You’ve made this case and you’ve lost it. Probably more than once.
Brand matters. It shortens the sales cycle. It makes the sales team’s job easier. It builds something that lasts beyond this quarter.
All true. And it loses to a paid search budget every single time, because the paid search budget can show what it did by Friday.
The problem isn’t that finance doesn’t understand brand.
It’s that you’re arguing the wrong side of it.
Every brand case I’ve ever made, and I’ve made plenty, argued the upside. Invest in this and here’s what you’ll get. Awareness. Consideration. Preference. Eventually, growth.
Put yourself in the finance director’s chair and look at that. They’re being asked to spend money now for a return that arrives in two or three years, can’t be isolated when it does, and is described in words that don’t appear anywhere in their accounts.
They’re not being difficult when they defer it. They’re doing their job.
So stop arguing the upside. Price the absence instead.
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud. A business that isn’t well known is already paying for it. Every month. It just isn’t written down anywhere as a brand cost.
Four places it shows up.
Deals take longer. When the buyer hasn’t heard of you, every conversation starts from nothing. More meetings, more time, more of your sales team tied up in one deal.
You discount more. A buyer who can’t tell whether you’re any good uses price to manage the risk. That discount comes straight off your profit on every deal it closes.
You lose more. Deals go to the company the buyer had already heard of, before your sales team ever got in the room.
Every lead costs more to convert. Unfamiliar prospects need more chasing, more content, more nurturing to reach the same point.
Three of those four push up what it costs to win a customer. The fourth pulls down what that customer is worth once you’ve won them.
And every one of them is already in your systems.
How long deals take is in the CRM. How much you discount is in the deal records. Win rates are in the monthly report. Margin is in the accounts.
Nobody has to believe in brand for any of that to be true. It’s just arithmetic on data you already have.
What that does to the conversation.
You’re no longer asking a business to fund something it can’t measure. You’re showing it a cost it’s already paying, in this year’s money, using its own figures.
That’s a different meeting. It’s also a meeting the finance director wants to be in, because you’ve brought them a number rather than a request.
One thing to be careful about, and I’d say this to anyone using it.
You can work out what weak brand is costing today. You can’t promise how much of that a particular campaign will recover.
Don’t claim you can. The first client who measures it will find out, and you’ll have handed them a reason to distrust the whole thing.
What you can say is this: here’s what the current position costs, here’s where we’re starting from, and here’s the number we’ll be judged on in a year. That’s more than any brand case has ever offered, and it’s honest.
Why I care about this more than the creative argument.
I’ve killed good work for feeling unserious and I’ve lost budget for work that would have paid. Both of those were my fault, and both came from the same place: I couldn’t put a number on it, so I argued about taste instead.
Taste is an argument you lose to anyone more senior than you.
A number isn’t.