3 Risks You Take When You Stop Brand Awareness
Jun 27, 2025
With marketing budgets under pressure, you are being asked to deliver more with less. As a result, ad budgets tend to either get reduced or cut off completely.
On the surface, pausing your advertising seems like a smart short-term cost-saving move. But the long-term impact? It’s a slow burn that can quietly erode your brand’s strength.
So what exactly is at risk when you hit pause on your advertising efforts?
Let’s break it down:
You Lose Visibility—and Customers
Research from Erenberg-Bass shows that brands typically experience a decline in sales within 3–6 months of cutting back on advertising. On the other hand, brands that maintained their ad spend during the 2008 recession saw brand visibility rise by 3.5X.
Why does that matter?
Because visibility builds familiarity. Familiarity builds trust. And trust leads to sales. Just like in any relationship, that trust doesn’t happen overnight—it’s built steadily over time.
When you stop being at the forefront, your audience slowly stops thinking about you. And rebuilding that trust later will cost you far more than maintaining it now.
You Make Way for Your Competitors To Take Over
If you step back, someone else will step in.
Especially in competitive or niche markets, reducing your brand presence creates space for competitors—often larger and more aggressive ones—to take your place.
Consider this:
67% of the buyer journey now happens digitally.
9 out of 10 B2B buyers say content influences their decisions.
If your brand goes quiet online, it’s not just out of sight—it’s also out of the decision-making process. And once a competitor wins your customer’s trust, it will be hard to win it back.
Restarting Will Slow You Down
Consider your B2B marketing timeline now - it takes around 6-9 months to start seeing the impact of your marketing efforts. You then spend more months fine-tuning your campaigns, optimizing your targeting, and analyzing performance. However, when you hit pause, it doesn’t just “pick up where it left off.”
The unfortunate truth is that brand awareness fades. That means when you return, you’re essentially starting from scratch—rebuilding awareness, re-earning trust, and re-investing more than you saved.
Worse yet, the time to regain lost market share? Anywhere from 3 to 5 years.
“The sales of a brand are like the height at which an airplane flies. Advertising spend is like its engines: while the engines are running, everything is fine, but when the engines stop, the descent eventually starts.”
— Dr. Simon Broadbent, the global legend in media research
So, before you cut your ad budget, ask yourself—can your brand afford to disappear?
