Most B2B marketers can’t get brand investment signed off. Not because they’re wrong, but because they’re explaining it to the wrong audience in the wrong language.
On a regroup call earlier this year, the COO of a software business we work with said something that has stuck with me ever since.
“The board does not need a long list of activities. We are focused on business outcomes. Otherwise it becomes just a long list of tactics.”
He wasn’t talking about brand. He might as well have been writing the brief for this article.
Most B2B marketers cannot get brand investment signed off. Not because they don’t have the case. They have the case. They have read Binet and Field. They know the 95-5 rule. They can talk for an hour about mental availability and category entry points. None of that means anything in a board meeting.
To the FD, brand investment looks like marketing wanting more money for things that don’t show up on a dashboard. To the CEO, it looks like the marketing team is trying to do the fun work instead of the urgent work. Neither sees it as commercial. Neither funds it.
This article is for the marketer trying to win that argument. It is also for the FD trying to understand it. If an FD has been sent this article, the section for them is below.
Why the brand argument fails in boardrooms
The story most marketers tell about brand goes like this. Buyers do not decide rationally. They decide based on memory and feeling. So we need to invest in long-term mental availability, build distinctive brand assets, optimise for share of voice, and trust that the ROI will come.
Every word of that is correct. None of it works in a boardroom. Mental availability is invisible. Distinctive brand assets sound aesthetic. Share of voice is a measurement marketers love and FDs distrust. The ROI “will come” is the worst phrase you can use in front of a finance director.
When the marketing team makes that pitch, the FD hears something different to what is being said. They hear: spend more, see less, trust us. That isn’t a budget conversation. It’s a faith conversation. FDs are not paid to have faith in marketing. They are paid to protect cash, manage risk, and ensure capital goes where it can generate a return. So every quarter that goes by without a different conversation, brand investment gets cut a little further, and the marketing team’s credibility erodes a little more.
Three things every FD recognises
If the brand argument is going to be heard, it needs to translate into language an FD already uses. Three concepts do most of the work.
Brand is an asset, not an expense.
FDs spend their lives separating capital expenditure from operating expenditure. They depreciate buildings, equipment, software. They understand that some money creates assets that hold value over time, and some money pays for things that get consumed in the period they are spent.
Most performance marketing behaves like operating expenditure. You spend it, it captures demand, then the effect tails off quickly when the spend stops. Brand investment is closer to capital expenditure. It builds an asset. The asset is mental availability, which is memory in the heads of future buyers. It depreciates if you stop maintaining it, but it doesn’t disappear the moment you stop spending. The brands that win the next decade in your category are the ones whose names are in buyers’ heads when those buyers go in-market. It behaves like an asset, even if it does not sit neatly on the balance sheet.
It is how FDs already think about every other long-term investment the company makes. The brand line item is the only one being held to a different standard.
Brand is what makes every acquisition channel cheaper, eventually.
Performance marketing has rising unit costs. Paid search CPC goes up every year. Retargeting pools get more expensive as platforms saturate. SDR cadences get less productive as buyers get more allergic. In most B2B categories, the cost of buying a customer through performance channels is climbing every year.
Brand investment moves the other way. The marketing investment compounds. A buyer who already knows your name takes less budget to convert than one who doesn’t. So a pound spent on brand today should reduce the cost of future demand capture.
That is a return on capital argument an FD will engage with. This pound, spent now, makes every future pound work harder.
Brand is risk management.
This is the part FDs should care about. FDs are paid to think about risk before opportunity. The risk they don’t currently see is the cost of being unknown when buyers go in-market. Brand investment isn’t optimistic. It is defensive. The brands that don’t invest in being remembered are the ones that get gradually forgotten, and B2B buyers don’t buy from companies they have forgotten.
That cost is already showing up in most B2B businesses. It just hasn’t been named yet. Rising CAC. Lengthening sales cycles. Lost deals to competitors the buyer already knew about. Eroding share of search. Pipeline that needs more spend each quarter to stand still. None of those numbers look like a brand problem on a dashboard. All of them are.
A note for the FD
If a member of your marketing team has sent you this article, this is the part they want you to read. The argument they are making is more financial than it sounds.
Brand investment is the closest thing marketing has to long-term capital allocation. Treating it only as quarterly expenditure means judging a long-term asset by a short-term reporting window. You would not assess most other strategic investments that way.
Customer acquisition cost is rising in most competitive B2B categories. The reason is usually not that performance marketing has stopped working. The reason is that the company has stopped being known by enough of its future buyers to make performance marketing efficient. Brand investment is what fixes that. Without it, you will spend more every year to acquire the same amount of pipeline. That is a trend any FD should want to head off before it shows up in the next budget. (More on the maths in the 5% problem.)
The companies in your category that win the next five years will be the ones buyers already remember when they enter the market. The Bain and Google research shows 86% of B2B buyers have a Day One List of vendors they want to consider before any formal research begins. 92% buy from that list. If your brand isn’t on those lists today, performance marketing won’t put it there. Only brand investment will.
You do not have to jump to a 50-50 or 70-30 split. You just have to stop treating brand as optional. Your marketing director is not asking you to bet the budget on brand. They are asking for one per cent to test what happens. That is a defensible commercial decision, and it is how every brand that is now famous in your category started building its lead.
How to actually have the conversation
On a retainer review earlier this year, a B2B marketing director told me what she was actually facing. “How do you prove the value of upper-funnel search? Otherwise I’m going to have someone breathing down my neck going have you maximised all the in-market spend, are we capturing all the demand rather than creating it?”
That is the conversation every senior B2B marketer is having. The way to win it isn’t more theory. It is commercial framing.
The conversation that doesn’t work is the one most marketers have on instinct. We need to invest in brand because of the 95-5 rule and mental availability and the importance of being on the day one list. The FD nods, files the request, and approves nothing.
The conversation that works sounds like this. Our customer acquisition cost is up 30% in two years. Our paid search CPC is up 40%. We are losing deals a quarter to competitors the buyer already knew about. If we don’t change something, the trend continues. I want to take 1% of the budget and test brand investment for two quarters. We will measure it on direct traffic from target accounts, branded search growth, share of search against our top three competitors, and win rate where the buyer knew us before they enquired. If those numbers don’t move, we stop.
That is a conversation an FD will say yes to. It sets up a follow-up in two quarters where the data does the persuading instead of the marketer.
The other shift is the language. Most marketers are using vocabulary their FD has never trusted. Share of voice. Mental availability. Long-term equity. All of those words mean something specific to a marketer and nothing at all to the person holding the purse strings.
Translate. Share of voice becomes category awareness benchmarks. Mental availability becomes brand recall as a leading indicator of pipeline. Long-term equity becomes compounding return on marketing investment. The argument is the same. The packaging changes whether it gets funded.
Bring the 1% with you. Most marketers cannot get a 46-54 split signed off in one conversation. Almost all of them can get 1%. The compounding effect over twelve months gives you the data to fight for 10% next year. Most B2B brands won’t get to a healthy ratio in one budget cycle. They will get there in three. That is fine. Start.
Read about how we’ve transformed B2B brands through brand investment with the likes of Infodesk and Open GI.
The point most marketers miss
The brand argument isn’t the FD’s responsibility to win. It is the marketing director’s.
The marketing director who said this on a pitch with me earlier this year captured it better than I will. “We’ve got a business that thinks the brand is ubiquitous and well known and that we’ll be top of the list. Speaking for myself and the team, we know that’s not the case. But the FD sees the customer numbers and the big logos, and assumes the brand is already doing the job. They don’t see us as a strategic partner, which we believe we are. We’re not, in reality.”
That marketing director was right about everything. He had been in the same business for years, watching the same FD make the same assumption, and the budget hadn’t changed. At some point, being right and being unfunded becomes the same thing.
The marketers who get brand investment funded in 2026 are the ones who stop trying to convince the board that brand matters and start showing them what happens if they don’t fund it. That is the conversation that moves money.
Looking to get a brand project over the line? Get in touch with us today.
