Brand value can be weakened one planning cycle at a time, one ‘harmless’ refresh at a time

This is a true story: a new head of marketing at a large consumer goods company was showing a CEO new slogans for several of the company’s brands.

The CEO didn’t think it was worth discussing it. To him, it was just a tactical marketing decision.

“I have strikes at two factories, retailer pressure on margins, shareholder presentations to prepare, and a budget gap to close,” he told us. “I’m not going to fight my CMO over a few words in a slogan.”

His reaction was understandable. A slogan hardly seemed like CEO territory.

That conversation, however, illustrates one of the biggest paradoxes in modern marketing. Top management takes a close look at spending capital on new projects, buying other companies, or making structural changes, because they know these choices affect the company’s future.

Brand equity deserves the same scrutiny.

Yet organizations routinely allow decisions that restructure a brand—its positioning, target audience, personality, distinctive assets or investment model—to be treated as too small to deserve serious executive discussion. Like the most dangerous diseases, they thrive because they escape the organization’s immune system.

By the time they are recognized, the damage is already well underway.

Bad strategies often arrive disguised as good marketing: agility, consumer centricity, creativity, or financial discipline.

Here’s how to spot them.

Impatience disguised as agility

Companies and their customers experience time in different ways.

A new campaign can soon feel really old for the people who’ve been working on it for months.

But consumers, noticing the ad for the first time, might just start associating the colors, symbols, sounds, or slogans with the brand—while the company is thinking about moving on to something new.

The greatest returns arrive late. Ironically, organizations often interrupt the process just as those returns start to accelerate, simply because people inside the company have become tired of the same assets.

What seems like a harmless creative refresh can actually dismantle valuable competitive advantages.

As Byron Sharp and System1 have both shown, distinctive assets become more valuable with repeated use.

Personal legacy disguised as consumer-centricity 

Every new marketing leader wants to improve the business they inherit.

Trouble begins when improvement becomes confused with leaving a personal mark on the brand.

Companies often change their brand’s direction in small steps.

One marketing leader might tweak the brand’s image, the next might think it needs to appeal to a younger crowd, and another might decide to give it a whole new personality. But while career growth comes from visible change, brands accumulate value through consistency.

These culmulative changes can create a lot of confusion over what a brand represents to consumers.

While listening to consumers is indispensable, overzealous customer-centricity can lead to justifying bad decisions. Once an organization becomes convinced that change is needed, it often uses consumer research to justify the decision rather than challenge it.

Consumers might find a new visual identity more interesting than the old one, but that does not mean the change will create more value.

When the CEO said “I’m not going to fight my CMO over a few words in a slogan,” he thought those few words represented a small marketing decision. But it was actually a big choice that would affect the whole business.

Creative excitement disguised as effectiveness

Marketing loves visible work. New campaigns, redesigns, and limited editions generate energy because they are fun to create and easy to celebrate.

Some of marketing’s biggest growth opportunities are far less glamorous. Improving pack-price architecture, simplifying the portfolio, strengthening the core products, increasing availability, and improving promotional efficiency rarely generate the same excitement, but often create greater commercial impact.

They also require relatively little non-working investment. More of the budget reaches consumers, and less is consumed by the process of creating the work.

Marketing, like every profession, is drawn toward the work it enjoys. The highest-return work is not always the most exciting.

Short-sightedness disguised as financial discipline

Few ideas sound more responsible than financial discipline. Every CMO should demonstrate the commercial impact of marketing investment. Trouble begins when financial discipline becomes synonymous with immediate measurability.

You can see immediate results from price promotions, retail activation, and lower-funnel media.

Brand building is different, because it’s an investment in the future.

A strong brand creates memory structures, making people prefer your product over others, and even allowing you to charge higher prices.

These benefits often take years to fully develop.

But dangerous shifts happen one planning cycle at a time: a little more investment toward activities whose returns are easier to measure, a little less toward those that create future demand.

The dashboards will look reassuring, but growth gets harder.

Then, pressure to promote and advertise intensifies. This requires more investment just to keep demand at the same level, making it challenging and expensive to continue expanding.

Nike’s recent rebalancing toward brand building shows that maximizing short-term efficiency and maximizing long-term brand value are not the same objective.

The problem begins when the easiest returns to measure become the only returns that matter.

It was never just a slogan

The impact of these strategic mistakes can be far-reaching, undermining the very goals they appear to support.

By the time they recognize what has happened, years of small, sensible-looking decisions have blurred the brand’s shape beyond recognition.

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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.

La pandémie a accéléré une désillusion déjà croissante à l’égard des programmes de
Responsabilité Sociale des Entreprises (RSE). Les consommateurs exigent désormais des entreprises comme des marques, qu’elles affichent une vision claire, qu’elles soient transparentes dans leurs actions et qu’elles fassent la preuve de leur impact positif sur la société et l’environnement. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de faire le bien, mais de mettre en place des modèles de valeurs partagées et de création de capital de marque, durables par nature parce qu’ayant du sens sur tous les plans : contribution sociale, impact environnemental, engagement des employés, choix consommateur ou résultats financiers.

Un nombre croissant de dirigeants, déjà inscrits dans cette nouvelle tendance, se  concentrent sur les objectifs à long-terme, liés à la pertinence et à la valeur de l’entreprise, plutôt que sur les rendements à court-terme de leurs actionnaires. Le présent manifeste de BXG s’inspire de leaders d’entreprises telles que Berkshire Hathaway, Centrica, Generation Investment Management, Mondelēz International, Pernod Ricard, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé et Unilever.

Ceux-ci, et un nombre croissant d’entre eux incitent la société en général à s’engager en faveur d’une consommation plus authentique et durable, aux côtés des marques proposant les produits qui seront choisis et appréciés par la prochaine génération.
Cette démarche relève aussi du simple bon sens en termes de business, puisqu’à titre d’exemple, la performance de l’Indice de Durabilité Dow Jones a été supérieure de 36% à celle du Dow Jones global sur les cinq dernières années. Il est donc important de construire une valeur d’entreprise pérenne, au travers de marques qui ont du sens pour les consommateurs et qui puissent jouer un rôle important dans leur vie de tous les jours.

Mais ceci requiert de mettre en place une mesure des comportements d’une organisation, intégrée à un ensemble de fournisseurs, partenaires et consultants. C’est ce que propose ce manifeste au travers d´un standard universel de mesure de l’expérience de marque, qui apporte une séquence linéaire d’analyse, de l’engagement du consommateur vis-à-vis d’un récit de marque authentique, aux résultats sociaux, environnementaux et financiers.

Le présent manifeste promeut également une évolution du rôle de responsable marketing en tant que facilitateur indispensable, considérant que le Marketing représente la voix des marques comme ambassadrices d’un business durable. La construction d’un capital de marque et d’une valeur d’entreprise durable demande en effet, que le responsable Marketing soit au coeur des décisions relatives à l’allocation des ressources limitées, nécessaires au business. La mesure de l’expérience de marque est la pierre angulaire de ce processus.

Devenir une entreprise véritablement durable constitue pour la plupart une transformation majeure, pour laquelle il n’y a pas une feuille de route unique.
Mais il existe un certain nombre de principes directeurs, que nous avons cherché à établir dans ce manifeste, pour guider les actions à entreprendre.

Ce que BXG apporte à ce parcours, c’est l’indispensable mesure de la façon dont les citoyens et consommateurs vivent l’expérience des marques et de ce que celles-ci représentent.
Nous souhaitons ainsi apporter de la transparence à l’engagement du consommateur et au potentiel de création de valeur, requis pour canaliser les ressources de l’économie globale vers des modèles d’entreprise durables.

Qu’est-ce-que le BXG – The Brand Experience Group ?

• BXG propose, une méthodologie exclusive de suivi de l’expérience de marque, des outils d’analyse et un standard unique de mesure des comportements consommateur,  fournissant des informations quantifiées par catégorie et marché, afin d’aider à l’allocation des ressources et à la prise de décision. Ce standard unique constitue un indicateur fiable de la santé d’une marque et du potentiel de croissance de sa part de marché.
• Notre vision consiste à voir adopter notre standard d’expérience de marque comme unité de mesure universelle, de l’efficacité du Marketing comme de l’impact réel des récits de marques authentiques en termes de business.
• En conséquence, nous pourrons ainsi rassembler les propriétaires de marque, les
  professionnels du marketing, les agences partenaires et les consommateurs autour d’une vocation sociale et environnementale commune.

Visitez le site BXG pour télécharger le manifeste.

A lire dans l’ADN

A change process, even simple and effective, can meet the resistance of existing ways of working. That’s exactly the case for ZBB applied to resource allocation in marketing and communications whose budget owners are notoriously organized in silos. And the challenge goes beyond marketing and communication since the universe of touchpoints affecting consumers’ choice includes the commercial side of things. Indeed, a typical, comprehensive list of touchpoints encompasses the following disciplines: media, digital, point of sale, promotion, CRM, sponsoring, events, PR, corporate / societal activities, etc.

By combining human nature, essentially on a defensive mode, and the budgeting exercise which is structured by discipline, companies most often end up with an incremental approach year on year. An increased budget always means more power whether inside or outside the organization.

The per discipline approach results in a long tail of service providers: that’s actually the rational response to this way of working. Unilever stated that, at the inception of the ZBB process, they realized they had a working relationship with nearly 3,000 agencies of all kinds.

The initial condition for a successful ZBB approach is a clear commitment of the top management behind it. Without this commitment, silos will eventually burry the process.

How to initiate the approach? It all starts with a workshop gathering the stakeholders of above-mentioned disciplines plus finance / controlling and top management whose role is key: only the top management (Managing Director or Head of BU, etc.) has the authority to call the shots. Indeed, a ZBB workshop should be at the same time a group exercise with a clear decision making at the end. Top management’s role is to ensure that decision making is not left behind.

What’s the purpose of the workshop? ZBB applied to marketing and communication consists in building an integrated communication plan, literally starting from a blank page. The workshop is essentially structured around 4 stages:

1. Aligning on the brand’s communication platform and strategic objectives: when gathering many stakeholders, there might be different perspectives on the brand’s story. It’s actually essential to share a common story and make sure it is sharp enough to be the basis of an investment strategy.
2. Choosing the 2 or 3 pivotal activities that have the responsibility to primarily convey that story to consumers. Like casting the 2 or 3 top acts in a movie, this selection is far from trivial: it’s a strategic and structuring choice. Many criteria should be used to make this selection: the adequacy to the brand story of course, but also the influence of the chosen touchpoints in the category where the brand competes, the balance between attitudinal and behavioral components, the capacity of the brand to be successfully deployed in these activities, etc.
3. Choosing the supporting activities, those that should at the same time reinforce the pivotal touchpoints and cover all the components of the consumer journey. Supporting touchpoints could also be assigned to reach specific targets. In all cases, the key principle is that you need to clearly state the planned synergies between the supporting and pivotal touchpoints, not just add them on the map.
4. Eliminating or redeploying the activities below the visibility threshold.

What you get is a real “less is more” plan with typically 30 to 50% less activities but much better funded. According to the top management’s goal, the exercise could be made with the same, lower or higher overall spend.

What are the benefits?

• Managerial: the workshop ends with a blue print shared by all stakeholders in a record time. Now each discipline can execute to its best capabilities its part of the brand task but with a clear understanding of how it fits and contributes to the bigger picture.
• Effectiveness and efficiency: the brand gains on both dimensions, provided the execution is up to the challenge. Never forget that a great plan is not worth much without a great execution.
• Service providers: a ZBB approach usually leads to a small number of agencies whose role is clarified. This generates much more productive brand /agency relationships with a sharply reduced time devoted to screening out the constant stream of new initiatives proposed by a long list of service providers. One can think that these new initiatives are a source of creativity: in reality, they are often a source of thin spreading, with a large number of below threshold activities. You’re much better off concentrating your creativity on the touchpoints that have passed the cut of the ZBB approach.