Your Marketing Works in Quarters. Your Customers Think in Years.

In 1997, researchers Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman ran a study on how frequently investors checked their portfolios. The finding was counterintuitive: investors who monitored their stocks more often took fewer risks and earned significantly less money than those who checked less frequently.

The reason? Every time they looked, short-term losses loomed large. Loss aversion kicked in. They panicked, adjusted, played it safe. The investors who checked quarterly saw the same volatility as background noise and stayed the course. Same market, same opportunities. Worse decisions from more information.

This is exactly what happens when businesses run their marketing on a quarterly clock.

Most of Your Market Isn't Buying Right Now

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimates that roughly 95% of category buyers are out of market at any given moment. This is the 95-5 rule: only about 5% of potential buyers are actively looking to purchase right now.

The maths behind it is straightforward. If your average customer buys your type of service once every five years, then in any given quarter, about 5% of the total market is in a buying cycle. For home services like HVAC, where replacement cycles run 15-20 years, the in-market percentage at any given moment is even smaller.

This means the vast majority of people you could sell to are not Googling you, not clicking your ads, not filling in your forms. Not because they don't need what you offer. Because they don't need it yet.

Byron Sharp's research across 130+ brands and 13+ product categories shows that when buyers eventually enter the market, they shortlist the brands they already remember. Mental availability, the propensity for a brand to come to mind in a buying situation, is what determines whether you make the shortlist. And mental availability is built over months and years, not weeks.

So here's the tension. Your marketing budget operates on a 90-day review cycle. Your customer's buying timeline operates on a 6 to 18 month cycle. And the metric that actually drives whether you win the sale (being remembered when they're ready) is built over years.

The Quarterly Trap

In 2024, marketers allocated 68.8% of their budgets to short-term performance tactics, up from 59.9% the year before. When asked for their ideal split, those same marketers named roughly 50-50. They know the balance is wrong. They do it anyway.

Why?

Because the dashboard tells them to.

Kahneman and Tversky's research on present bias explains this perfectly. Humans systematically overweight immediate, visible rewards and underweight future, invisible ones. A Google Ads campaign that generated 47 leads this month is tangible. A brand awareness effort that shifted unaided recall from 8% to 14% over six months is abstract. The 47 leads win the budget meeting every time, even when the recall shift is worth ten times more in long-term revenue.

This is the same mechanism Thaler found with investors. The more frequently you check your marketing performance, the more you see short-term fluctuations. The more you see fluctuations, the more you react to them. The more you react, the more you shift budget toward what's working right now and away from what builds value over time.

Mark Ritson has called long-term brand building "the ultimate strategic BOGOF": brand investment doesn't just build future demand. It makes your activation spend more efficient today. But that efficiency gain is invisible if you're only looking at the activation dashboard.

What 996 Campaigns Actually Show

Les Binet and Peter Field analysed approximately 996 campaigns from the IPA Effectiveness Awards database, spanning several decades. Their findings are the most robust data set in marketing effectiveness research.

The core insight: activation effects decay within weeks. Brand effects compound over years.

A price promotion or retargeting ad converts existing demand into sales within days. But when the promotion ends, the spike ends with it. Nothing was built. Nothing compounds.

Brand investment works differently. It creates memory structures that make future activation more effective. It builds the mental availability that puts you on the shortlist. It generates pricing power that means you don't have to compete on cost. And critically, it increases the elasticity of your activation spending: the same Google Ads budget converts more efficiently in a high-brand-equity environment than in a low-brand-equity environment.

Ekimetrics, a data science firm specialising in marketing measurement, found that a narrow focus on short-term performance can obscure nearly half of the potential media returns that come from long-term brand building. Their Long-Term Marketing Mix Modelling shows that channels with modest short-term ROI often deliver 1.3x to 1.9x stronger long-term multipliers. The channel that looks weakest on a quarterly report might be the one doing the most work.

The Harvest-Without-Planting Problem

Here's the pattern we see most often.

A business starts advertising. After three months, they look at the numbers. Some campaigns are converting leads. Others are building awareness but haven't generated direct enquiries yet. Under quarterly pressure, they cut the "underperforming" channels and double down on what's converting.

For the next quarter, results look strong. They're harvesting demand efficiently.

By quarter three, lead volume starts to plateau. They've captured most of the people who were already in-market and already aware of them. The pool of ready buyers hasn't been replenished because they stopped investing in the activity that feeds it.

By quarter four, they're spending more to get fewer leads. Cost per lead creeps up. They blame the algorithm, the competition, the market. But the real cause is simpler: they stopped planting and kept harvesting.

This is the expensive cycle. Stop brand investment. Watch performance metrics stay flat for a quarter (because existing brand equity takes time to decay). Conclude brand investment wasn't doing anything. Reallocate entirely to performance. Watch leads dry up two to three quarters later. Restart brand investment from scratch. Pay to rebuild what you already had.

Binet and Field's data shows that approximately 50% of brands show measurable declines within a year of stopping advertising. Smaller and newer brands are the most vulnerable. Decay is faster because there's less accumulated brand equity to draw on.

Rory Sutherland puts it differently. He argues that businesses reflexively prefer expensive engineering solutions over cheaper psychological ones because intangible fixes feel illegitimate. The same logic applies here: a Google Ads campaign is tangible (you can see the clicks, the leads, the cost). Brand building is intangible (you can't point to the moment someone remembered you). So businesses systematically overspend on what's visible and underspend on what actually drives long-term growth.

The Time Horizon Your Dashboard Doesn't Show

The fundamental problem isn't that businesses can't measure brand. It's that they measure everything on the same timeline.

A Google Ads search campaign should be evaluated monthly. Its effects are immediate and its feedback loops are fast.

A content strategy should be evaluated quarterly. SEO effects take months to materialise and compound slowly.

Brand building should be evaluated annually at minimum. Its effects on unaided awareness, consideration, and preference shift over 6 to 18 months. Its ROI only becomes visible when you stop measuring it the same way you measure performance.

Avinash Kaushik has proposed a hierarchy of marketing accountability that moves from Activity metrics (clicks, impressions) through Outcomes (leads, conversion rate) to true Accountability: ROAS, ROI, POAS (profit on ad spend), and finally POI (profit on investment). Most SMEs never get past ROAS. That's like judging an investment portfolio solely by this month's dividends while ignoring capital appreciation.

The fix isn't to stop measuring short-term performance. It's to stop using short-term metrics to evaluate long-term investments.

What This Means for Your Business

If you're spending $3,000 to $10,000 a month on marketing, you can't afford to waste it on the harvest-without-planting cycle. Here's how to avoid it.

The businesses that grow consistently aren't the ones with the best ads. They're the ones who resist the quarterly pressure to stop doing what works slowly in favour of what works fast. They understand that marketing is a compounding asset, not a monthly expense. And they measure it that way.

Further Reading

• The Long and the Short of It - Binet & Field's original IPA research on balancing brand and activation
• Branding Beyond the Quarter - Ekimetrics on measuring long-term media impact with data science
• The 95-5 Rule: Why B2B Growth Starts Long Before the Purchase - Ehrenberg-Bass research on out-of-market buyers
• 70% of Marketers Are Stuck in Short-Term Thinking - Data on the short-termism problem in marketing budgets
• The Problem With 'Campaign Thinking' in Marketing - Forbes on why burst campaigns undermine growth