In this op-ed Equality Media + Marketing, strategy director, Leah Cioccio argues that when cutting brand spend in downturns, brands will then risk losing the next decade of customers.
Economic uncertainty has a way of making brand budgets look optional. The evidence says otherwise and nowhere is that evidence more unforgiving than in the categories where you only get one shot at a customer per decade.
There is a budget conversation happening in marketing departments across Australia right now. It looks roughly the same whether you work in financial services, automotive, health insurance, or home building. The CFO has a line item called ‘brand’. The macro environment geo-political uncertainty, a rate cycle that keeps surprising, household budgets under sustained pressure is making that line item look like the most defensible cut on the page.
The CFO’s real question isn’t whether to cut. It’s where to cut.
Research from Binet and Field shows why this distinction matters: activation spend the short-term, performance-driven kind decays quickly. Brand spend decays slowly and compounds. Research tracking recession cutters found that 80 per cent of companies that reduced marketing costs hadn’t regained pre-recession levels within three years. The reallocation argument isn’t complicated: cut low-performing campaigns and redundant tools first, not entire departments. Shift spend away from the things that decay, toward the associations that compound.
In long-purchase-cycle categories, this choice becomes asymmetric. The cost of being wrong compounds across an entire decade.
Consider the category most exposed to getting this wrong: Australian residential property. The sector is valued at $12.3 trillion, approximately six times Australia’s annual GDP, and represents the single largest asset class in Australian household wealth. Construction alone contributes 7 per cent of GDP and employs 1.3 million Australians. This is not a niche category. And yet within marketing industry conversation, it barely registers.
The research is clear: when competitors pull back on brand spending, those who stay present accumulate disproportionate share of voice, which eventually converts to market share growth at exactly the point it matters most during recovery. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that brands which stop advertising lose market share at a steady, compounding rate that doesn’t reverse without significant reinvestment.
This argument holds across categories, but it holds with particular consequence in the long-purchase-cycle sectors that rarely get starring roles in marketing thought leadership. Think superannuation, private health, aged care, luxury automotive and the one I know best: residential property.
Australians buy a new home roughly once a decade. The research journey stretches 18 to 26 months. There are no impulse purchases, no loyalty programs, no redemptions. You get one opportunity to be present, trusted, and chosen. Then the window closes for a decade.
Compare that to the 3pm chocolate craving. Same consumer, entirely different decision architecture. The FMCG marketer who misses a week of presence can recover it the following week. The home builder who goes dark for eighteen months waiting for conditions to improve cannot. The consideration set was assembled without them. The build goes to someone else. And the next opportunity to win that customer is somewhere around 2035.
But buyers in downturns don’t disappear. They defer. The research continues. The Pinterest boards pile up. The Saturday estate drives still happen. While they watch, they’re assembling the consideration sets that will drive the next cycle of demand. A buyer researching for 18 months isn’t making a rational checklist they’re building trust with the brands that stayed visible. You can’t rush that when they finally call.
This is the opportunity the current slowdown creates. In long-purchase-cycle categories, slow markets create a rare window: competitors retreat, share of voice concentrates, and the cost of maintaining presence relative to competition has never been lower. The brands that hold steady don’t merely survive the uncertainty. They use it to build a structural advantage that plays out across the entire next cycle.
Property doesn’t get much airtime in Australian marketing thought leadership. It’s not as alluring as a fast food rebrand or a challenger telco’s social strategy. But it’s a category where the stakes of getting the marketing science right are about as high as they get. A misstep isn’t a bad quarter. It’s a lost customer for a decade.
The brands being called in 2027 are the ones being noticed today. Those cutting brand in 2026 are betting they can rebuild when recovery hits. Their competitors who held steady will already own the consideration set for the next ten years.
