalisation and reason to buy. ‘The space of personalisation is complicated, there are many steps. It’s not just access, but how you decide what’s important, the data you select, how the data is used in content creation, and how it all works together.’ The Johnnie Walker brand strives to truly connect with customers at every stage of their journey, leveraging the most accurate personal data for contextual hyper targeting and hyper personalisation. This data is used holistically to measure both advertising performance and brand effectiveness.

First-party data is vital to the personalised advertising campaigns that drive short-term performance and long-term brand growth. Implement a personalised approach in your media strategies with single-source data that reveals the full customer view.

2. Mars - Understanding Customers Through Direct Research & Connection; And Partnerships: Collaboration Internally, with Customers, and with Other Relevant Category Leaders

‘Marketing hasn't changed that much since ‘Don Draper’. Our goal is to build brands that are providing value to people - as marketers we should spend more time talking about what that value is,’ advises Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director of Marketing Effectiveness at Mars.

As a family-owned business free to experiment away from shareholder appeasement, Mars doesn’t think in quarters, it thinks in legacy. The confectionary leader’s marketing and executive teams alike are driven by the sincere belief that its brands are the engine for business growth and value creation. The company balances the tricky task of evolving its marketing strategy to remain relevant to new and younger consumer demographics, whilst staying true to its heritage and core values.

Collaboration within marketing teams and internal departments, and across relationships with customers and partners, power the brand house’s ability to weave short-term performance campaigns into its long-term brand growth goals. Sales, marketing and digital technology teams work closely together from the start of any campaign and share the same long-term vision, goals and KPIs. 

Mars’ consumer-obsessed philosophy is founded on rich data and meaningful, one-to-one relationships created by marketing and nurtured across channels. Social media teams observe consumer behaviour in response to campaigns, and work with R&D teams to unite advertising effectiveness insights with original consumer research, to develop products and campaigns that meet evolving consumer expectations.

The snack specialists’ brands strive to build human-to-human connections with consumers in the short and long-term, with the wider goal of using social media advertising to educate audiences in eating better. Mars created a whole new agency ecosystem to meet its consumers in the places where they already exist. Rather than traditional communications where a client submits a brief and an agency creates a 30-second ad in response, the company brought together a collective team across the in-house marketing department, the brand’s many associates and agency partners. The fundamentally different approach aims to meet consumers where they are on their journey, promoting consumer-to-brand conversation rather than just pushing content out. 18 months into the new model, Mars representatives report great impact and much closer connections with consumer audiences. 

Mars’ own original first-hand research powers emotive advertising campaigns that resonate with audiences, as evidenced in sales volume, and nurtures long-term relationships. ‘Emotions are helping brands build memory structures, which is the role of advertising,’ Patilinet continues. ‘The role of marketing is to order the marketing communications needed to build memory structures into the minds of consumers. We have done tonnes of research to understand how emotions work and what role various emotions play.

‘Storytelling is getting harder because of consumer behaviour: people spend only seconds with content. We have to work with consumer behaviour rather than just on what we want to communicate. We know that we need to monitor consumer response to the long tail of content. All of our tools are built around behavioural measures. We work with various industry partners on predictive models for attention and emotional response linked to sales. 

‘Because we are behavioural first, we assess advertising effectiveness via a sales impact lens - both short-term and long-term. When we talk about ‘the long term’, we're talking about ‘the long term sales impact of marketing’. We know that there is an equity element: brand value is measured in multiple ways.’

Matthew Graham, CMO of Global Food and Nutrition, shares how Mars revolutionised its approach to retailer partnerships to drive both sales and brand: ‘We disrupted the traditional way of collaborating with retailers by conducting our own consumer shopping research and brought it to the biggest retailer in the UK. We approached the supermarket with what we believed were huge insights in a category-busting opportunity and said we wanted to work with them to realise it.

‘Together with the retailer, we formed not only the proposition but also the execution plan, both from a marketing and sales point of view. The supermarket brought in not just a section in an aisle for us, but created a whole new aisle and brought in competitors to form the new category aisle. We launched the project in mid-2024 and so far it’s exceeding expectations. The opportunity wouldn’t have happened if marketing and sales weren’t aligned from the start with the same vision and KPIs, and if we hadn’t positioned customers at the heart of collaboration.’ 

Mars has in recent years amped up partnerships with leaders in similar and complementary categories, that share both target audience groups and consumer values of self-expression and individuality:

• The new Uber/Uber Eats and Skittles brand campaign displays Journey Ads and Post-Check Out Ads to consumers taking a ride or waiting for their Uber Eats order. Customers can seamlessly interact with the Skittles website throughout their experience and add Skittles products to their Uber Eats shopping carts. Tom Manktelow, Senior Manager of On Demand Delivery at Mars Snacking, explains, ‘To win in an increasingly digitally-connected world, our job is clear – deliver great brand experiences for people wherever they are. Whether you’re on your way home from a night out or travelling back from the airport after a long flight, the Skittles products at the end of the rainbow are now within reach for Uber users.’

  
  

• M&M’s and kate spade new york unveiled the Candy-Inspired Capsule Collection of themed handbags, jewellery and accessories that will launch globally this Christmas. The collection marries M&M’s colourful products and packaging with kate spade new york’s style to create a playful and bold experience that lasts much longer than the taste of sweets. 

  
  

• A Generative AI-driven Snickers partnership created an AI clone of football manager José Mourinho that sent personalised coaching videos to consumers’ friends and family. Involving consumers directly in campaign content creation marked successful experimentation with media that the brand had never used before. 

  
  

• M&M’s established another recent partnership with Christmas family film Red One, offering a limited-time special edition offer in the form of the M&M’S Snack Jacket. The merchandise represents the ‘spokescandy’ mascot Red and includes pockets to hold M&M’S and movie tickets, a strap to hold a popcorn bucket and a light to help moviegoers find their seats in the dark. 

  
  

“The reason that the founders and entrepreneurs are very keen to partner and work with Mars as a differentiator is our long-term view to start with,” believes Andrew Clarke, Mars Snacking global president. ‘We have an ability to really protect and respect and build those brands for the long run.’

Mars’ focus on collaboration to drive short-term and long-term consumer connections is paying off in abundance. Research-based advertising is powering global expansion, with Mars product sales growing 40% last year in India and Brazil, and sugar-free Dove products reaching $14 million in just 10 months with 80% of customers new to Mars products. Clarke expects digital sales of Mars’ sweet snacks to reach a three-fold growth of $4 billion by 2030, attributed by the brand to digitising the business with partnerships like Amazon and Uber.

3. P&G -  Prioritising Investment in Brand Over Promotion to Increase Market Size, & Uniting Brand-Building Mass Marketing with Targeted Activation In Advertising Campaigns

Leading brand house Procter & Gamble harnessed the long-term approach that saw market-dominating FMCG brands come out on top after historic recessions. By keeping ad spend high throughout the pandemic, P&G maintained significant levels of investment where other advertisers are still making up for lost brand-building time. 

The CPG pioneers continually commit to a large advertising budget as a major growth driver for the brand and business, but measure advertising ROI by long-term revenue growth rather than short-term sales activation. CEO Jon Moeller states, ‘We would rather invest $1 in innovation, or $1 in brand building, any day of the week before we invest in promotion.’ A test-and-learn approach with close and constant advertising optimisation enables the company to deliver astronomical savings on media spend, at projections of $500million per year, which is then ploughed directly back into advertising to drive greater innovation and impact. 

A large proportion of media investment is allocated to increasing the capabilities of P&G’s advertising tools, which are delivering greater depth in consumer data and insights that further create spend efficiencies. Moeller expands, ‘We have line of sight to savings from improved marketing productivity, more efficiency and greater effectiveness, avoiding excess frequency and reducing waste while increasing reach.’

P&G’s best example of long-term brand growth alongside continuous short-term campaign performance is one of the world’s most successful brands: Gillette. The 2008 recession proved challenging when converting existing customers to new, more expensive razor models - but Gillette met the challenge with record results. 

A combination of mass marketing and targeted advertising built on the brand image of ‘the best a man can get’ to reach men aged 18 to 34 who shopped in Walmart. Gillette created a campaign that tapped into its audience’s sports and video games interests to link up with the most popular game that year, Madden 10. The campaign duration saw a 20% increase in Fusion razor sales inside Walmart. The hyper targeted sales activation campaign focused on a very small, well-understood audience segment and ran at the same time as a mass reach TV advertising campaign featuring Tiger Woods and Roger Federer aimed at the whole category. 

Innovation supported by both mass marketing and targeted sales activation has been carried through Gillette’s advertising strategy ever since. In 2022 the brand rolled out its largest UK launch campaign to date for its premium innovation hub, with a new razor featuring a built-in exfoliation bar to reduce the consumer pain point of time-consuming shaving. Gillette’s R&D team iterated every element of the product over three years, including testing 60 different forms of the scallops on the razor’s exfoliating bar to find the most effective design. The ad campaign maximised market reach across TV, outdoor, a takeover of Gillette Soccer Saturday and partnerships with football and Formula One influencers. The razor and wider brand concept tested in the top 5% of consumer goods launches: better than any Gillette launch in history.

‘While DTC is the lifeblood of the data and insights, traditional retail partners are a massive part of campaign success,’ Brand Director Callum Wood says of the strategic approach to mass and targeted advertising. ‘The other piece is using digital and data to personalise our messages, especially for younger consumers, with a message that resonates in a channel they’re more likely to be in. We’ve been modernising our media mix through the years and, as channels like TikTok grow in prominence, we need to make sure that we are playing across the wide range.’

P&G are marrying their long-term innovation-focused approach with a goal that’s wider than just increasing the company’s own market share: investing in innovation to increase the total market size itself. The consumer branding experts are introducing new use cases for individual categories and attracting new customers into these categories, benefiting P&G, its partner retailers and the growth of the category and whole market.

Moeller shares, ‘By far the most prominent part of the discussion is, what can we do, working together, to increase market size? If you look at the opportunity to fully penetrate households with innovation that delights them and improves their lives, now is not the time to be pulling back on investments in marketing, or commercialisation efforts of that innovation.

‘Superior innovations that are driven by deep consumer insights, communicated to consumers with more efficient and effective marketing programmes, executed in-store and online in conjunction with retailer strategies grow categories and brands.’

Looking at ad spend effectiveness over longer periods of time, and acting on insights to innovate for larger scale meaningful change, has paid off incrementally for P&G in both short-term sales activation and long-term revenue growth. In 2024 the company reported fiscal year net sales of $84.0 billion, an increase of 2% on the previous year, and organic sales growth of 4%. P&G has seen at least 4% organic sales growth for the past six consecutive years, and is projecting all-in sales growth of up to 4% for fiscal year 2025 with organic sales growth of up to 5%. 

Join the Leading Brands: Balance Short-Term & Long Term Marketing Efforts for Maximum ROI

World-beating CPG marketing leaders are operating with strategies that prioritise:

• The Customer Above All - Putting the customer at the heart of both brand and activation, listening to them by creating direct connections, and truly understanding them as individuals with diverse needs and interests

• The Best Data - Creating original research, selecting the right data and measurement tools, and continually testing and learning

• The Best Partnerships - Working with retailers, suppliers and agency partners by collaborating from the very start of the marketing strategy and every campaign, aligning to the same goals and continually analysing and improving performance.

Ultimately, paid media is a form of distribution for the best marketing strategy, consumer content and customer comms. Advertising should be treated as a core part of the marketing mix - but implemented optimally and measured accurately.   

Amongst the many misleading attribution models on the market, only single-source first-party data measures the full 360 view of the purchase journey - and enables full understanding of consumer behaviour. Empower your teams to identify the most effective channels and deliver the most effective messaging that builds long-term relationships and drives customer sales. Gain the advantage over your competitors with the customer insights provided by single-source data.