Article published in Adweek on May 13, 2026
The real problem is not ROI versus brand building. It is that too many companies use a narrow definition of what counts as return.
This is the second in a two-part series on what separates CMOs who advance from those who stall. Read the previous article about the 5 things CEO-ready CMOs know that others don’t.
The ROI question should sit at the center of every CMO’s job.
Marketing leaders ask for investment, decide where it goes, and are expected to show that it created value.
If a CMO cannot explain, in commercially credible terms, what marketing is generating, the function soon starts to look expensive rather than strategic.
It’s an uncomfortable fact that marketers get fired when they fail to deliver promised results. Against that backdrop, dodging the ROI question starts to look less like a measurement gap and more like a career-limiting habit.
Every Dollar Must Face the Same Scrutiny
While ROI measurement has improved dramatically with digital marketing and ecommerce, that standard should apply to all marketing investment, not just the parts that are easiest to count, like lower-funnel digital activity or promotions.
Sponsorships, PR, events, sampling, and even above-the-line advertising are far less tidy to measure, but if the money is worth spending, marketers should be able to defend it.
In our experience, many CMOs become less fluent when the conversation shifts from “what we did” to “what it returned.”
Some returns are simply easier to observe than others. Short-term sales stimulation leaves a visible trail: clicks, conversions, temporary spikes, red arrows on dashboards.
Brand building is more stubborn. Good advertising may improve memory structures, consideration, preference, willingness to pay, and the brand’s ability to sell without being chained to discounting. Those effects are real, but do not arrive neatly in next week’s sales report.
When CMOs become vague, they sound evasive. And when they retreat toward whatever is easiest to measure, they sound like a head of promotions.
Don’t Go Soft on Half the Budget
The first mistake is failing to make a clear ROI case for longer-term, equity-building activity.
We have seen the consequences. Once marketing becomes the department that talks confidently about performance media, but gets lyrical on brand investment, the rest of the business concludes that only the lower funnel is serious.
That is how budgets get distorted and how the role gets diminished.
It also weakens the CMO’s case as a future CEO. A serious brand leader should think like a business leader, not like the custodian of the communications calendar. That means caring about P&L consequences, capital allocation, and the long-term economic health of the asset being managed.
If marketers want credibility, they cannot treat half their own spending as if it were beyond economic discussion. In leadership rooms, what cannot be translated into value gets translated into cuts.
Focusing on What’s Easiest to Measure Diminishes the Marketing Role
The second mistake is worse: shifting too much money into short-term, highly measurable sales stimulation simply because the return is easier to calculate.
This is the old streetlight problem. A man is searching for his keys under a lamp post. Someone asks: “Did you lose them here?” He answers: “No, but the light is better.”
That is how many marketing budget decisions are made nowadays.
The fact that something is easier to measure only makes it easier to see, not more valuable.
Yet many organizations steadily move spending toward lower-funnel activity for precisely that reason. The dashboards look cleaner. The attribution story looks tidier. The CMO looks more numerate.
But the job itself quietly shrinks.
A CMO has a much larger mission than to optimize this month’s conversion plumbing. She must build brands that can grow, defend margin, resist commoditization, and create future cash flow. When measurement logic starts driving resource allocation, rather than informing it, the brand ends up being managed by the nearest light source.
This is damaging because the neglected activities—sponsorships, PR, events, sampling, brand advertising, recommendation, and presence at the point of consumption—all create value. They just do so in less immediate ways.
We have seen this repeatedly in beverages and spirits: bartender recommendations, more visible menu presence, and a more distinctive experience at the point of consumption can all shape future demand and margin quality.
Just because the return is harder to model doesn’t make it any less real.
3 Ways to Fix the ROI Mess
We’ve identified three fixes.
First, we need better tools to measure marketing. Second, we need to redefine what the “return” in ROI actually means. Third, we need to think about the impact over a longer period of time.
On the first point, Marketing Mix Modeling has limits. In beverages and spirits especially, it is generally stronger on media than on the wider reality of activation like sponsorships, events, and PR.
We often complemented MMM with Market Contact Audits, or touchpoint studies, to measure the consumer experience created by different touchpoints, their relative influence, competitive performance, and cost efficiency.
Because that consumer experience correlates closely with market share, MCAs give management a broader and more realistic view of whether the brand is winning in the real world, not just inside a model.
The second part is to think more practically about the return itself. Pricing power matters. “Worth paying more for” matters. Gains in penetration and consideration matter. Brand preference matters. Brand teams should not think of these as consolation prizes, but as leading indicators of future demand and future margin.
Finally, time horizon is an important factor. Some investments are slow to pay back, and do so by gradually improving the quality of future demand. Judging every activity by immediate sales impact is like judging a gym membership by what happened on the walk home after the first session.
The Case CMOs Must Make
CMOs should stop behaving as if the only respectable number is the one that appears fastest at the bottom of the funnel. That is a distorted way of measuring the world, dressed up as pragmatism.
While every marketing investment should justify resources, not every return will show up in the same place or on the same timetable. CMOs must make that argument clearly and repeatedly.
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FRANÇOIS BAZINI
François Bazini is a French- and US-educated global brand leader. A former BCG strategy consultant, he held marketing roles at Danone in Canada and at PepsiCo in New York and London, before leading international brand portfolios and business units in spirits and beverages at Suntory. He writes on scaling brands across countries, cultures and categories, and on brand turnarounds.
MICHEL SARA
Michel Sara is the founder of ROI Marketing. He has 25 years of experience in marketing efficiency consulting. He has also held senior executive positions in leading communication agencies.