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.
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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.
