What if Pepsi and Coke stop advertising?
Many decades ago, I read a book written by one of the founders of operations research, who was hired (with some colleagues) to assist in marketing analysis for one of the large beer companies (which was named in the book). By testing different amounts of advertising in different regional markets, they found (if I remember correctly) that periodic “reinforcement” advertising campaigns were needed to protect market share, but that continuous advertising was unnecessarily expensive. I’ve always wondered why this relatively scientific approach to advertising (that is, try different things in different markets, and measure the impact) never became the default norm. Instead, companies do national campaigns, and remain relatively clueless as to the optimum amount of advertising.
