A landscaping business has its best year ever. The diary is full, the phone keeps ringing and the owner decides there’s no point spending money or time on marketing when he can barely keep up with the work he has. He stops posting, lets the local directory listing lapse and cancels the small newspaper advert that has run for years.
For about six months, nothing changes. Then, slowly, the phone rings less. By the following year, enquiries are noticeably down, and he finds himself having to discount to fill gaps in the diary. When he restarts his marketing, it takes far longer to rebuild momentum than it took to lose it.
It’s an understandable decision, and an extremely common one. When a business is busy, or when money is tight, marketing is often the first thing to go. Research on what actually happens when brands stop advertising suggests that the cost is often delayed, which is exactly what makes it so easy to underestimate.
One Like insight: Stopping your marketing rarely hurts this month. That’s what makes it dangerous.
When brands go dark
In 2021, Nicole Hartnett, Virginia Beal, Rachel Kennedy and Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, with Adam Gelzinis of the Australian drinks retailer Endeavour Group, published a study in the Journal of Advertising Research called “When Brands Go Dark”. Using twenty years of sales and advertising data for Australian alcoholic drinks and mixer brands, they examined what happened when a brand stopped broad-reach advertising for a year or longer.
The average result was a steady decline. Compared with the last year they advertised, brands’ sales fell by 16% after one year without advertising, 25% after two years and 36% after three. The decline continued over the following years.
The averages hid large differences, and those differences are especially relevant for small businesses. Bigger brands that were growing often continued to grow for a year or two after stopping, cushioned by years of accumulated familiarity and availability. Almost all smaller brands that had been growing began to decline straight away. Brands that were already declining fell faster once they stopped.
The study has limits. It covered one product category in one country, and critics have pointed out that unweighted averages can exaggerate the typical effect, since individual brands varied widely. But the direction of the finding is consistent with decades of earlier research: stopping advertising rarely saves money in the long run, and the smaller the brand, the sooner it tends to feel the effect.
Why small businesses feel it fastest
The researchers’ explanation for the size effect is that bigger brands have built up more mental availability, meaning more people think of them, and more physical availability, meaning they’re easier to find and buy. That reservoir of familiarity keeps working for a while after advertising stops. Most small businesses don’t have that buffer. If people stop seeing and hearing about you, they gradually stop thinking of you when they need what you sell, and a competitor fills the gap.
Small businesses don’t need to spend heavily on advertising. The practical lesson is to avoid going completely silent, even when busy or under financial pressure. Staying visible doesn’t have to be expensive:
- Keep a minimum level of activity you can sustain in busy and quiet times alike, such as a weekly post, a monthly newsletter or a standing directory listing.
- Keep your owned channels alive. As we explored in You Have 2,000 Followers, staying in touch with customers who’ve opted in costs little.
- Keep reviews and listings fresh, so you remain findable when people search.
- When busy, shift the message rather than switching off, for example by showing work in progress or opening a waiting list.
[Infographic placement] What happens when advertising stops. A downward line chart of average sales after stopping broad-reach advertising: Year 1: −16%, Year 2: −25%, Year 3: −36%. A second, flatter line labelled Big growing brands stays steady for a year or two, while a steeper line labelled Small growing brands drops straight away. Caption: Hartnett et al. (2021), Journal of Advertising Research; averages vary widely by brand.
Never fully switching off
Decide on your “minimum visible presence”: the small amount of marketing you will keep doing no matter how busy or tight things get. Write it down. It might be one post a week, a monthly email and keeping your Google Business Profile up to date. Protect it the way you’d protect paying a key supplier.
When you do need to cut back, cut back rather than stop. Reduce the frequency, focus on the cheapest channels or shift to owned channels, but keep showing up. And if you have already gone quiet, restart sooner rather than later; the research suggests the longer the silence, the steeper the decline.
A few questions can help:
- What is the minimum marketing we will keep doing, whatever happens?
- When we’re busy, do we switch off, or change the message?
- How long has it been since a new potential customer last saw us somewhere?
- If enquiries fell in six months’ time, would we know whether our silence was the cause?
Which brings us back to the landscaper and his year of record work. He didn’t need to keep spending at full pace. But a weekly photo of a finished garden, a quarterly email to past clients and a live directory listing would have cost him an hour a week and kept him in people’s minds. When the busy season ended, the phone would have kept ringing.
Sources
- Nicole Hartnett, Adam Gelzinis, Virginia Beal, Rachel Kennedy and Byron Sharp, “When Brands Go Dark: Examining Sales Trends when Brands Stop Broad-Reach Advertising for Long Periods”, Journal of Advertising Research 61(3), 2021. Summarised by the ARF.
- Strategy, “What really happens when brands stop advertising”, for the critique of unweighted averages.
