If a brand stops ads for just three months, they lose 10% of their customers. Period.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Quarterly Advertising Pauses and Market Share Trends: Exploring Brand and Category Conditions
SSRN · 6440160
The Takeaway
Many managers assume that brand loyalty or previous marketing creates a 'reservoir' of memory that allows for seasonal budget pauses. This large-scale study of over 1,000 brands shows that market share erosion is nearly immediate and that advertising continuity is far more important than timing ads to match demand cycles.
From the abstract
Advertising is widely seen as important, yet continuity is often disrupted when brands run out of budget or shift strategy. Responding to calls for academically rigorous yet managerially relevant research, this large-scale study quantifies the cost of quarterly advertising stops, analysing 7,029 observations from over 1,000 brands across 22 product categories. On average, market share changed-10% after a single quarter of no advertising and-14% after four. The findings extend prior research by s