Why Brand Investment Loses the Internal Argument - And How to Fix It

Brand often loses the budget conversation. Not because the case isn’t there, but because it needs to be made in the right language.

Brand health scores, engagement rates, reach and views are real signals but none of them connect to revenue, and revenue is how budget decisions are made and defended. When leadership looks across the portfolio and needs to find efficiency, brand spend is the easiest cut. Those metrics don’t fight back, and that’s the first problem to solve.

MMM levels the playing field

Marketing mix modelling puts brand and performance channels on the same footing. Every channel is measured against ROI. For the first time, brand investment has a number attached to it that holds up in a boardroom conversation.

But the devil is in the details. A model skewed by unclean data or biased assumptions will flatter the channels already favoured and understate the ones that aren’t. Getting it right matters. So does looking beyond channel ROI in isolation to understand the true contribution of each channel, including the synergistic effects that click-based attribution structurally cannot see.

The implementation problem nobody talks about

A common frustration I hear from peers is that MMM is harder to get right than it looks. In most cases the model isn’t the failure, it’s the embedding into the org. For MMM to be genuinely useful it needs to be wired into the way the business operates: revenue forecasting, budget planning across the portfolio, media strategy, and increasingly creative strategy too. There needs to be governance around applying learnings, a clear optimisation schedule, and a refit rhythm that makes sense.

One more thing: MMM is a strategic tool best used for strategic decisions. A good MTA handles weekly in-campaign optimisation. Best to be deliberate about which decisions are handled by one vs the other.

Don’t rely on one metric

MMM-driven channel revenue is highly credible but it’s a lagging indicator. You need leading metrics for brand that run alongside it. Branded search share is the one I return to consistently - it’s relative, frequent, behavioural and moves before revenue does. Complement it with brand lift and conversion lift experiments and together they give you a triangulated view: lagging credibility from MMM, early signals from search, and controlled evidence from experiments.

The real cost of underinvesting

Brand gets deprioritised because the consequences of cutting it aren’t immediately visible. The direct effects, such as more direct traffic and cheaper branded clicks, are the smaller part of the story.

Brand shapes the quality of demand, not just the cost of capturing it. It has synergistic effects across the growth engine and defends your existing customers. When those effects are invisible and “brand, acquisition and retention” is not seen as an interconnected growth engine, underinvestment in brand seems rational.

The harder conversation

Brand investment has a longer payback window than performance spend. It moves like a naval ship, not a speedboat. Slow to build momentum, but once it’s moving, it’s hard to stop. The pressure to show returns quickly is real, but the trade off of underinvestment needs to be looked at in the cold light of day. What does it actually cost to go dark? What does it cost over a year or two?

Those are hard conversations and the ones worth having.