Marketing lessons
Can short-term marketing weaken a brand?
In marketing, many decisions that seem effective today produce the opposite effect over time. The law of perspective explains why constant discounting, forced brand extensions, and tactics designed only for the quarter risk eroding value, margins, and positioning.
What is the law of perspective?
Among the marketing laws formulated by Al Ries and Jack Trout, the law of perspective is one of the hardest to accept because it goes against the operational instinct of many companies. The principle is simple: marketing effects unfold over long periods of time and, very often, what works in the short term produces the opposite effect in the long term.
It is an uncomfortable law because it forces us to distinguish between immediate results and value creation. A promotion can increase this month’s revenue. An aggressive activation can generate traffic spikes. A heavily pushed campaign can increase leads within a few weeks. But none of these effects, on their own, says anything about the quality of the positioning the brand is building.
That is exactly what perspective is for: it reminds us that marketing should not be read only through the lens of instant reaction, but as a process that progressively changes market perception, expectations, and behavior.
Why does it matter so much?
In a context dominated by dashboards, performance reporting, and pressure for quick results, the law of perspective is even more relevant. Companies have access to an enormous amount of data, but that does not automatically mean they are reading reality correctly. Some metrics reward the short term while hiding deeper effects: erosion of perceived value, dependence on promotions, lower lead quality, and loss of brand recognizability.
This is also why the topic now intersects with how brands are interpreted in digital environments. It is not enough to generate attention or traffic: what matters is that the brand builds, over time, a coherent, recognizable, and defensible representation, including in search engines, answer engines, and generative systems.
The most common trap: constant discounting
The clearest example of the law of perspective is the systematic use of discounts. In the short term, they work: they increase conversion, move inventory, drive traffic, and create an impression of commercial dynamism. For many companies, they seem like a rational solution.
“Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow.”
The problem emerges over time. If promotion becomes a habit, the market starts to read the full price as not fully credible. The customer learns to wait. The brand stops being associated with its own value and starts being associated with temporary convenience. At that point, you are no longer just selling a product: you are training the audience to buy only under conditions that are unfavorable to you.
In some verticals, this is even more evident: there are pharma e-commerce businesses that offer a 10% discount on their entire catalog every month, on prices that are already very aggressive, with the result that people, now used to it, wait for that specific week to buy.
This does not mean that a promotion is always wrong. It means it has to be read within its strategic context. A tactical lever can make sense, while a structural dependence on discounts usually signals a problem of positioning, pricing, or brand management.
The other shortcuts that seem to work
Discounts are not the only form of marketing short-sightedness. Other tactics, too, can produce apparently positive results in the short term while proving harmful in the long run.
One of these is line extension: leveraging a strong brand to push it into categories that are not consistent with the meaning built in the customer’s mind. At first, it looks like a growth shortcut. Over time, however, it can confuse the brand and weaken its focus.
Another is the obsessive pursuit of traffic or engagement without quality. Forced headlines, overly click-oriented content, exaggerated promises, or mechanisms that inflate vanity metrics may look effective in reports, but they often do not build trust, reputation, or healthy demand.
This is also why, in the HT&T magazine, the theme of perspective connects well both to the strategic role of content and to the relationship between measurement and real business, already discussed in the article on the great deception of metrics.
“Marketing effects take place over time.”
Al Ries and Jack Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
Short term vs long term
The short term must be managed without compromising the long term. For this reason, the right way to read the issue is not performance versus brand but the quality of the immediate result versus the resilience of positioning over time.
| Action | Short-term effect | Long-term effect |
|---|---|---|
| Constant discounting | More conversions, faster turnover, more immediate cash flow. | Reduced perceived value and growing pressure on margins. |
| Line extension | Faster monetization of the brand name. | Perceptual confusion and weaker positioning. |
| Click-driven content | Increase in traffic, reach, and vanity metrics. | More noise, less authority, and less narrative coherence. |
| Consistent brand building | Slower and less spectacular results at the beginning. | Greater memorability, stronger pricing power, and better demand quality. |
The exception that proves the rule
There are also cases in which continuous promotion does not seem to destroy brand value and instead becomes an integral part of it. This happens when the discount is not perceived as an anomaly or as a temporary tactical lever, but as a structural component of the commercial promise.
In some very well-known cases, including in the Italian market, promotional pressure has been so constant over time that it has become a distinctive trait of the retail brand. Rather than reading the promotion as an exception, the customer ends up interpreting it as a normal part of the purchasing experience.
In these cases, the customer does not interpret the full price as the true reference point and the discount as the exception. On the contrary, they learn to read the brand as a place where convenient purchasing is an expected part of the experience. Recurring promotion, therefore, no longer acts only as a conversion incentive, but as an identity signal.
This does not eliminate the risks: regulatory pressure, pressure on margins, possible audience habituation, and the difficulty of building a brand value that is different from convenience. But it explains why some brands are still able to grow around a permanent promotional system. In these cases, rather than speaking of brand erosion, it would be more accurate to speak of a brand built on promotional mechanics.
The law of perspective in the age of SEO, AEO, and GEO
Today, perspective is not only about advertising, promotions, and pricing, but also about how the brand is read and reconstructed in digital environments. A company that chases only immediate tactics risks generating inconsistent signals: overly variable messages, disconnected content, misaligned promises, and unclear information architectures.
From an SEO and GEO perspective, this makes it harder to build a stable semantic representation of the brand. From an AEO and structured data perspective, it also means reducing the likelihood that engines and generative systems will truly understand who you are, what you do, and why they should cite you as a reliable reference.
The law of perspective, therefore, is also a law of coherence: what you do to chase today’s result can strengthen or compromise the way the brand will be understood tomorrow.
Reading beyond the quarter
In consulting, this means helping companies distinguish between useful tactical levers and dangerous dependencies. The point is not to reject short-term results, but to place them within a design that does not damage positioning.
When a brand lives only on promotions, commercial pressure, or activations designed to “move the numbers,” the risk is not only economic, but also perceptual. The market begins to read that brand differently, and often in a weaker way.
Marketing is not only what produces a response today, but also what teaches the market to expect something from you tomorrow.
That is why perspective must be held together with focus, narrative coherence, demand quality, and brand discipline. Strategic work serves precisely to prevent the urgency of the quarter from destroying the advantage of the coming years.
Conclusion
The law of perspective reminds us of something very concrete: not every action that improves the short term is improving the business. Some actions are simply bringing forward its cost.
For this reason, marketing must always be read on two levels. The first is immediate response: traffic, leads, sales, conversions. The second is the construction of meaning: perceived value, positioning, trust, memorability. Ignoring the second in order to chase the first is one of the most common and costly mistakes.
In an ecosystem where brands must be read by people, search engines, and generative systems, perspective is not a theoretical reflection. It is a strategic discipline. It means choosing levers that do not compromise tomorrow’s clarity in order to gain only an apparent advantage today.
FAQ – Frequently asked questions about the law of perspective
What is the law of perspective in marketing?
It is the principle according to which marketing effects unfold over long periods of time and, often, what seems effective in the short term can produce negative consequences in the long term.
Why can constant discounting damage a brand?
Because it can train the customer to buy only during promotions, reduce the credibility of the full price, and weaken the perceived value of the brand over time.
Does the law of perspective also apply in digital?
Yes. It applies to paid campaigns, content, SEO strategy, AEO, GEO, and the management of the signals that contribute to defining the brand online.
Are short-term results and brand building in contradiction?
Not necessarily. The point is not to choose one over the other, but to achieve immediate results without compromising coherence, perception, and positioning in the medium to long term.
What are the signs of a strategy that is too focused on the short term?
Dependence on promotions, continuous message fluctuations, low-quality traffic, low loyalty, constant pressure on margins, and difficulty sustaining the full price.
What is the relationship between perspective and focus?
They are two complementary laws. Focus helps the brand be associated with a precise meaning. Perspective reminds us that this association is built over time and can be weakened by inconsistent tactical choices.
Why is the law of perspective relevant for SEO, AEO, and GEO?
Because engines and generative systems also read the continuity of signals. A brand that is inconsistent or too dependent on the short term is harder to interpret, cite, and associate with a stable positioning.
Bibliography and further reading
A selection of useful sources to explore the relationship between short term and long term, brand building, promotions, and brand value.
Marketing effectiveness
Les Binet, Peter Field
The Long and the Short of It
One of the most important references for understanding how to balance short-term activation and long-term brand building.
Research summary
Thinkbox
The Long and the Short of It
A useful page for contextualizing the work of Binet and Field and its impact on the analysis of advertising effectiveness.
Prequel
Les Binet, Peter Field
Marketing in the Era of Accountability
The work that preceded The Long and the Short of It, useful for reading the relationship between data, goals, and marketing results.
Profit and advertising
IPA
Profit Ability – The New Business Case for Advertising
A useful insight for connecting media investment, profitability, and value creation beyond the short term.
Marketing science
Byron Sharp
How Brands Grow
A key text for understanding brand growth through an empirical approach that is less dependent on marketing myths.
Promotions and pricing
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
John Dawes – profile and research areas
A useful profile because it directly references research areas related to the effects of price promotions and brand metrics.
Positioning
Al Ries, Jack Trout
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
A classic for connecting brand building to the way people organize brands in their minds.
Marketing laws
Al Ries, Jack Trout
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
The theoretical foundation from which the law of perspective also starts, useful as both an editorial and conceptual reference.
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