The Lexicon. Evidence-based marketing vocabulary.

The central-tendency ratio identified by Binet and Field across more than eighteen hundred IPA Effectiveness Databank cases: the optimal average division of a marketing budget is approximately sixty per cent to long-term brand-building activity and forty per cent to short-term sales activation. The figure is a central tendency, not a prescription — it shifts by category, brand maturity, and growth objective, and it is typically closer to seventy-thirty or eighty-twenty for larger, more mature brands with longer purchase cycles. Brands that maintain a balance near the sixty-forty mark outperform those skewed heavily toward activation by approximately two to one on long-term profit metrics.

The category of advertising investment directed at broad reach, emotional resonance, and the construction of lasting mental structures in the full population of category buyers — including the substantial majority who are not currently in-market. Brand building operates on time horizons of twelve to thirty-six months, which is precisely the window in which its commercial return is invisible to any reporting instrument built around the last-touch conversion event.

The specific thoughts, situations, needs, and emotional states that trigger a consumer's entry into a category's consideration set. The framework treats CEPs as mental doorways — the routes by which a buyer arrives at the moment of choosing among competing brands. Brands with dense coverage across many CEPs possess high mental availability; brands tied to a single entry point are vulnerable to shifts in any one of the conditions that elicit it.

The finding, from Paul Dyson's 2023 analysis of approximately twenty-eight thousand global campaigns, that creative quality is the single largest driver of return on marketing investment within the marketer's direct control. Dyson's model identifies a twelvefold multiplier between best- and worst-executing creative at equivalent media investment. This dwarfs other commonly optimised levers: audience targeting (×1.1), multi-media strategy (×2.5), and brand-versus-performance mix (×1.6–2). The 2023 result is consistent with Dyson's earlier 2014 analysis, indicating it is not an artefact of a single dataset or period.

The non-verbal elements of a brand — colours, characters, shapes, sounds, music cues, typographic signatures, and layout systems — that cue brand identification in the absence of an explicit brand name. Distinctive assets are the principal mechanism by which creative investment compounds into durable mental availability, and they are built through disciplined repetition across years and placements rather than within the life of a single campaign.

The empirical regularity, observed across decades of consumer panel data, that smaller brands suffer doubly: they have fewer buyers and those buyers purchase less frequently. The term originates with the sociologist William McPhee's 1963 work on listener loyalty, and the pattern was subsequently documented across consumer categories by Andrew Ehrenberg and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The commercial implication is direct and counter-intuitive: share growth is produced primarily by penetration, not loyalty.

The difference between a brand's share of total category advertising spend (Share of Voice) and its share of category sales (Share of Market). Brands whose eSOV is positive — advertising at a share above their sales weight — tend to gain market share over the following twelve to twenty-four months. Brands with negative eSOV tend to decline. eSOV is the most robust empirical predictor of market-share movement documented in the IPA Effectiveness Databank.

The canonical two-speed model of advertising effect proposed by Les Binet and Peter Field on the basis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank: long-term brand-building works slowly, broadly, and emotionally; short-term sales activation works quickly, narrowly, and rationally. The two mechanisms operate on different time horizons and are not interchangeable. The authors' central econometric finding is that organisations that neglect the long term consistently underperform on long-term profit metrics by a margin in the order of two to one, compared with those that balance both.

The econometric technique of decomposing historical sales data into the contributions of individual marketing activities, controlling for exogenous variables — seasonality, pricing, distribution, competitive pressure, macroeconomic shifts. Unlike last-click digital attribution, which assigns credit to the most recent touchpoint, marketing mix modelling estimates the incremental effect of each marketing input across the full time series, and in doing so captures the long-term brand-building contribution that short-window attribution is structurally unable to observe.

Byron Sharp's formulation of the buyer-side dimension of brand equity: the probability that a brand is noticed or thought of in a buying situation. Mental availability is distinct from awareness; awareness is a recall test administered in a quiet room, whereas mental availability is a brand's ability to surface spontaneously at the precise moment a consumer encounters a category entry point. It is built through broad-reach advertising that links the brand to many CEPs and decays steadily when that advertising stops.

The empirical generalisation, derived from more than half a century of consumer panel data, that brand growth is produced primarily by increasing the number of buyers (penetration) rather than by increasing the purchase frequency of existing buyers (loyalty). The finding is stable across product categories, geographies, and time periods, and it is one of the most robust empirical results in the marketing science literature. Its sharpest statement is that the buyers who matter most to a brand's growth are the light and non-buyers — not the heavy loyalists retargeting campaigns typically prioritise.

The seller-side dimension of Byron Sharp's twin-pillar model: how easy it is for buyers to notice, find, and purchase a brand across the full set of buying occasions. In traditional retail, physical availability is a question of distribution, shelf-facing, and out-of-stock rates. In digital, it is a question of organic search presence for every category-relevant query, speed of fulfilment, and integration into the end-to-end buying path.

The incremental profit generated by a marketing investment, expressed as a ratio to the cost of that investment. Return on marketing investment is more complete than ROAS for two reasons: it is measured on the profit line rather than the revenue line, and the "incremental" qualifier forces the analyst to isolate the effect of the marketing activity from concurrent non-marketing drivers. The consistent IPA Effectiveness Databank finding is that the highest long-term return on marketing investment comes from media mixes weighted approximately sixty-forty in favour of brand building over sales activation.

The short-term half of the Long-and-Short model: advertising that converts existing in-market demand into immediate sales by speaking directly to the subset of category buyers who are currently ready to transact. Activation works quickly — effects are measurable within days — and uses rational, direct-response, often offer-led messaging. It produces the results that populate the weekly dashboard, and it has diminishing returns. In the absence of brand-building investment, activation becomes progressively more expensive as the brand equity that made activation efficient steadily depletes.

A brand's percentage share of the total sales volume (or value) in its category. Share of Market is the fundamental output metric of a commercial marketing effort: it captures the net effect of every marketing, distribution, pricing, and product decision taken in service of the brand. It correlates strongly with both mental and physical availability, and it is a lagging indicator — this quarter's Share of Market reflects the cumulative effect of decisions taken twelve to twenty-four months earlier.

A brand's share of all branded search queries issued within its category over a defined time period. Share of Search functions as a near-real-time proxy for mental availability and, per Les Binet's 2020 work, is tightly correlated with future Share of Market. Because it is measurable at no cost from Google Trends and Google Search Console, Share of Search is the single most accessible leading indicator of brand health currently available to SMB and mid-market marketers.

A brand's percentage of total advertising expenditure in its category across a defined period. Share of Voice is the leading predictor of a brand's future Share of Market change, per the IPA Effectiveness Databank: brands whose SoV exceeds their SoM (positive eSOV) tend to gain share; brands whose SoV is below their SoM tend to lose it. Share of Voice was historically measured across all paid media but is increasingly tracked on a digital-only basis as traditional media measurement becomes less accessible.

Originating in the biological literature — Amotz Zahavi's handicap principle, published in 1975 — and imported into marketing by Rory Sutherland and others, signalling theory holds that a communication is credible in direct proportion to the cost of producing it. In advertising terms, visibly expensive, high-quality creative broadcasts a signal of brand confidence, financial stability, and commitment to the category, and this signal is itself part of the mechanism by which creative quality produces the twelvefold ROMI multiplier Dyson has documented. A cheap advertisement, however well-targeted, is read by the viewer as a cheap advertisement.