Fewer than seven in ten CEOs and CFOs now say they believe brand marketing builds long-term value, down from around eight in ten two years ago. That's not a marketing problem. It's a proof problem, and it changes what brand strategy actually needs to deliver.
For a long time, brand strategy got funded on conviction. A leadership team sat through a workshop, agreed the positioning felt right, signed off the document, and moved on. Nobody asked how they'd know if it worked, because nobody expected to be asked to prove it later. That era is ending.
The confidence gap
Growth has slowed, inflation hasn't gone away, and budgets are being held to a standard they weren't held to a few years ago. Marketing leaders now cite ROI as their primary basis for allocating spend, and the businesses funding brand work alongside performance marketing are the ones that can show what the brand spend actually changed, not just what it felt like.
Brand marketing hasn't disappeared from the budget. It's being brought back in, cautiously, after a period where performance channels took the lion's share. But it's coming back on different terms. It has to sit next to performance spend and hold its own in the same conversation about what the money achieved.
Why "trust the vision" stopped working
In flusher years, a confident narrative and a well-argued deck were often enough to get brand work greenlit. The default answer to a good pitch was "yes, if it feels right." The default answer now is closer to "yes, if you can show me how we'll know."
The strategist's job isn't to produce a beautiful positioning document anymore. It's to produce one with accountability built into it.
That's a genuine shift in what the work is for. A positioning document that only describes where the brand is going, without stating what should be measurably different in the business afterwards, is now an easier target for a sceptical CFO than it used to be, and rightly so. Vision without a way to check it isn't strategy. It's a story.
What proof actually looks like for brand strategy
Brand strategy is genuinely harder to prove than a performance campaign, because its effects usually show up downstream: in how much easier the sales conversation gets, in how much pricing pressure eases, in how many fewer touchpoints need explaining before someone trusts the business. That's real, but it isn't a single, obvious number the way a click-through rate is.
The answer isn't to invent a brand-only metric that nobody outside marketing looks at. A bespoke "brand health score" that only the marketing team tracks won't survive a budget conversation with someone who doesn't already believe in the work. The answer is to anchor the strategy to metrics the business already trusts: close rates, average deal size, retention, time to close, position in competitive shortlists. Whichever of those the strategy is meant to move, name it up front.
Building the evidence trail from day one
Three things belong in the strategy document itself, not in a separate measurement plan nobody reads:
First, name what should be different in the business, not just the brand, a set period after the work is used. Not "the positioning will be clearer." Something closer to "the sales team will stop losing deals to the same two objections" or "the business will be able to hold price in at least one segment where it currently discounts."
Second, anchor that expectation to a metric finance already tracks. If the only evidence of success is something marketing invented to measure itself, it won't carry weight in the room where the next budget gets decided.
Third, set the review date inside the document, not in a calendar reminder somebody might miss. Six months is a reasonable default for most of what brand strategy is meant to change. If the date isn't written down at the start, it tends not to happen at all.
None of this makes brand strategy a performance channel. It shouldn't be judged the same way a paid ad is judged, week to week. But it does mean the document has to say, in plain terms, what it expects to change and how the business will know. The strategists defending their budgets successfully this year aren't writing better decks. They're writing decks with a named consequence and a return date.
If your last piece of brand work didn't include a way of checking whether it worked, the Brand Foundation Workbook has a section on naming what should change in the business before any strategy work starts, so there's something concrete to check against later. It's free.
Brand strategy and proof: direct answers
Why are CEOs and CFOs losing confidence in brand marketing?
Slower growth and tighter budgets have pushed leadership teams toward spending they can trace to a result. Brand work has traditionally been justified by conviction rather than evidence, and that no longer clears the bar on its own.
How do you measure the ROI of brand strategy?
Not with a brand-only metric invented for the purpose. Name what should change in the business, such as pricing power, close rates or retention, using measures finance already tracks, and set a date to check whether it moved.
What's the difference between a brand vision document and a brand strategy with proof built in?
A vision document describes where the brand is going. A strategy with proof built in also states what should be different in the business by a specific date, and against which existing metric that will be judged.
Should brand strategy use its own metrics or the ones finance already tracks?
The ones finance already tracks. A new brand-specific KPI that only marketing looks at won't survive a budget conversation with a sceptical CFO. Anchoring to existing metrics makes the result legible to the people deciding whether to fund the next phase.
How often should brand strategy be reviewed against results?
The review date should be written into the strategy document itself, not left to whenever someone remembers. Six months is a reasonable default for most of the changes brand strategy is meant to produce.