The Big BANG Theory: Why Your Brand Needs More BANG

After almost 10 years running our own agency, we've noticed a common theme across businesses of all sizes and categories. Whilst many are stuck in a false choice between immediate performance and long-term brand building, there’s also a strong innate sense of what’s needed. Those needs are unique, varied and nuanced. How do you describe this in one word?

Most businesses want more BANG for their brand.

What is BANG?

BANG has become our framework for understanding how brands really create business value. Not through single tactics, but through systematic effects that compound over time.

The Big BANG theory proposes that when a brand is nurtured the right way, it creates multiple powerful effects for a business. These effects can't be reduced to a single output, because there are many ways a brand can deliver more BANG.

In short, the BANG should help you attract more customers, convert sales and improve efficiency, to name just a few outcomes.

The Science Behind BANG

Memory is Your Market

Memory decay is a brand's biggest challenge. Brand memories fade in 8-16 weeks without reinforcement. In this memory economy, your brand is competing for precious mental storage space.

Information theory and quantum biology reveal why most brand messages fail. The human brain stores unexpected information while discarding predictable patterns. For the 99% of buyers not actively shopping, you need to convince their subconscious that your brand deserves precious mental storage space.

More BANG ensures your brand gets classified as worth remembering.

How BANG Works in Practice

More BANG Through Untargeted Reach

Here's a counterintuitive truth: untargeted ads drive the most incremental sales.

While marketers obsess over precision targeting (it feels efficient), broad reach actually beats precise targeting when building mental availability. Dr. Augustine Fou's research shows that the ‘wastage’ in broad campaigns often delivers the highest incremental value.

Why? Because you're reaching future buyers who aren't even thinking about your category yet. When they eventually come to market, your brand has already earned mental shelf space.

We created Swandays to target casual footy fans who weren’t focused on the next game but were thinking about their weekends.

More BANG Through Brand Platforms

Sometimes advertising isn't enough. BANG can come in unconventional ways. Things people seek out rather than get confronted by. A brand platform can range from a tool, content series, narrative objects or even events. These can be more powerful and less invasive than ads. They create a story, talking points or sales device that brands can continually tap into.

Our Mental Fitness Gym platform for Gotcha4Life delivered a platform and tool that became a narrative object, generating earned media and community engagement beyond what a single campaign could achieve.

More BANG Through Strategic Investment

So how do you create the conditions for growth? Your advertising presence should exceed your market share with excess Share of Voice (eSOV). But Share of Voice alone isn't enough.

To address the memory decay factor we identified earlier, brands need to ensure their reach is having the right impact. Building or refreshing memories require your brand to be presented in interesting and unexpected ways that give you more BANG than predictable category codes.

Your brand also needs distinctive assets that help you stand out in crowded markets and trigger memory retrieval at the moment of choice. These must also be used consistently over time.

We developed 'The Unspoken Advantage' for NIDA Corporate Training as a distinctive brand platform that transformed how they communicate their corporate training services and helped them stand out in a traditionally bland category.

The BANG Multiplier Effect

Here's why BANG matters: it's not about choosing between performance and brand because your brand is the very thing that will drive performance. Strategic brand investment amplifies everything else you do.

That's why a holistic approach provides compound effects that give brands more BANG today and tomorrow.