Only half of CEOs and CFOs believe advertising drives brand and business growth. At BERA’s Multiplier Playbook Day, leaders working to tie brand investment to business results heard an expert panel take on how to win over that skeptical half.
Elspeth Rollert, CEO of The Marketing Cloud, moderated a conversation with panelists from across agencies, in-house insights teams, marketing measurement, and industry research. Together, they shared how marketers can make brand a C-suite priority and secure the investment it needs to drive growth.
Start with the problem brand can solve
CFOs respond best when marketers outline the business problem first, demonstrate how brand can help solve it, and attach hard numbers to both short- and long-term impact.
Chelsea Cramer, investor and growth advisor, saw this play out in her own experience. At a consumer fintech company, years of performance-only spending kept revenue rising even as brand metrics declined. Growth eventually slowed, and the cause traced back to weak acquisition among 18- to 24-year-olds. Performance channels had hit the top of their saturation curves, so additional spending wasn’t producing additional growth.
The team modeled performance-only spend against a plan that shifted some budget to brand. Brand trailed at one month but pulled ahead at two and three years, making the investment far easier to approve. Framing brand as the solution to a specific growth problem gives the CFO a business case to evaluate on familiar terms.
Connecting brand equity to financial outcomes strengthens that case. When marketers can quantify how brand strength relates to revenue and other business measures, they give leadership evidence to evaluate the potential value of continued investment.
Swap marketing speak for margin
CMOs and CFOs often speak different languages. Telling a CFO you’ll move awareness two points or make the brand more approachable explains what marketing will do. CFOs care about what it will return, and they need to trust the projections behind that number.
Pricing power, customer acquisition, and revenue growth resonate because they tie brand to financial performance. Quantifying how changes in brand equity relate to these outcomes gives marketers evidence to support investment decisions. Leading with financial impact positions brand as an investment finance can evaluate on its own terms.
Framing the cost of inaction also helps, since people work harder to avoid a loss than to secure a gain. The strongest CMOs pair hard numbers with plain, human language and build credibility through smaller experiments before asking for Super Bowl budgets.
Build measurement that tracks brand over time
Brand influences sales, yet measurement systems often hand performance the credit. A new brand campaign can bring fresh buyers into the market, but the sale usually gets attributed to the performance ad they clicked last. Brand effects also build over months, so a strong framework tracks early, middle, and late indicators that show how a campaign moves people from awareness to purchase.
General Motors, featured in The Multiplier Playbook, put this into practice. It tracked fast-twitch metrics like share of search as early signals, then watched for lower acquisition costs and less price elasticity as campaigns matured. Finance followed the same metrics, giving the results credibility across the company. McDonald’s built a similar framework with its CFO, and getting the right metrics in place took about a year.
Planning matters as much as the metrics. Set objectives before launch, use holdout audiences or markets to isolate a campaign’s effect, and bring brand metrics into weekly performance meetings so both teams see the connection.
Tracking brand equity alongside business outcomes over time adds another layer of evidence. It helps marketers understand how changes in consumer perceptions relate to financial performance and gives leadership a clearer view of brand’s contribution to growth.
Make creative work as hard as media
Distinctive creative earns attention and can reduce the media spend needed to make an impact. Ads that fail to stand out require far more spend to achieve similar results, a penalty researchers call the “cost of dull.”
Consistency also gives brands room to take creative risks. Surprising work that still fits the brand creates an “aesthetic aha,” the jolt of pleasure when something unfamiliar suddenly clicks. Kinder Bueno played on the “no bueno” catchphrase in its Super Bowl spot to reinforce its name and encourage trial, then saw 30% year-over-year sales growth eight weeks later.
Brand-level creative can also shape how AI assistants understand a brand when consumers ask them for recommendations. In WARC’s Guide to Brand Building in the Age of Gen AI, researchers asked several LLMs about credit cards. Mastercard’s “priceless” platform, built over 20 years, came through in almost every answer. Competitors without that long-term commitment showed no consistent identity, and AI responses mostly reflected whatever promotion they were running at the time.
See brand’s impact in the numbers
Some of the earliest signs that brand is multiplying performance can appear in performance metrics themselves. Customer acquisition costs can decline as brand strength improves the effectiveness of performance advertising, while the pool of people willing to consider the brand can expand.
Connecting brand equity to financial performance helps marketers understand these relationships and demonstrate brand’s contribution to growth. BERA.ai brings that connection into focus by measuring how brand equity relates to business outcomes, including customer acquisition, pricing power, and revenue.
With that evidence, CMOs can make informed investment decisions, defend brand budgets, and give financial leadership a stronger basis for evaluating brand’s contribution to business performance.
