Marketers often want to refresh creative assets regularly, but what are the longer-term implications of making frequent changes to advertising / marketing content?

How often should you change your advertising / content creative? Find out:

• How chopping and changing creative can weaken marketing performance
• The value of consistent creative in driving longer term growth
• The importance of having distinctive core brand assets and using them consistently

Creative consistency is key to building stronger brands, yet businesses and marketers seem to be driven by a desire to change creative regularly.

Perhaps part of the issue stems from the immediacy that performance marketing brings. With performance marketing activity you can see results almost instantly. It creates a climate of ‘responsiveness’ and a desire to change things quickly – possibly even immediately! - where results aren’t as anticipated. There’s temptation to review the creative before it’s really had chance to bed in.

Where campaigns have been running for a while, and audiences could be seen to be getting tired of the execution (creative wearout), marketers often want to ‘reinvent’ the campaign… at the expense of core brand assets that have already been established and become recognised.

The truth is that consistent creative execution over time delivers stronger long-term brand and business results:

1. “Continuity of distinctive assets is more important than being clever or new.”

Byron Sharp / Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, How Brands Grow

Consistency builds mental availability, where a brand comes easily to mind when a buyer is in a purchasing situation:

• Byron Sharp (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute) argues in 'How Brands Grow', that distinctive brand assets (logos, colours, jingles, slogans, characters) must be used consistently over time to build strong memory structures
   
• Refreshing creative too often weakens these memory associations, reducing brand awareness and engagement
   

2. “The most effective campaigns retain the same characters, music, and themes across years.”

Binet & Field, IPA (The Long and the Short of It)

In their report, The Long and Short of It, Binet & Field showed that better long-term performance came from consistent creative strategies. This landmark analysis of over 1,000 advertising case studies shows:

• Campaigns with consistent creative elements over multiple years were more effective at building long-term brand equity
   
• Campaigns that changed creative too often tended to perform worse on business metrics (e.g., profit, share gain)
   
• Emotionally consistent campaigns outperformed more variable, rational-message campaigns in the long run
   

3. “Brands with the most consistent creative produced twice as many profit gains compared to the least consistent brands.”

System1 / IPA report, How creative consistency strengthens brands and business effects.

In their analysis of 56 brands and over 4,000 ads, they connected creative consistency scores (CCS) with business outcomes:

• Brands in the top 20% for consistency produced significantly better ads and reported twice as many profit gains compared to the least consistent group.
   
• Creative consistency, measured across positioning, distinctiveness, and agency continuity, was linked to higher ad quality, recognisability, and positive growth over time

Some of the most successful brands have tapped into the value that consistent creative execution brings.

• Nike’s ‘Just do it’ core message and style have remained consistent since 1988.
   
• Compare the Market’s meerkats core theme has seen over a decade of consistent use, with a strong identity and emotional engagement.

Investment in mental availability - using consistent and distinctive brand memory cues - pays dividends in the longer term.
 

Key takeaways – creative consistency

Consistent creative execution:

• Increases long-term profit growth
   
• Strengthens brand memory, awareness and engagement
   
• Drives higher ROI and more efficient use of media
   
• Wins both hearts (emotion) and minds (recognition)

Creative consistency – caveat!

A 2023 study, ‘Consistency and commonality in advertising content: Helping or Hurting?’ by Maren Becker and Maarten J. Gijsenberg, in the International Journal of Research in Marketing suggested that some brands should be consistent and common in their advertising strategy, and others shouldn't.

‘While the best strategy for small, less-known brands is to remain consistent over time to create and preserve brand essence, larger brands will be most successful when they differ and surprise in their advertising content over time.’

This doesn’t mean that larger brands should divert away from their core brand assets, but that they should keep them central when creating surprising, unknown and never-seen-before content.

Interested in marketing strategy? This article may be of interest:
The key to marketing success? Think longer-term