Branding Beyond the Quarter: Measuring Long-Term Media Impact with Data Science

According to the IPA’s landmark study, The Long and the Short of It, the optimal marketing investment split is 60% brand-building and 40% activation—a balance proven to maximize long-term ROI across industries. Yet many brands over-index on short-term tactics, driven by immediate KPIs. This imbalance risks eroding brand equity, weakening pricing power, and compromising future growth. Strategic rebalancing is not optional—it’s essential for sustainable performance.

The most iconic brands—those that command cultural relevance and consumer trust—aren’t built in a quarter. They’re built over years, through consistent investment in media that shapes perception and builds emotional connection. The challenge? Proving that investment pays off. Traditional measurement tools often miss the full picture. But with the right measurement approach, brands can measure the long-term return on branding—and help marketers make smarter, more balanced decisions.
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The Risk of Prioritizing Immediate Results

It’s easy to see why marketers focus on short-term performance. It’s measurable, actionable, and often tied to media channels that deliver quick results. But this focus can be dangerously narrow.

Brands that chase short-term gains at the expense of long-term brand building often find themselves in a cycle of diminishing returns. As brand equity weakens, customer acquisition becomes more expensive, loyalty declines, and even short-term performance begins to suffer. A notable example is a European automotive brand’s joint venture with a Chinese motor group. In its effort to compete with domestic Chinese manufacturers, the brand placed excessive emphasis on pricing and promotional strategies. This approach ultimately undermined its premium European image. Consequently, the company had to significantly downsize its workforce and reduce its manufacturing footprint in China following several years of declining sales.

Adding a Long-Term Lens to Traditional MMM

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) has long been a valuable tool for assessing media effectiveness, especially in capturing short-term outcomes like conversion spikes following campaign launches (for more on the holistic role of MMM, see our dedicated article here). However, it’s important to clarify that traditional MMM isn’t inherently short-term in its design. Rather, most MMMs, as applied in organizations today, tend to emphasize short-term results—primarily because they often exclude brand-related indicators and longer-term KPIs.

This traditional application can unintentionally skew media planning toward immediate performance drivers—such as paid search or promotions—while underrepresenting the influence of upper-funnel channels like TV, influencers, or digital out-of-home. The result is a bias toward short-term tactics, reinforcing a cycle that overlooks the cumulative value of brand-building efforts.
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A Holistic Approach to Media Planning with Long-Term MMM

To truly understand media’s full value, we need to look beyond the quarter. Long-Term MMM (LT-MMM) does just that. It builds on the foundation of classical MMM, which first isolates short-term media contributions from sales data. From there, LT-MMM goes further—decomposing the remaining baseline sales into long-term drivers, including brand attitudes and delayed media effects.

This approach allows marketers to quantify how media contributes not just to immediate sales, but to long-term brand equity and future performance. It’s a more holistic view—one that aligns with how consumers actually build relationships with brands.

At Ekimetrics, we’ve developed LT-MMM frameworks that integrate multi-year data, brand health KPIs, and attitudinal metrics to reveal the full impact of media investments, not only on sales but also brand health.

Case Study: Beauty Brands in China – Rebalancing for Long-Term Growth

Beauty brands in China often face a strategic challenge: a strong focus on short-term sales performance can overshadow the long-term value of brand building media investments. Traditional measurement models often struggle to capture the delayed impact of upper-funnel media, leading to underinvestment in key brand equity drivers.

To address this challenge, we apply Long-Term MMM by developing two complementary models that bridge the gap between performance and brand building:
• A Baseline Model to capture long-term sales dynamics
• A Brand Attitudes Model to quantify media’s influence on brand perception over time

For one of our clients, we applied these models across the Skincare and Makeup categories, uncovering nuanced differences in media effectiveness by product line and across different time horizons.

Key insights from this holistic strategy include:
• Media channels with modest short-term ROI delivered 1.3x to 1.9x stronger long-term multipliers, underscoring their critical role in sustaining brand equity and driving enduring value.
• Brand attitudes explained up to 65% of long-term sales variance in Skincare and 45% in Makeup
• Budget reallocation toward high-impact brand-building media improved both brand health and long-term ROI

The analysis highlights the critical importance of measuring media’s long-term impact on brand health. By adopting a long-term measurement lens, beauty brands in China can build a more balanced media strategy—one that supports immediate performance while laying the foundation for sustained growth.
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Key Takeaway: Brand Building Is Measurable

Marketers have long known that brand matters. What’s changed is our ability to prove it. With LT-MMM, we can quantify the long-term impact of media, identify the true drivers of brand equity, and make smarter investment decisions.

In a world where short-term pressure is constant, this kind of measurement is more than a nice-to-have—it’s a strategic imperative. Because the brands that win in the long run are the ones that never stop building.

Want to learn more?
Check out Ekimetrics’s white paper: Long-Term Marketing Performance: Brand Equity, Measuring and Optimizing to Guide Your Decisions

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