Rigorous study shows marketing turnover has a high cost and lasting impact; demonstrates the importance of continuously investing in the marketing team

When a marketing team turns over a team member, two things happen:

1) the value of the brand falls; and

2) customers hear more negative news about the company.

These adverse effects are more pronounced when senior- and mid-level marketing employees leave. The impact is also strong for marketing employees who are responsible for digital marketing activities.

While the adverse effects are not as strong for junior employees, the loss of junior employees, however, seems to adversely impact senior leaders.

This conclusion stems from a new academic study published recently. I first read about the study in the UK trade publication, Marketing Week and included it as the top story in my monthly newsletter, rounding up interesting articles in marketing and PR.

Even so, I wanted to get a better understanding of the study, so this past weekend I read through the 50-page academic paper.

Why the interest? I’ve been part of a marketing team that experienced high turnover as a result of a business reorganization, so I’ve seen the effects but wanted to see, precisely, how the researchers came to that conclusion.

That particular business seemed to reorganize every six months. We’d work hard to build momentum, and then another reorg would come along, and we’d have to start all over. We were stuck in a perpetual loop of stutter steps. This study, I think, offers some empirical reasons explaining the impact of that high turnover.

(click any image for higher resolution)

Defining “brand equity” and “brand buzz”

The word brand gets thrown about in marketing with almost a religious zeal. There’s a lot of theory, writing and anecdotes suggesting evidence to believe in it, but little scientific data. Those who say that have experienced the power of brand marketing done well believe in it, while those who haven’t don’t. After 25 years in the space, I’m a believer.

Yet this study tapped the data from the YouGov BrandIndex to bring some rigor to the concept. It’s effectively a daily survey of 5,000 randomly selected consumers from a survey panel of five million people. It’s used, in part, to develop two metrics for “brand equity” and “brand buzz.”

Both are measured using a formula that is reminiscent of how the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is calculated:

• Brand equity. This is calculated from survey responses across six attributes, including impression, quality, value, recommendation, corporate reputation,and  satisfaction.

YouGov says these six metrics are combined into an overall ‘brand health index score,’ which can range from -100 to +100. This index is calculated by subtracting negative feedback from positive feedback; a score of zero indicates equal positive and negative sentiment.

• Brand buzz. This measures whether consumers have heard positive or negative things about a company recently.

YouGov says buzz is calculated by subtracting the percentage of respondents who report hearing something negative about the brand from the percentage who report hearing something positive. This results in a net score that can range from -100 (all negative) to +100 (all positive), with a score of zero indicating equal positive and negative feedback.

In other words, brand equity is looking at long, or at least the longer-term, impact of marketing employee turnover. By contrast, brand buzz looks at short-term effects.

The marketing employee turnover data source

The research team then analyzed these brand metrics for 477 businesses and compared them to marketing employee turnover.  The employment data was provided by Revelio Labs.

According to the paper, Revelio aggregates data from a wide range of public sources covering 400 million active positions, 20 million companies, and “102,106,715 individuals with job histories dating from 2008 to 2023.”

More specifically, according to the paper:

“These jobs data include information on employer company, position start and end dates, job role, job category, seniority and salary. Revelio also provides ancillary information on the companies tracked including CIK and NAICS codes as well as company names, which we use to match the data to YouGov brands. Since not all employees share their employment information online, the Revelio datasets likely are most representative of white collar occupations, which aligns closely with the focus of this paper on marketing employees.”

This study used data from 2012-2020, which controlled for anomalies stemming from the pandemic. Safe to say the dataset for this study is solid.

Marketing tenure and turnover have a tangible impact on brand

One of the immediate findings that stands out to me is that most businesses in this study are turning over at least one marketing employee every quarter. Turnover is higher at the middle and lower ranks, and lower at the higher ranks, relatively speaking.

Certainly, the size of a marketing team has an effect, but that rate of turnover seems high. Either businesses are hiring employees who don’t fit, or they have a retention problem.  It sounds like an easy benchmark for marketing leaders to identify, track and beat.

The study found good reason for setting this objective, too:

“These results suggest that marketing employees have significant effects on brand performance metrics across seniority levels, with marketing employee turnover causing significant declines in both short-term brand buzz and long-term brand equity even for mid-level marketing managers and (for brand buzz metrics) junior employees.”

More specifically, the loss of the following roles led to losses in brand equity and buzz:

1. Adverse brand effects of senior marketing turnover:

“We find a highly significant effect of senior marketing executive turnover on both measures, with one senior marketing executive turnover leading to declines of 0.041, or roughly 6.1% of a median within-firm standard deviation, in brand buzz, and declines of 0.022, or roughly 2.4% of a median within-firm standard deviation, in brand equity.”

2. Adverse brand effects of mid-level marketing turnover:

“We find a smaller significant effect of mid-level marketing manager turnover on both measures, with one mid-level marketing manager turnover leading to declines of 0.011, or roughly 1.6% of a median within-firm standard deviation, in brand buzz, and declines of 0.0054, or roughly 0.59% of a median within-firm standard deviation, in brand equity.”

3. Adverse brand effects of digital marketing turnover:

“Specifically, for digital employees, one senior marketing executive turnover results in a decline of 0.10 in brand buzz (approximately 14.9% of a median within-firm standard deviation) and a decline of 0.081 in brand equity (approximately 8.9% of a median within-firm standard deviation).”

4. Junior marketing turnover adversely impacts marketing leaders:

“We find a small, but significant effect of juniors on the short-term measure of brand buzz…but we find null impacts of junior turnover on brand equity…[and] that some of the negative impacts of senior executive turnover are partially driven by their indirect effect on the turnover of lower-level employees.”

The authors note that, despite the numbers, the impact of junior employee turnover is worth monitoring:

“Given that firms generally have many more mid-level and junior employees, this suggests that the overall importance of retaining lower-level employees may be largely comparable to the importance of retaining executives, depending on the relative volumes of departures at each level.”

All of this makes sense. Even the most experienced marketing employee is going to need at least three months to get up to speed and perform optimally in a new position.

If you are turning over an average of one employee a quarter, or several with a reorganization every 6-12 months, that’s a lot of people who are not yet proficient in their new roles. Of course, things are going to slide. What other result would you expect?

And that’s just the impact on marketing momentum – and ostensibly, by extension, revenue. There’s another hard cost businesses incur: It costs anywhere from 1x-3x any given position’s salary to replace an employee who turns over.

Add in the hit to morale on the marketing team turnover causes and you start to get a picture of just how much damage marketing employee turnover can do to a business.

Want marketing to improve? Slow employee turnover

The authors conclude their study with a rousing conclusion:

“In sum, marketing drives brands, but people drive marketing. Losing marketing talent, especially digital marketing talent, hurts brand performance, and firms pay a lasting price. Our findings reveal the painful causal effects of turnover, from senior executives down to mid-level managers and even junior employees, highlighting the importance of continuously investing in marketing teams. In an economy characterized by frequent employee mobility, retaining and nurturing marketing talent is not simply good management—it’s essential for sustained brand success.”

The message couldn’t be clearer: if you want your marketing team’s performance to improve, then strive to slow or stop turnover. Improve your efforts to higher, better-fit candidates and develop a culture that causes your marketers to want to stick around.

The full report can be found here: Marketing Employee Turnover and Brand Performance: Evidence from 477 Firms.

Authors:

• Ruizhi Zhu, Northeastern University, Marketing Area;
• Samsun Knight ,University of Toronto;
• Anatoli Colicev, University of Liverpool, Management School; and
• Yakov Bart, Northeastern University, D’Amore-McKim School of Business.

Other academic studies I’ve looked at:

• Early stage B2B tech startups don’t invest enough in marketing [peer-reviewed study]
• MIT Sloan Study: Just 7% of Companies Have Digitally Savvy Executive Team
• Board members with marketing experience improve shareholder returns by 3% [benchmark]

Research idea: I’d love to construct a study that examines turnover data from Revelio in comparison to goodwill, that is, the value of intangible assets such as brand, on the balance sheet of publicly traded companies.

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Image credits: Google Gemini, respective study, self-made graphic