Why FMCG growth still depends on memory, attention, and long-term brand building—not dashboards alone.
I started my career in the 90s working with the Harvard of FMCGs, namely Procter & Gamble. That was truly what I would call Performance Marketing. Everything was monitored, absolutely nothing was left to chance. Every action was tied to sales. We even had a way of predicting immediate sales effects before we received the official market shares from Nielsen. P&G used to monitor their product stocks in their warehouses when campaigns were launched to see the immediate effect. We could even determine the success of a campaign, excluding any promotional effect in the category, by monitoring sales in small neighborhood grocery stores that had no promotions.
That was what I would call true performance marketing. But we never called it that way, because it was obvious. That was our job: make advertising work to build brands and sales. It sounds like science fiction now.
The performance deficit of low-attention media
Fast forward to today and the new “performance marketing” narrative. The pseudo-science behind it makes you think that everything else before that was not about performance. A very smart narrative implying that the past was a waste of money. Clever, but a total fallacy in reality. When it comes to FMCG, I truly believe performance marketing is a total scam. Just walk down the aisle of your supermarket and show me one brand that was built through performance marketing, and its social and digital sidekicks.
Probably none! All these brands pre-existed the digital revolution. Basically, we have switched from real marketing and sales to digital dashboards monitoring what I would call “superficial efficiency.” While it could eventually work in some categories, I doubt it, it is absolutely useless in FMCG. Such purchases are very fast and require little or no thinking down supermarket aisles, which means you need to build memory to remain top of mind. The #1 brand at the top of mind is generally the category leader in FMCG. And for that, you need to build memory, which social and digital media are totally incapable of doing unless you go viral, which is the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket.
Real performance needs attention, building media-supporting penetration
Memory buildup is fundamental, and for that, you need to build attention-building media. Maybe TV is no longer as powerful as it used to be, but when it comes to FMCG, it remains the best attention-building media, along with OOH, to build memory.
According to Peter Field’s research, high-attention media deliver above 58 percent more attentive seconds per spent, which translates into stronger brand effect and market share growth.
One must always remember that in FMCG, three out of four brand buyers buy your brand once (source: Europanel), so being ‘top of mind’ is crucial, and only memory-building media can do that. Most growth comes from reaching more people than squeezing more from existing customers. Focusing your attention on existing customers is yet another fallacy beautifully crafted as “performance marketing,” via its precision marketing accomplices this time. Basically, the biggest source of growth is category buyers who do not buy your brand. It’s called penetration, and it is the only viable strategy for FMCG.
The long and short of it all
Finally, one cannot write about performance without citing Les Binet and Peter Field’s brilliant article “The Long and Short of It”. Their evidence is solid (based on analyzing the performance of 1000 campaigns), and it comes up to the three key points.
Long-term brand building is fundamental and should make up at least 50 percent of your investment versus short-term tactics.
Emotional ads work best, especially when paired with distinctive assets, such as the Cadbury Gorilla, the Milka Purple Cow, or McDonald’s Golden Arches.
Focusing on fame (mental availability) drives growth.
And I would add, in today’s attention-deficit ecosystem: repetition and consistency.
The way forward: easy but very hard
While all the elements cited above are easily understandable, with plenty of articles and studies proving the rationale, they are very hard to implement, especially in the GCC. The marketing culture remains very focused on short-term, demanding immediate results, even though dismal. It takes a lot of courage to play the long term, build brands, and, most importantly, rebalance the budget in favor of traditional media.
The tide is turning in Western markets. Brands and especially FMCG behemoths, such as Nestle and Unilever, are rethinking their approach because their brands have been destroyed with the rise of low-attention media over the past 15 years. There is definitely hope, and the best evidence will come from the Super Bowl, with the return of great work and big ideas, as evidenced by the Pepsi and Budweiser work that has already been released and gone viral.
(Hubert Boulos is the Founder and CEO of Das Kapital. This opinion piece was originally published in the FMCG Crisis Playbook digital issue of Communicate. For more insights, read the full issue here)
