The Eyelet.

You have invested a substantial amount of money in not only creative development but also media. Three months after starting the campaign, your sales aren’t up. It immediately appears like the creative didn’t work, so you’re on the phone scrambling to either change creative or your media mix.

Questions to Define Your Brand Development Lifecycle
Before jumping to conclusions about a campaign, we need to first understand both our brand and product lifecycle. Understand whether you’re a leading brand, trying to close a gap, striving to improve your image or whether your brand has a polished and respected image you’re hoping to reinforce. Just as important, you also need to fully understand how often people buy your product or service and how often the product or service is utilized. These are all important questions which need answered to understand your campaign lifecycle.

Even Great Campaigns Need Time
At Mlicki, we have mentioned it a lot, but it is a great and recent case study, which we have all seen or heard about: Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign . Strategy was genius: target the female for a man’s body wash since she is the one purchasing it. The creative was brilliant: showcase a man who seems to have it all and a personality of, “he takes what he wants.” However, three months into the campaign every leading marketing site was quick to jump on the band wagon of deeming the campaign a “failure” because sales weren’t up. Six months into the campaign, these blog posts suddenly stopped because the campaign was now a “success” due to an announcement in July that sales of Old Spice’s brand of body wash had doubled.

As we think about the product lifecycle, it all makes sense. How often do you need new body wash? For me, personally, it’s probably every three months. The marketers simply needed to give consumers time to use up their current brand of body wash. Once this product lifecycle ran its course, and most people had adequate time to recycle their body wash, it was clear the campaign had done its job.

Preparation Yields Results
What we can learn from this before launching a branding campaign? We need to have a crystal clear definition of our product or service brand lifecycle to understand how long a campaign needs to run before we will notice results. To do this, we need to know where our brand currently stands in the market place and clearly define our product lifecycle. For Old Spice, its brand had ground to make-up and its product lifecycle is around three months. This required a campaign lifecycle of at least six months before results could accurately be analyzed. Now, the campaign is well on its way to a 12-month cycle with additional extensions of creative due to its tremendous success.

Stay patient. Because sales aren’t where you would like them, your branding campaign may not be off course. Stay the course and give the creative time to work within the product lifecycle.