An Ehrenberg-Bass study found brands lost an average 16% of sales after a year without advertising. Here's what that means when you're deciding what to cut.
When money gets tight, marketing is the easiest line to cut. The bill stops today, nothing visibly breaks this week, and the phone keeps ringing for a while on the work you already did. It feels like a clean saving.
A post we shared put the problem simply: "Stopping has its own cost." There's research on how large that cost tends to be, and how long it takes to appear.
Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with data on 70 Australian consumer goods brands over more than two decades, looked at 57 cases where a brand cut all mass media spending for a year or longer. On average, compared with the last year of advertising, sales fell at each step.
Those numbers need their limits beside them. These were packaged consumer goods brands in Australia, not Texas contractors. The averages hide wide variation, and the decline eventually levels off. Treat this as the direction of the risk, not a forecast for your business.
The size of the brand mattered. Big and medium brands that were growing before they stopped kept growing for a year or two. Small growing brands stopped accelerating and fell below where they'd been before the pause.
The researchers put this down to bigger brands being better known and easier to find, which protects their sales for a while. A local business usually doesn't have that cushion. If your phone rings because people find you this month, the gap can arrive sooner than it would for a national name.
| Move | What happens | Better when |
|---|---|---|
| Stop everything | Biggest saving now, and you lose visibility | Only if you can't serve new work |
| Trim the weakest spend | Keeps what brings in customers | Almost always the first move |
| Keep only the low-cost basics | Reviews, site updates and your Google profile continue | When cash is very tight |
To trim well, you need to know which spend brings customers, so look at your calls, forms and booked jobs by source before you decide. Cutting by feel often removes the wrong thing.
There's a fair case for pausing, too. If you're booked solid and can't take more work, or an ad sells something you can't deliver, stopping that spend is sensible. The point is to choose it knowingly.
How WebKing runs this
When a budget has to shrink, we work out which spend brings in customers and what you can keep running for less.
In an Ehrenberg-Bass study of Australian consumer goods brands, sales fell an average of 16% after one year without advertising, 25% after two and 36% after three, with wide variation between brands.
In that study, small growing brands fell below their earlier base sales, while big and medium growing brands kept growing for a year or two. A local business usually has less of a cushion than a national name.
Trim before you stop. Look at which spend brings in customers, reduce the weakest, and keep low-cost basics such as reviews and your Google profile running.
It can make sense if you're fully booked, or you can't deliver what an ad is selling. Choose it deliberately and keep your basics running so you aren't starting from nothing later.
Sources
The Lab is original analysis by WebKing. We summarize and interpret developments from the sources above for industrial, commercial, and small business owners. Figures are reported as published by their sources.
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