Finding an ideal budget mix is not the real challenge

It has long been accepted that long-term brand building should be balanced with short-term sales activation in a 60:40 split. But the balance isn’t the same for every category; further research suggests the sweet spot for retail was closer to 64:36.

Knowing the right balance is one thing; securing organisational commitment to brand building in a business pulled towards the short term by everyday commercial realities is another.

This is particularly true in the hardcore retail environment that Currys operates in, where weekly sales pressures, supplier commitments and promotional cycles make immediate returns feel more urgent than long-term growth, especially when facing into significant market headwinds.

Currys had developed a marketing model heavily weighted towards product launches and offers. Effective at generating immediate sales, it left little space to celebrate what made the brand distinctive.

Making brand less of a ‘dirty word’

In the past, people joining the Currys Marketing team were warned that ‘brand was a dirty word’. Investment decisions were driven by retail trading realities: weekly sales pressures, supplier commitments and a media model heavily influenced by short-term priorities.

Working with the team, spearheaded by Currys Brand and Marketing Director Dan Rubel, alongside the media agency Spark Foundry, we made the case for a different definition of success, putting long-term profitable growth at the heart of our approach.

Dan keeps a Post-it note with ‘long-term ROI’ by his computer as a reminder of what we're working towards. It captures the mindset shift: keeping the business focused on long-term success despite short-term pressures.

This shift secured initial investment from the business, giving long-term thinking space to prove its value without compromising the immediate sales Currys still needed.

Finding our 'Trojan horse'

By making long-term ROI our North Star, we translated this shift in investment priorities into a new three-pillar communications model: Amazing Us, Amazing Tech and Amazing Offers.

Amazing Us gave Currys space to build the brand around what made it different: colleague expertise and the in-store experience. Amazing Tech brought that expertise into the context of specific technology, while Amazing Offers communicated the products, prices and deals customers needed to know about.

The 'Beyond Techspectations' creative idea adopted by Currys succeeded in part by acting like a Trojan Horse, inserting brand messaging into hard-working product and offer comms focused on tech. Take our computing ad, ‘Laptop Rage’.

By dramatising the frustration of navigating complicated technology without the right help, we demonstrated the value of Currys colleagues while communicating a specific computing offer.

Both-ism in practice

The results demonstrated that investing in brand didn't come at the expense of short-term performance. 

'Beyond Techspectations' delivered 47% higher long-term ROI than short-term, offer-led activity. Across the wider mix, long-term ROI increased from 9.7:1 to 14.1:1 between 2022 and 2024, while short-term ROI improved from 7.1 to 8.8.

Seeing its effectiveness gave us the confidence to push further. Until now, product-and-price communications had looked quite different to 'Beyond Techspectations', but we saw an opportunity to bring them closer to our brand activity.

This year's Black Friday campaign brings the world of colleagues going above and beyond into product-and-price communications for the first time. A modular approach introduces the same hyperbolic visual world while retaining flexibility across products and offers during the busiest period in the retail calendar.

This allowed us to creatively blur the lines between the roles of our three pillars, so individual communications could work harder for the brand while ensuring brand building stayed connected to the products and offers driving sales. This was facilitated by the creative idea: the 'Bigger Than Big Choir'.

Three key lessons

1. Align everyone around a single North Star, and stick to it. To make the case for more investment in brand, look at bigger structural definitions of success and opportunities to test and learn, using proven efficacy to build confidence.

2. Know when to flex the model. No world is perfect, so find opportunities to creatively flex and blur the lines between brand and commercial communications, allowing individual pieces of activity to work harder.

3. Keep looking for opportunities to connect the two. The model should never be static. Keep evaluating what's working, building on what we've learnt and identifying new opportunities to bring brand and commercial activity together.

The real challenge isn't finding the perfect balance between brand and sales. It's making that balance work in the imperfect reality of retail.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.