Why brand salience wins when markets get tough

Posted 22 Jul

Here’s an advertising truth nobody likes to admit: Most people don’t think about your brand… until they need to. And in a tighter market, with cautious consumers and tighter wallets, there’s one thing that separates brands who stay on the shopping list from those who vanish: salience.

Wait… What’s Salience?

Salience isn’t just “We ran some ads and people know us”. It’s brand muscle memory. It’s the reason you automatically:

• Grab a Coke instead of a no-name cola at a servo.
  
• Book a Flight Centre holiday without opening a second tab.
  
• Google Bunnings opening hours instead of “hardware store near me.”
  

Salience = being the brand people remember and choose when it matters most. It’s not about screaming the loudest, it’s about being first in their brain when it counts.

When markets get wobbly — like they are now — businesses panic. Marketing budgets shrink, people cut “brand building” because it’s harder to measure than clicks.
But here’s what the research says:

• Brands that maintain salience bounce back faster after downturns
• Brands with high salience can charge more because people default to what they trust
• Brands that only spend on performance channels get trapped in a cycle of higher cost-per-acquisition and lower returns

Les Binet and Peter Field (aka the gods of long vs short-term marketing) have over 10 years of data showing long-term brand investment delivers stronger profits than short-term activation alone.

And in a digital world where CPMs are rising 20% year-on-year and ROAS is dropping 10% (source: Varos, 2024), brand salience is what protects you from joining the race to the bottom.

Out-of-home: the unsung salience machine

If you want to build salience, it’s simple: be where your audience is, often enough to be remembered.

Out-of-home (OOH) doesn’t rely on algorithms. It doesn’t get skipped, scrolled past, or blocked.
It shows up:

• Every day in the most high-traffic places
• Every commute, every school run, every shopping trip
• Every key corridor, every lifestyle precinct, where people naturally move through their week

And unlike digital, you’re not competing in an auction where costs skyrocket because your competitor had a bigger budget on Tuesday.

You own the space. You build mental availability without the bidding war.

It’s not just theory:

• MOVE 1.5 data in Australia shows OOH drives higher spontaneous brand recall than many digital channels.
  
• OOH combined with digital has been shown to increase ROI by up to 23% (Meta x Kantar CrossMedia study, 2022).
  
• Brands that cut back on OOH during COVID recovery lost market share, while those who maintained presence grew theirs (WARC, 2023).
  

And locally, we’ve seen Brisbane clients win big with OOH + digital combos — because it’s the big screens that get you remembered, and the small screens that help you close.

Salience isn’t optional, it’s the shortcut to growth

If your competitor is the first brand someone thinks of when they’re ready to buy — they’ve already won. You’re not competing for a click. You’re not competing on price. You’re simply chosen.

• OOH keeps you in the conversation
• OOH makes your digital campaigns cheaper
• OOH turns you into the brand they remember first, and buy from faster

When others go quiet, the brands that stay visible win. If you want to make sure your brand gets chosen — not just noticed — out-of-home is where you start.

Ready to see how? Let’s map out your brand’s salience strategy.