CMOs say brand is a long game. CFOs want immediate results.

Hey there,

Ever been in that meeting where you're passionately presenting your brand strategy, only to have your CFO ask: "But what will this do for us this quarter?"

Before we start either crying or rolling our eyes at our profitability pals, understand that it's not that CFOs don't value brand. They absolutely do. It's that marketing and finance are sometimes speaking completely different languages.

Marketing speaks in terms of awareness, perception, and loyalty – the long-game metrics. Even the shorter growth metrics are about leads, conversion, churn. Slightly less long, yes, but… Finance speaks in revenue, margins, and ROI – the quarterly survival metrics.

We both know that neither is wrong. In fact, the companies that thrive don't force one department to adopt the other's language. They become bilingual.

I’ve learned a lot from the CMOs we work with that have honed three approaches that consistently work:

1️⃣ Connect brand metrics to financial outcomes: When brand awareness increases by X%, what happens to customer acquisition costs? When preference rises, how does pricing power change? These connections might not be perfect, but they provide the translation finance needs.

2️⃣ Structure for both short AND long-term wins: That 18-month brand refresh? Design it to deliver measurable improvements at 30, 60, and 90 days too. These early indicators build confidence and buy time for the deeper work.

3️⃣ Position brand as a business asset, not a marketing expense: When brand strategy affects every department, it becomes much easier to justify the investment.

Need some hard data to make your case? Here's what I share with clients:

• Companies with strong brand differentiation command a 27% premium on enterprise deals (Brand Finance)

• Clear positioning reduces customer acquisition costs by up to 38% (Gartner)

• Differentiated B2B brands extract 2.4x greater customer lifetime value (Bain)

The smartest marketing leaders I know don't just defend brand investments – they translate the value for each functional leader:

• For sales: Brand strategy transforms unpredictable pipeline into predictable growth.

• For product: It elevates your roadmap from features to a coherent vision.

• For tech: It provides a framework to focus on truly differentiating innovations.

• For finance: It creates pricing power and margin protection even in competitive markets.

If you're trying to bridge this gap in your organization, remember that brand isn't just a long game. It's played on multiple timescales simultaneously. The best players know how to score points today while setting up the big wins of tomorrow (sorry, that's as sports-metaphor'y as I get).

If you're preparing for a brand investment conversation with your finance team, check out this simple framework we created to help structure your case.

Just launched a brand refresh? The framework's great for that too, especially when you're launching without a baseline and post-launch quantitative brand tracking study in place. You're likely already measuring a lot of these metrics. Now's the time to give the brand the credit it deserves for the lift.

I'd love to hear about your experiences navigating the marketing-finance divide. What's worked? What hasn't?

Lauryn