We apply decades of peer-reviewed research, behavioural science, and AI-powered delivery to every brief. This is how we consistently outperform the industry average.
Evidence-Based Marketing applies the same rigour to marketing decisions that medicine applies to clinical ones. Across thousands of campaigns and three decades of IPA effectiveness data, researchers have built a clear picture of what actually drives brand growth.
The findings are counterintuitive. Most of what the industry treats as best practice - loyalty-focused budgets, hyper-targeted media, rational messaging - consistently underperforms against the evidence-backed alternative. We’ve built our entire practice around what the data says, not what convention assumes.
Strategy grounded in what the data says.
Three findings that underpin everything we do - and consistently outperform conventional thinking.
Byron Sharp’s Double Jeopardy Law is one of the most replicated findings in marketing science: brands grow primarily by acquiring new buyers, not by deepening loyalty among existing ones. Loyalty is an outcome of size, not a strategy for achieving it. We build strategies that reach the many - including, especially, the buyers who don’t know you yet.
Most purchase decisions begin with a search of memory, not a search engine. Mental Availability - the probability of your brand coming to mind when a buying situation arises - is built by consistently linking your brand to the situations that trigger purchase. The brands with the strongest network of these associations get on the shortlist before anyone opens a browser.
Binet & Field’s analysis of over 1,400 IPA campaigns demonstrates that emotional brand campaigns and rational sales activation serve fundamentally different functions - and both are necessary. Emotional priming determines around 60% of predisposition to buy, and over 90% of willingness to pay more. Running activation without brand building is harvesting a field you stopped planting.
The evidence is clear. The optimal marketing budget splits roughly 60% toward long-term brand building and 40% toward short-term sales activation. Most businesses default to activation - because it’s easier to measure, faster to show results, and simpler to defend in a budget meeting. The data says this is a mistake.
The reason brand building needs to be emotional rather than rational is neurological as much as strategic. System 1 thinking - the brain’s fast, instinctive mode - handles most purchase decisions before conscious reasoning takes over. Emotional advertising encodes more strongly in memory, builds the associations that drive consideration, and determines willingness to pay more. That’s the foundation that activation later harvests.
We apply this discipline to every brief, every time.
“Brands that invest in both brand building and activation consistently outperform those that prioritise one - delivering 46% more profit over a 3-year period.”
- Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPAKnowing the principles isn’t the hard part. Applying them consistently - across every brief, every strategy, every piece of creative - is where most agencies fall short. We’ve codified EBM principles into proprietary AI agents that operate at both a strategic and executional level.
Every brief runs through evidence-based protocols - no gut calls on audience, message, or budget split.
AI-assisted identification of the buying situations your brand needs to own in memory.
Every execution assessed against the effectiveness principles that predict commercial performance.
Systematic enforcement of the brand elements that build recognition and reduce cognitive load.
Creative and copy produced by AI agents trained on what actually works, not what’s fashionable.
Our in-house AI systems aren’t general-purpose tools pointed at marketing tasks. They’re purpose-built applications of evidence-based principles - designed to deliver smarter strategy and stronger creative, consistently, at speed.
High-quality AI-generated imagery and video at the speed and scale that modern brands demand. Our production capability, not a vendor’s.
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Real-time brand intelligence. Market position, competitive landscape, and audience sentiment - continuously updated, instantly actionable.
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Let’s talk about how evidence-based strategy and AI-powered delivery can transform your results.
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