Introduction

Marketers struggle to prove their full impact. Most still focus too much on short-term wins, missing long-term business growth.

What's the problem it solves?

Many companies don’t clearly understand how marketing drives profit. Because of this, marketing budgets are often cut or ignored. This report helps explain why proper measurement matters and how to prove marketing’s real value.

Quick Summary

This report explains why marketing is often misunderstood, especially by finance teams. While marketers know that their work builds brands and drives sales, many still rely on short-term results like clicks or quick revenue. This can cause budgets to be cut during tough times, even though long-term brand building often has more impact.

The report shares tools to better measure marketing, like looking at both short- and long-term ROI, using response curves to find the best spending points, and showing how strong brands keep pricing power. It also highlights the importance of first-party data and explains why cutting marketing during a downturn can hurt more than it helps. The key message: marketing must be seen as an investment, not just a cost.

Key Takeaways from the article

• Only 2 in 10 marketers strongly agree on how to measure success with other teams
• Most companies focus too much on short-term wins and forget the long-term effects
• Strong brands can charge more and lose fewer customers when prices go up
• First-party data helps smaller brands beat big ones by being more personal
• Cutting marketing in hard times often causes more harm than savings
• Finance and marketing need to talk more and agree on what success looks like
• Good marketing builds sales today and strengthens brands for tomorrow

What to do

• Balance short- and long-term focus: Track both immediate sales and how marketing helps over time
• Work with finance: Use language and numbers they understand to explain marketing’s value
• Build response curves: Find the spending level where each channel performs best
• Use first-party data: Collect and use customer info to make marketing more personal
• Keep investing in brand: Don’t stop marketing when the economy dips
• Choose the right KPIs: Focus on clear goals, not just clicks or views
• Model pricing power: Show how strong marketing keeps customers loyal even with higher prices
• Measure incrementality: Separate what marketing actually adds from what would have happened anyway
• Use the full toolkit: Combine tools like MMM (Marketing Mix Models), experiments, and attribution to see the whole picture
• Meet regularly with finance: Share results and update plans together to build trust and keep budgets flexible