How to get your CFO to believe in brand

Your brand campaign lifted awareness, improved consideration and reached a large audience, then you sit down with the CFO and the only clear number in the P&L is the cost.

Marketing brings impressions, clicks and brand health results, while finance asks a simpler question: what did this do to in-year profit? The CFO is right to ask this.  A client at Haleon put it well: “ROI looked good on paper but couldn’t be linked to top-line growth.” The CFO was asking the right questions and the team never fully answered them.

When that happens, performance media usually wins because it has last-click uplift, daily reporting and a clear route into conversion, while brand activity becomes an expense that marketing says is important but finance cannot see reflected in the business.

The CFO does not need more marketing metrics

Impressions, reach and engagement can tell you whether activity ran as planned, but they do not show whether the campaign created demand that turned into sales and profit.

Brand health follows the same pattern: a lift in awareness or consideration can be a useful sign that the campaign is working, but it does not tell a CFO how much incremental revenue arrived, when it arrived or whether the return justified the investment.

Showing a long list of marketing metrics can make the problem worse, because it asks finance to take several steps of logic without proving the commercial result.

The useful discussion is less about every metric marketing tracks, and more about the link between activity, the change in demand and the P&L.

Brand health needs a route into sales

Brand health can matter a great deal, particularly when it shows that a campaign has changed how people think about a brand, the question is what happens next.

Does stronger consideration lead to more base sales? Does it improve price sensitivity? Does it make paid search, social or CRM work harder? Does it reduce the amount the business needs to spend on performance media to generate the next sale?

You need to measure those links.

That means looking beyond a media-only model, because sales move for several reasons at once, including price, promotions, distribution, new products, seasonality and the wider market.

If those drivers are missing, a CFO has every reason to question a model that gives brand activity a large share of the credit.

A proper econometric model should show brand activity in that full commercial context, isolating its contribution, explaining how it affects sales over time in context with other commercial drivers and translating the likely effect into revenue and profit.

Where the result is contentious, use a lift or geo test to build confidence, giving the business evidence in its own market rather than asking it to accept a model result on its own.

Last click still has a role because it gives teams a frequent and granular read, although it should not decide the full brand budget.

Give finance a decision, not a model

Trying to get a CFO to “believe in brand” is the wrong starting point, the better question is “what decision do we need finance to make, and what would they need to see to make it with confidence?”

Perhaps the business is deciding whether to fund another £500k of brand activity. Finance will want to know the likely revenue and profit effect, when it should show up, what could change the result and whether there is a sensible way to test the assumption before committing the full amount.

That creates a much better conversation than debating whether a response curve looks convincing.

The output should make the commercial trade-off visible: if the business puts more money into brand, what happens to demand, sales, contribution margin / EBITDA and the return from performance activity? If it takes money out, what does that mean for the next quarter and the following year?

Finance does not need every technical detail behind the model, it needs a clear P&L bridge and a view of the risk.

Many marketing effectiveness projects still prove an ROI, present the result and leave the business to work out what happens next.

A model can identify between £1m and £20m in profit gain per project, but that value remains theoretical until somebody makes a decision and deploys it.

Bring finance in before the answer arrives

Finance should be involved when the work is being scoped, not invited to a readout once the result is finished.

Start by agreeing the business question: which P&L line matters, what decision is coming up, what time period will finance accept as a fair test, and how will the team separate the effect of brand activity from a promotion, pricing change or distribution gain?

Those questions shape the model and force marketing to be clear about what it wants to change.

Brand activity should not be defended as a general principle, it should be tied to a decision about investment, expected profit and the action the business will take if the evidence holds.

The final output needs to live in the normal planning process, with a named owner and a clear next step, otherwise it remains an expensive piece of academic work.

Summary

Your CFO is less concerned with impressions, likes or a neat brand lift chart, and more concerned with how brand activity creates demand, how that demand reaches revenue and profit, and what the business should do with that answer.

Before your next brand campaign, ask one question: will our measurement show finance what changed in the P&L, or only show marketing that the campaign ran?