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 in conversations with finance and the board, revenue is how budget decisions are made and defended. Ultimately when efficiencies are needed, brand spend is the easiest cut unless the case is compelling and commercial. 

MMM levels the playing field

Marketing mix modelling puts brand and performance channels on the same footing because 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 and a model skewed by unclean data or biased assumptions will flatter some channels and understate others. Getting it right matters as does looking beyond channel ROI, including understanding the synergistic effects that click-based attribution structurally cannot see.

The implementation problem we don’t talk about

A common frustration I hear from peers is that MMM is harder to get right than it looks. In most cases it’s not the model that fails, it’s getting it embedded effectively 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 that is best used for strategic decisions, while a good MTA handles weekly in-campaign optimisation. Being deliberate about which decisions are handled by one vs the other is important.

Don’t rely on one metric

MMM-driven channel revenue is highly credible but it’s a lagging indicator so you need leading metrics for brand that you can run alongside. Branded search share is the one I personally always use - it’s relative, frequent, behavioural and is a good indicator of future growth. When combined with brand lift and conversion lift experiments, they give you a valuable 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. Cut brand and the numbers might even look a little more efficient for a short period of time. However, brand shapes the quality of current and future demand, not just the cost of capturing it. It has synergistic effects across the growth engine and defends your existing customers but when those effects are invisible and “brand, acquisition and retention” is not seen as an interconnected growth engine, cuts in brand can seem rational.

The harder conversation

Where things get tricky is that b\rand investment has a longer payback window than performance spend and often markets are concerned with numbers this quarter. 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. It’s a difficult decision and one that can be made more effectively if we look at the trade off. What does it actually cost to go dark? What does it cost over a year or two?

These are hard conversations worth having.