Nerd Alert: How Advertising Builds Brand and Sales Simultaneously

Summary

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Podcast Episode Summary

The Marketing Architects

Episode: Nerd Alert: How Advertising Builds Brand and Sales Simultaneously
Date: August 21, 2025
Hosts: Lana Jasper (B), Rob Demar (A)

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Overview

This episode of The Marketing Architects dives into the question: How does advertising build both brand and sales at the same time? Drawing from an academic study by Norris Bruce, K. Peters, and Prasad Nick Paul (2012), the hosts dissect how advertising influences not just short-term sales, but also long-term brand equity—debunking the idea that these are separate outcomes. Using research-based insights, they discuss the interconnected psychology and economics underlying advertising’s dual role, translating complex findings into actionable strategy for marketers.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Do Marketers Really Design Campaigns for Both Goals?

• Lana (B) questions whether marketers actually balance both short-term sales and long-term brand-building in their campaign designs ([01:20]):
  • “Do you think that most marketers actually believe that advertising works in both the short and the long? And if they do believe that, how often do you think campaigns are actually designed with both those goals in mind?”
• Rob (A) acknowledges the belief is there, but execution is inconsistent:
  • “I think you look at short term metrics for sure. And also looking at long term brand recall... advertisers that are planful, which we would like to think many of the good ones are, then yes, they're absolutely considering both of those levers.” ([02:13])
• They agree many organizations lean toward short-termism, often driven by media channel choices ([02:44]).

2. The Study: Mapping the Ad-to-Purchase Journey

• Study Cited: "Discovering how Advertising Grows Sales and Builds Brands" (Bruce, Peters, Nick Paul, 2012)
• Analytical Approach:
  • Integrated Hierarchy Framework: Tracks cognition (“think”), effect (“feel”), experience (“do”)
  • Data: 5 years (251 weeks) from a major soft drink brand; over 30,000 interviews; 16 different brand metrics ([04:00])
  • Methods Used:
    • Bayesian state space modeling: Updates probability as new data comes in
    • Kalman filtering: Strips out measurement noise ([05:44])
• Key Model: Tests how “think,” “feel,” “do” interact and impact sales over time.

3. Surprising Findings: The Journey is NOT Linear

• Contrary to the classic “Think–Feel–Do” sequence, the research found:
  • Actual sequence observed: Experience (“do”) → Cognition (“think”) → Effect (“feel”)
  • In practice, people try the product first, then form opinions, and finally develop feelings that drive repeat purchase ([06:40]):
    • “Instead of I think about it, I feel something and then I act. This brand's customers acted, thought after, and then felt even later. And that's what led to more sales.” (B, [07:10])

4. Direct and Indirect Effects of Advertising

• Advertising has immediate impact on both:
  • Feelings about the brand (affect)
  • Sales behavior
• Supports the idea you don’t always need experience to form feelings toward a brand, e.g. iconic ads create attachment pre-purchase ([07:58]):
  • “Advertising can... drive that effect. And they also, they did look at that in this study. They looked at advertising in particular and they found that it didn't just set things in motion. It had a direct immediate effect on two key things, which is one, how people felt about the brand (feeling), and how much they bought right away, which is sales.” (B, [07:58])

5. Duration of Effects & Brand Building

• Brand “Feelings”: Fade quickly—about 4 weeks after exposure. Consistent advertising is needed to maintain positive brand feelings ([09:00]).
• Experience/Sales Effects: Last much longer—people retain their behaviors and product experiences.
• Takeaway: Measuring only immediate sales or awareness is insufficient; advertising also shapes future perceptions and loyalty.

6. Metaphors & Practical Implications

• Lana’s Metaphor: Advertising is a campfire ([09:50]):
  • "The flame is the ad, the heat is sales. But the smoke, that's everything else. The thoughts, feelings, experiences drifting through the air... If you only measure the heat, you'll miss the real story of how a great ad warms a room, sparks conversation, and keeps people coming back."
• Rob’s Extension: Advertising not only draws new buyers, but also supports past purchasers by overcoming buyer’s remorse ([10:09]):
  • “Their campaigns have value…to continue to help them feel good about that purchase after the fact…multiple benefits.”

7. Consistency and Share of Voice

• Long-term brand building depends on consistently reminding consumers of your brand ([10:45]):
  • “As much as we'd like to think, oh, someone's going to see my brand and remember it forever, or they're going to buy me once and remember me forever, that's not how it works. You need to be consistently reminding them and that becomes how advertising can build your brand and why share of voice is so linked to market share.” (B, [10:45])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the realities of campaign design:
  “It’s more talk than walk is what you’re saying.” — Rob (A), [02:56]
• On the sequence discovery:
  “Instead of I think about it, I feel something and then I act. This brand’s customers acted, thought after, and then felt even later. And that’s what led to more sales.” — Lana (B), [07:10]
• On the importance of consistent advertising:
  “Feelings about the brand… faded pretty quickly. Within about four weeks, those warm, fuzzy feelings start to wear off. That means if you want people to keep feeling good about your brand, you need to keep advertising to them consistently.” — Lana (B), [09:00]
• On advertising as more than sales:
  “Advertising could cause that real work in the moment. So it’s backing up what you’re saying, Rob, that you can see an ad, you can feel something, and that can drive how you interact with it.” — Lana (B), [08:05]
• Memorable Metaphor:
  “Think of advertising like a campfire. The flame is the ad, the heat is sales. But the smoke, that’s everything else… If you only measure the heat, you’ll miss the real story...” — Lana (B), [09:50]
• Connecting it to share of voice and market share:
  “Brands that have a high share of voice are consistently reminding their customers that they either made a good choice or they will make a good choice when they buy you.” — Lana (B), [10:52]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:20] — Do marketers really design for both short-term and long-term?
• [04:00] — Introduction & breakdown of the cited academic study
• [05:44] — Explanation of Bayesian modeling and Kalman filtering
• [06:40] — The surprising “do-think-feel” sequence found in the research
• [07:58] — Advertising’s immediate effects on feelings and sales
• [09:00] — Duration of brand feelings and need for consistent advertising
• [09:50] — Campfire metaphor for advertising’s multi-faceted impact
• [10:09] — Value of advertising in overcoming buyer’s remorse
• [10:45] — Role of reminder advertising and share of voice

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Final Takeaways

• Advertising is most powerful when recognized for its dual role: It can drive immediate sales and slowly build brand equity.
• Marketers should resist the urge to focus exclusively on short-termism—brand-building effects require ongoing, visible presence.
• The sequence from ad to purchase is not always linear; often action precedes emotion for specific products.
• Measuring only sales or awareness misses the subtle, long-term levers that advertising pulls (consistency is key).
• Marketers should bridge research and strategy, connecting campaign design to both present and future business growth.

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Transcript

[A]

Nerd Alert. Learning is important, right?

[B]

Yes, exactly. What a bunch of nerds.

[A]

Nerd alert. That's right.

[B]

Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Lana Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects and I'm joined by my co host. Rob Demar is the chief product architect of misfits and machines.

[A]

Hello, Elena.

[B]

Hello. We're back with your weekly Nerd Alert. Every week I'll take a deep dive into academic marketing research and translate its complex ideas into simple, understandable language for Rob and of course for all of you. Are you ready to nerd out, Rob?

[A]

I was just listening to my favorite band, Nerdvana. Their big hit, Elena smells like teen Attribution. I'm ready. Let's do this.

[B]

Let's get into it. As always, we'll link the research we cover in the episode notes. This week I read a study titled Discovering how Advertising Grows Sales and Builds Brands. This is by Norris Bruce, K. Peters and Prasad Nick Paul, published in 2012. Simple title, not exactly a simple study to break down, so you'd have to bear with me here. Now before I get into that, Rob, I'm curious. Do you think that most marketers actually believe that advertising works in both the short and the long? And if they do believe that, how often do you think campaigns are actually designed with both those goals in mind?

[A]

Holy smokes, that's a, that's a heavy two parter. I do think that most marketers, depending upon their media mix, believe certain channels can drive more short term, some drive more long term, some drive a little bit of both. Digital probably being one where people default to being able to drive short term growth in addition to some, some longer term stuff. And TV tends to be labeled as the long term channel, which of course, you know, we, we disagree with that it can do both short and long term. But I think that everyone is front loading a campaign with media and strategies that can put a little ignition into the engine and then, you know, planning long term momentum as they're kind of flighting their schedules.

[B]

So you think that most marketers believe that it works in both the short and long. We design campaigns with both goals in mind.

[A]

I do, I do. And I think you look at short term metrics for sure. And also looking at long term brand recall and obviously advertisers that are planful, which we would like to think many of the good ones are, then yes, they're absolutely considering both of those levers.

[B]

I might disagree that Most of marketers design campaigns with those in mind. I think you're right. Most marketers believe in both. Marketing can drive the short and the long. You'd probably be hard pressed to find.

[A]

Are they actually doing it?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Is your, your push?

[B]

Yeah. If you looked at your campaign design, are you really. Are you just saying that or are you starting from the beginning saying this campaign, we want to make sure it's optimized for both along in the short? I'm not sure about that piece.

[A]

It's more. More talk than walk is what you're saying.

[B]

Maybe. Or I think sometimes the platforms that we choose or like the channels we operate in force you into more of a short term mindset where it makes it harder to invest in a long.

[A]

No, I, I can definitely see where you're going there. I just, I do think they both. I think marketers do believe it though, that you can control both and will. But yeah, they'll probably bias themselves towards short termism, especially in the beginning stages of their campaigns.

[B]

So if you're a marketer listening to this and you feel like maybe your brand is more biased towards the short term, this episode in this study might be a nice thing to share with others within your company because it tries to answer a question that is asked a lot. What does advertising actually do? Does it build your brand? Does it drive sales? Is it just about getting noticed? Does it change how people feel? It looks at all of that. And this paper was published in the Journal of Marketing Research and it tries to map out the full journey from ad exposure to final purchase by looking at how advertising shapes what people think, feel and do. And instead of treating brand building and sales activation as separate goals, the authors argue that those effects are deeply connected, which sounds a lot like a report we love from work, the multiplier effect. I would say this academic paper is a little tough for me to understand because these people are incredibly smart. It's an academic paper. Right. It's not translated to us lately, people as lay marketers. So if you're looking for a quicker maybe get on this stuff, probably look into the multiplier effect because all those genius people took that and they helped translate it into language then.

[A]

Robin, I. I believe in you, Elena. I believe in you.

[B]

I know, it's just. It's gonna be tough. All right. They looked at all this stuff. Think, feel and do. They call this approach an integrated hierarchy framework, and it links advertising to three intermediate effects. So that's cognition, that's the think piece. What are people thinking effect. That's how they're feeling, think, feel and then experience. That's the do piece, what they do. So we got cognition, effect and experience, think, feel, do. They then track, tell. Those effects unfold over time and ultimately lead to sales. So how they do this, they collected five years of weekly data from a major soft drink brand that was 251 weeks of advertising. Did I say five weeks? I meant five years. I hope I said five years. Five years, which was 251 weeks of advertising spend, sales and consumer survey responses. That was over 30,000 interviews across 16 different mindset metrics like brand recognition, liking and purchase intent. So this is a softric brand. But there's a lot of data here, a lot of time they looked at. And instead of assuming that all brand metrics are clean indicators of consumer response, the authors used a Bayesian state space modeling. And Rob, we did cover Bayesian. Do you remember we covered that in the Nerd alert.

[A]

I think I blacked it out.

[B]

That was a tough one. So let me. And they. So they use that. I'm going to tell you what that is again. But they also used Kalman filtering to strip out measurement noise. So just to bring us up to speed, Bayesian modeling, it's using probability to make educated guesses. So you could say, all right, given everything we know, what's the most likely way advertising is influencing people? And it updates those guesses as new data comes in. And then common filtering is a method that helps clean up messy data if you're trying to track something over time, like whether brand liking is going up or down. Kalman filtering helps you separate the real signal from the random noise. So essentially that's just helping us strip out like they use these two things to get cleaner data, as far as I understand it. And then they group those metrics into those latent factors. I just mentioned the think, feel and do cognition effect and experience. And they tested how those factors influence one another, how they change over time and how they drive sales. And here's what they found. They found that for this brand in particular, the path from advertising to purchase didn't follow the traditional order we're taught, which is think, feel and do. Instead, it happened in a completely different way. First, people used or experienced the product, so they tried it. Then they thought more about it. Maybe they were noticing the packaging, remembering the ad or considering it made it different. And then they formed an emotional opinion how much they liked it or how it made them feel. And finally those feelings led them to purchase it again. So Instead of I think about it, I feel something and then I act. This brand's customers acted, thought after, and then felt even later. And that's what led to more sales. So, Rob, do you ever feel something for a brand before trying it, like just from the ad alone, or do you have to actually purchase it and interact with it in order to form an emotional connection?

[A]

Oh, heck no. I do not need to buy a brand to feel something for it. I think it's one of the reasons why as a kid, I always loved advertisements to begin with because they made you feel something for a brand whether or not you associated with it or not. I mean, even as a kid growing up, I didn't drink Budweiser, but I sure did like the frog ads. I still to this day have fallen in love with the Mercedes Benz and I will never buy one. But the ads are amazing. The brand is amazing. I can absolutely feel something for a brand, even though I'm a wrangler guy.

[B]

Yeah, I would agree with you. I feel the same way that advertising can find, can drive that effect. And they also, they did look at that in this study. They looked at advertising in particular and they found that it didn't just set things in motions. It had a direct immediate effect on two key things, which is one, how people felt about the brand set feeling, which is what you're saying, and how much they bought right away, which is sales. So the advertisement wasn't just a seed for consumers to maybe think or feel something later. Advertising could cause that real work in the moment. So it's backing up what you're saying, Rob, that you can see an ad, you can feel something, and that can drive how you interact with it. The study had also looked at how long these effects lasted and it found something kind of interesting. Feelings about the brand, what the researchers call effect faded pretty quickly. Within about four weeks, those warm, fuzzy feelings start to wear off. That means if you want people to keep feeling good about your brand, you need to keep advertising to them consistently. But when it comes to experience, like actually using the product and sales behavior, the people buying it, those effects last a lot longer. So people tend to remember what they did and what they bought, even if that emotional lift fades. So what does this mean? If you're only looking at things like sales spikes or awareness numbers to judge whether an ad worked, you're missing a bigger part of the picture. The study shows that advertising does more than just get noticed or boost short term sales. It's also quietly building your brand value in the background. Changing how people think, feel and behave over time. So the real power of advertising is in doing both. It can drive those sales now and it can build your long term brand equity. And this model gives marketers a smarter way to see that full picture. It helps you connect the dots between your creative, your strategy, and the actual business outcome. So instead of just asking, did this sell today? You could start asking, is my advertising helping me to build something bigger too? All right, Arab GPT was very helpful for me for this one. Think of advertising like a campfire. The flame is the ad, the heat is sales. But the smoke, that's everything else. The thoughts, feelings, experiences drifting through the air. You don't always see where the smoke's going, but it matters. It gets in your clothes, it's in your hair. That's brand building. If you only measure the heat, you'll miss the real story of how a great ad warms a room, sparks conversation, and keeps people coming back. All right, Rob, what did you think?

[A]

No, I think that was super interesting. And it also speaks into something I've heard peers talk about that have worked in the automobile sectors that overcoming buyers remorse is another reason why their, their campaigns have value. So it's not just that initial getting people into the marketplace with their car, but it's also to continue to help them feel good about that purchase after the fact. So you can see that those secondary benefits of just continuing to run the campaign to make, to continue to rekindle the feeling for the brand has definitely multiple benefits.

[B]

That's such a great point. And that's not something we talk about a lot as an effective advertising, but totally is that you could help reinforce. Hey, you made a good decision buying this brand because you're seeing it over and over again. Yeah, it. I liked this study because it adds to. We had Dale Harrison on the podcast recently and he was talking about how advertising's main job is to remind people enough so that when they're in that buying moment, your brand is top of mind. And as much as we'd like to think, oh, someone's going to see my brand and remember it forever, or they're going to buy me once and remember me forever, that's not how it works. You need to be consistently reminding them and that becomes how advertising can build your brand and why share of voice is so linked to market share. Because brands that have a high share of voice are consistently reminding their customers that they either made a good choice or they will make a good choice when they buy you. That's it. For this episode of the Marketing Architects, we'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn, and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build. Great marketing.

[A]

Good one, Elena. Yeah, that was meaty.

[B]

As soon as I saw the word Bayesian, I thought, oh, not again. But apparently Bayesian is like, a very foundational attribution model or something. It's not necessarily something new and complex. I'm like, well, good thing I'm not an analyst, because.

[A]

Sounds cool.

[B]

Yeah, it does. Marketing Architects.