This edition of The Brand Equation is brought to you by the Villain Team of executive-level strategists, writers, researchers, creatives, and category experts who bring both precision and pace to their craft.
At a glance
What we're focused on: Why brand investment stalls in budget conversations, and what changes when you reframe the argument.
What breaks without it: Brand gets funded at whatever's left over. Which is rarely enough.
Where to look first: Are you making a marketing argument in a room that requires an operational one?
What we’re reading:
Harvard Business Review: Why Strategy Execution Breaks Down
Deloitte: Global Marketing Trends
Gartner: CMO Spend and Strategy Priorities
From the Villain desk
Most leadership teams we talk to aren't skeptical about brand. That battle is largely over.
The conversation that hasn't been won yet is the budget one.
What I see happen, reliably, is this: a leadership team agrees brand needs to be stronger. Everyone in the room believes it. Then someone asks what it should cost, and the conversation quietly falls apart. The number feels pulled from thin air. There's no clean way to connect it to outcomes the CFO cares about. Other line items have clearer return narratives. Brand often doesn't in the way that holds up under pressure in that room.
So it gets funded at whatever's left over, simply out of an inability to defend a specific number.
That's a different problem than not believing in brand, and it requires a different solution.
The instinct most marketing leaders bring into that conversation is to make a stronger case for brand with better data, more compelling examples, and sharper storytelling about awareness and perception. Unfortunately, that’s usually not enough because the CFO isn't questioning whether brand matters. They're questioning whether this number is the right number, and whether the return shows up somewhere they can measure.
That’s where an operational argument comes in.
The shift from a marketing argument to an operational one is subtle, but it changes the whole conversation. When brand investment is framed around what misalignment is already costing — in decision speed, sales cycle length, how often the same strategic questions get re-answered across teams — it no longer seems like discretionary spend, but a fix for something that's already expensive. Suddenly, you hear questions like "why are we underinvesting in something that's already slowing us down?"
That reframe doesn't require tons of new data, but looking at costs that already exist and connecting them to the right cause.
What we're seeing
Across organizations in the $500M to $3B range, the budget conversation tends to break down in one of three places.
The first is ownership. Brand investment gets split across marketing, communications, and sometimes product, meaning no single function is accountable for whether the total is right, and the CFO has no clean way to evaluate it as a whole.
The second is timing. Brand comes up in budget cycles after growth targets are already set, which means it gets sized against what's left rather than against what the business actually needs to hit those targets. It's reactive by default.
The third is language. Marketing leaders make the case in brand terms (awareness, perception, equity) while the rest of the leadership team is evaluating in operational terms. The argument lands in the wrong register, and the number doesn't stick.
None of these are unsolvable. But you have to know which one is happening in your organization before you can fix it.
From the table
We recently hosted a dinner with a group of CMOs navigating exactly this. Three things came up consistently enough to be worth sharing.
Brand isn't what you say in a deck. It's what your customers repeat back to you. If there's a gap between your narrative and what's actually landing, that's where growth stalls. You can't fix external perception until the story is working internally first.
The message also has to travel without you. Through a buying committee of 50 people, across functions that weren't in the room when the strategy was set. Most brand systems aren't built for that kind of distance, and most leaders don't find out until it's already expensive.
The third was about pressure at the top. AI has made speed a commodity. Shiny object syndrome at the executive level is real. The CMOs in the room were clear: the leaders winning right now aren't moving faster, but with more clarity.
If these conversations sound familiar, we're expanding the dinner series to Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. Let us know which city you're interested in (or suggest one) and we'll be in touch when dates are set. Join the waitlist here.
A question worth sitting with
Before your next budget conversation, look at where decisions are slow, where teams keep revisiting the same questions, where the story shifts depending on who's in the room.
Put a rough number on the time that's being lost to those things. Then ask whether your current level of brand investment is sized to actually fix them, or just to maintain.
That's the gap most organizations are carrying without realizing it's a brand problem. And it's the most honest starting point for a conversation about what the right number should be.
