Why marketers should be reading the sports pages

In sport, the body is the instrument. Muscles, lungs and the nervous system are pushed again and again until they can do something that once felt impossible. What starts as a painful five kilometres becomes effortless after a few weeks. Not because someone is “trying harder”, but because the body rewrites itself.

Sports science calls this adaptation: every time the body is exposed to a stimulus, it changes and becomes more efficient. You don’t notice it from one day to the next. But over time, the difference is huge. In marketing, the same thing happens. Only this time, we’re not training muscles. We’re training a brain.

When people repeatedly encounter a brand through campaigns, sounds, visuals, colours, humour or emotional scenes, the brain literally changes how it processes that brand. Psychology knows this as the “mere exposure effect”: the more often we see something, the more positive we tend to feel about it. Familiar feels safe. Familiar feels trustworthy. Even when we can’t consciously recall where we saw a brand, it has left a mark.

Neuroscience adds another layer: the brain isn’t a passive machine, but a prediction engine. It constantly tries to guess what will happen next. Brands that consistently use the same symbols, the same tone, and the same emotion or visual style are easier for the brain to process. That’s called “processing fluency”. The smoother something is processed, the better it feels and the quicker it’s accepted.

You recognise a Coca-Cola or IKEA commercial within seconds, long before the actual message lands. The brain knows what to expect. The prediction is right. That feels comfortable. Closer to home, look at Jupiler. For decades, the brand has linked itself to masculinity, friendship and football. Not through one-off ideas, but through one long story told in new chapters. When a major tournament comes around, Jupiler doesn’t need to explain as much. The association is already there. The brain fills in the gap: football = Jupiler.

This is neuroplasticity at work: the brain forms connections the way muscles build fibres. One campaign is a signal. Ten campaigns form a memory structure. The brain learns to respond faster, just like muscles fire more efficiently after training. And as in sport, it doesn’t always need to be explosive. Small, soft stimuli still build strength, as long as they keep returning.

That’s exactly how the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute talks about brands: strong brands are not only distinctive, they’re also mentally available at the moments when a category becomes relevant. Hungry? Snickers. Something to celebrate? Champagne.

These shortcuts don’t exist because one campaign was a stroke of genius. They exist because, for years, creative variations have been built on the same foundations. Every execution becomes another training kilometre in memory.

That’s the essence of compound creativity: creativity that compounds over time. Not restarting from scratch with every new campaign, but building on previously earned recognition, emotion and meaning.

Think of Dove, which has spent years consistently showing “real beauty”: unfiltered, human, recognisable. Those brands can say less in each execution because the brain already does half the work. Recognition itself becomes the argument. It’s the same logic that helped our clients Wibra and BelOrta recently win Effies: not by shouting louder, but by stacking smarter.

In sport, a coach prepares a body for exceptional performance. In marketing, we prepare a mind. Brand communication isn’t a one-off sprint; it’s a training regime that builds mental fitness. The more often a brand is seen, felt or recognised, the quicker the brain decides: this fits me. It looks like magic, but it’s just biology. Behaviour is simply the last step in a long chain of repetition.

A body gets stronger through training. A brand gets stronger through creativity that keeps coming back. That’s compound creativity: the brand you don’t just recognise but instinctively reach for. And yet, marketing teams often default to “something new”. New feels clever. Repetition feels boring. But only one of those actually works. So, resist the urge to keep starting over. Train the brand you already have.