Qual a diferença entre performance de curto prazo e autoridade de longo prazo?

A ativação de curto prazo dá um pico de vendas nítido que decai quando o investimento para. A construção de marca é lenta, mais durável e compõe ao longo dos anos. Uma aluga atenção agora; a outra constrói uma posição que fica.

O que é a regra 95-5 e porque importa para a marca?

John Dawes, do Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, estimou que num dado momento a larga maioria dos compradores não está no mercado. A publicidade encontra sobretudo quem não vai comprar já, e o seu papel é ficar na memória para quando esse comprador entrar em compra.

Porque é que estar em todo o lado não constrói autoridade?

Espalhar a marca por todos os canais, sem uma tese que se repita, produz alcance sem memória. A disponibilidade mental constrói-se por associação, e a associação exige repetição consistente do mesmo sinal, não presença dispersa em tudo.

Construir autoridade de marca dá resultados garantidos?

Não, e quem o promete está a vender certeza que não tem. A evidência de eficácia mostra padrões médios e correlações, não garantias para um negócio concreto. O que a autoridade oferece é defensabilidade e margem ao longo do tempo, não o pico de vendas de amanhã.

Devo abandonar a performance de curto prazo?

Não. Não é um contra o outro. Os próprios autores do estudo de referência guardam cerca de 40% do orçamento para a ativação, que converte quem está no mercado hoje. A questão é parar de confundir performance de curto prazo com estratégia de marca.

The end of being everywhere: brand authority or the short term

Whoever runs a company has learned to buy results that appear at the end of the month: the ad that generates the click, the campaign that fills the funnel, the presence measured the following week. It is a legitimate discipline, and it is still needed. What has changed is that the effectiveness evidence, accumulated over more than a decade, points with an uncomfortable consistency to the other side of the table. The effect that compounds, that sustains the margin and stays on the balance sheet is not the short-term peak, it is the authority built slowly. This article explains the difference, what it is worth to the business, and where the proof stops.

Short term and long term are not the same effect at different speeds

In 2013, Les Binet and Peter Field published for the British IPA the analysis that still organizes this debate today. They cross-referenced 996 campaigns from the IPA Databank, the archive of case studies submitted to the effectiveness awards between 1980 and 2010, and separated two types of effect. Sales activation, the part that generates immediate response, produces a sharp, short peak that decays quickly when the investment stops. Brand building produces a slow, more durable effect that accumulates over years. The conclusion that became famous is the average balance: around 60% of the budget on brand building, 40% on activation.

The common error is to read this as two speeds of the same thing, as if brand building were activation with patience. It is not. They are two distinct jobs. Activation harvests the demand that already exists; brand building creates the disposition to buy that does not yet exist. One pays for today's sale. The other buys the memory that decides the sale two years from now. And it is precisely the second, the one that compounds, that spreading presence everywhere, cheaply and without a position, is incapable of manufacturing.

Why being everywhere fails

There is a fact that reorganizes the question. John Dawes, of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, summed it up in 2021 in what became known as the 95-5 rule. Starting from the average cycle between purchases (a company changes its main bank or its law firm about once every five years), he estimated that, at any given moment, the vast majority of business buyers are not in the market. Something like 5% per quarter for long-cycle categories. The other 95% will not buy any time soon.

The implication is hard for whoever buys presence chasing tomorrow's result. The ad that fires today reaches mostly those who will not decide now. Its job, for those people, is not to close the sale. It is to stay in the memory for when the buyer enters the market, months or years from now. The brand remembered in that instant is the one that wins the consideration. Being everywhere, without a position that sticks, spends the encounter without leaving a trace.

This is where being everywhere falls apart as a strategy. Spreading the brand across every channel, without a thesis, without a point of view that repeats, produces reach without memory. What builds mental availability is the opposite of dispersion: consistent, repeated, recognizable brand signals, and in the right places, not in all of them. Memory forms by association, and association requires the repetition of the same. A brand that changes its face with each campaign, or that dilutes itself into everything so as not to be missing anywhere, does not build a position. It builds noise under its own name.

And your sector is not the average

Dawes himself is the first to delimit the number, and that honesty is what makes it useful. The 95% figure, he writes, is not meant to be a precise rule; he uses it as a heuristic to convey the idea that the vast majority of companies, for many products, are not in the market in a given period. It depends on the category: it is calculated from the average time between purchases. Whoever sells something bought every week has far more people in buying mode at any moment, and there activation weighs more. The 60/40, likewise, is an average, not a law: the authors themselves show that the balance shifts according to the medium and the business. There is no number that serves your company without someone first looking at your concrete purchase cycle.

The part our own sector does not want to admit

If the evidence is so clear, one would expect the money to already follow it. It does not, and it would be dishonest to pretend it does. NIQ, in its CMO Outlook for 2026, shows conviction at the top of the company cooling. Only 69% of marketing leaders say their chief executive and their chief financial officer support long-term investment in the brand, against 80% the year before. Only 55% already allocate 60% or more of the budget to brand building, four points fewer than in 2024. And 84% point to return on investment as the main metric for deciding where to spend. Under pressure for results, the brand loses to the number that appears now.

WARC documents the other half of the paradox. In 2026, in a survey of more than a thousand professionals, 55% see short-termism as a major concern of the sector, against 25% in 2022. The argument has become the majority view. The behaviour has not. WARC calls it the vicious circle: wrong metrics, wasted spend and decreasing returns that feed one another. The shift to long-term authority is winning on paper and losing on the spreadsheet. Whoever makes it now, with method, makes it against the current, not with it. That is also why it pays off: it is a hard position to take, and what is hard to replicate is what can be defended.

There is also a result that cuts against NP, and we do not hide it. Ehrenberg-Bass, with Byron Sharp, holds that what makes brands grow is not perceived differentiation, but distinctiveness added to availability. A brand has to be recognizable at once; the difference, for Sharp, need not be significant. NP argues that what is the same has no authority, and holds the position. A ready-made template with the name swapped is, by definition, indistinct, and leaves no memory of its own. The distinctiveness Sharp demands and the authority we build meet in the same practical place, being recognizable and reusable as an asset, even if they start from different premises.

The money: what authority does to the margin

The legitimate objection of whoever signs the cheque is the simplest of all: show me the money. It is on this point that the effectiveness literature is clearer than on any other. Profit Ability 2, the econometric study commissioned by Thinkbox and published in 2024, measured the return of advertising by channel. The short-term return, within three months, was on average profitable, at 1.87 pounds of profit per pound invested. But the long-term effect was, on average, more than double the short-term one. The part that shines least in the immediate metrics is the one that produces the largest share of profit over time.

The framing is old and solid. David Aaker defined, in 1991, brand equity as the set of assets, and liabilities, tied to the brand's name and symbol, that add or subtract value. The decisive word is the second. An indistinct brand is not worth zero, it subtracts. A brand with authority sustains price without losing the customer, retains demand and defends itself in the company's valuation. The short-term spend disappears when it is cut; authority stays on the balance sheet and compounds. It is the difference between renting attention and owning a position.

Translated into the invoice, without promising what the evidence does not guarantee: the remembered brand enters the consideration halfway there, which lowers the cost of converting it into a customer; the brand with authority charges what it is worth without being punished for it, which protects the margin; and the position, once fixed, is expensive to imitate, which is defensibility. None of these three things appears in Friday's campaign. All of them appear in the company's value two years later.

What this does not prove

None of this proves that building authority will give more money to your concrete business, and whoever promises you that is selling you a certainty they do not have. The caveats, because without them the numbers are worth nothing.

The 95-5 rule is a heuristic, not a measurement, and the author himself says so; it changes with the category. The IPA Databank is made of self-selected award entries, the sector's best work submitted by the agencies themselves, hence biased by selection; it is indicative, not a sample of the economy. Profit Ability 2 is econometric modelling on British cases, commissioned by a television marketing body with an interest in the result, and it is correlation, not a controlled experiment. The NIQ and WARC numbers measure opinion, not behaviour or return; and they point, in the real budget, to the side opposite the thesis: the shift to the long term is happening in the discourse, not yet in the money.

And it is not one against the other. Authority without activation does not close the sale of whoever is in the market today, and that is why the authors themselves keep 40% for the short term. The question was never to abolish performance. It was to stop confusing it with brand strategy, and to stop spending on presence what should be built into a position.

Authority is buying an option on the future

What changes when you look at this as a board member, and not as a campaigns manager, is the horizon. Short-term demand generation is an expense: it is paid, it produces, and it disappears when you stop paying. Authority is another thing. To build it is to buy an option on the future of the business, a position that, if it is defensible and repeated with method, is worth more tomorrow than it costs today, and that the competition cannot match by spreading itself across more channels. Authority is not bought in a media plan. It is built, and that is why it compounds.

At NP we treat this as what it is, an asset that is measured and defended, not a matter of style. It is what the Method makes auditable, point by point, rather than a matter of opinion, and it is on that asset that we exist to work: converting perception into a financial asset, not decorating the company.

Sources

Every number in this article was verified in the primary source or in its reference publication. Where the source does not support the current reading, or has an interest in the result, we say so in the text. It is the least that is asked of anyone who claims that the brand is measured.