Marketing’s Least Loved: what lies between the long and short
In her regular column for Mumbrella, VMLY&R chief strategy officer Alison Tilling looks at the long and the short of the middle.
Balancing “The Long and the Short of It” has become a marketing industry hot topic, thanks to the work of Les Binet and Peter Field in their 2013 paper of the same name, and plenty of development work since. If you haven’t read these, well, you probably should.
But between the adrenalin shot of short-term thinking and the holy grail of brand-building in the long-term, lies an overlooked and underused horizon: the medium-term.
It might sound boring, inherently overlook-able, because it isn’t one of the extremes: but it can be powerful. Here’s how.
What is the medium-term? Getting some definitions in place
“Short-term” in marketing usually applies to thinking a quarter ahead. Results are announced to the markets quarterly and that is still a crucial rhythm for publicly-listed companies and the economy generally, much as we sometimes rail against it.
“Long-term” usually applies to a three-year timeframe, or even longer, which just about equates to the average CMO tenure.
There’s another, forgotten timeline that companies and brands use more than they care to admit: past-term. The past has a bad rep in the agile-pivoting-warp-speed mythology marketing likes to believe about itself. In fact, if the past is used to provoke change in all the right places it can be incredibly powerful. It’s when “that’s the way we’ve always done it” comes out that it becomes a false friend.
“Medium-term” is none of these.
Medium-term is the horizon that stretches from ‘next quarter’ to ‘next year’ or even at a stretch ‘the year after.’ It’s the grey area between the pressure of next month and the digital transformation work focusing on a distant future.
Which is precisely why it matters: according to the HBR, the medium-term may not be glamorous, but it is “where companies and businesses are shaped”.
“Medium-term” helps eat the elephant one bite at a time
Medium-term thinking, planning and acting can be the bridge between short-term marketing ‘acts’ (promotions, activations, short campaigns) and building in the longer-term. Brand planning still tends to happen annually and breaking a long-term brand build into medium-term parts means avoiding overwhelm while building belief in a narrative bigger than just ‘the next product release’ or ‘the next promotion’. Thinking medium-term brings long-term strategy into glorious technicolour focus rather than keeping it at arms’ length: it is easier to see how the elephant is being eaten, and which bite to take next.
Nuix: a salutary tale in overlooking the medium-term
Take Nuix as an example. The data company floated in December 2020, and they quickly became an ASX darling, with a high of $11.86 per share in January 2021. Yet by early May, that price had reached a low of $3.14.
Nuix has strong long-term planning in place, and a long-term value proposition.
In the short-term, it had done the preparation work for listing on the market.
It’s the medium-term that suffered: in the words of the Chairman Jeff Bleich, Nuix “did not appreciate the challenges of a company with a valuation of over a billion dollars.” It’s that medium-term bridge from listing to fulfilling long-term vision; that is where Nuix will now focus.
LEGO: designing for the medium-term
It’s interesting that the medium-term tends to be the horizon where private equity and family-owned businesses focus. Take LEGO, for example. LEGO has a deservedly strong reputation for long-term brand building. Looking through annual reports gives an understanding of some of the ways that long-term success is achieved: through yearly and 18-month targets, that break the long-term into what is achievable, yet still give things time to develop. Sustainability for example is key to LEGO’s CSR strategy – measured on medium-term annual targets set in conjunction with WWF.
Medium-term is how people live their lives
People live day-to-day and we have long term dreams, that much is true. Yet a lot of life happens in the timeframe that sits between. In advertising, this context matters, and the masters play it well.
While Nike looks at long-term societal plays, it also helps ‘the athlete in everyone’ think not only from one run to the next, but from one medium-term goal to the next: the fun runs that become half-marathons next year that turn into ultra-running beyond that.
Afterpay and similar payment systems tap into the medium-term in the human brain: I want to buy something now, but I don’t want the longer-term compromise of a credit card.
It’s looking properly at human behaviour and the importance of social and temporal context that can help tune into, and make the most of, a medium-term focus.
Hybrids, blends and the ‘new normal’
Thinking in a binary way won’t be doing marketing any favours when our working and non-working lives have become so much more blended. Working while at home, homing while at work means understanding overlaps matter for society, let alone marketing.
While place is obviously a different horizon to time, actively focusing on the medium-term will only help leaders deal with employee anxiety about this hybrid future. Most people cannot sustain the productivity gains during the pandemic; reports of burnout are common, but many fear a total return to the office in the longer-term. Negotiating the next year or so, ensuring both resilience and trust remain, is where medium-term thinking can help.
The medium-term is not glamorous, but it is crucial and can open up new lines of thinking, planning and working. The long and the short of it help us conceptualise how brands are built, but the ‘medium of it’ is where a lot of that work happens.
Alison Tilling is the chief strategy officer at VMLY&R. Marketing’s Least Loved is a regular Mumbrella column.
