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.
