Marketers face a paradox: the most powerful brand-building work often delivers the slowest, least visible returns. Emotional campaigns build meaning, distinctiveness, and memory structures that sustain growth, yet they resist the tidy attribution models CFOs often demand. The challenge is not whether emotional work works—decades of research confirm it does—but how to prove it in ways that satisfy financial stakeholders who expect immediate ROI.

Why Emotional Work is Harder to Measure

Emotional brand campaigns operate through memory, not clicks. They prime future consideration, reduce price sensitivity, and improve loyalty, but these effects accrue over years, not weeks. By contrast, activation campaigns are tightly coupled to transactions and deliver sharp, measurable spikes. Left unchecked, this bias toward the measurable often creates under-investment in brand, even though long-term profitability depends on it.

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) databank—over 1,500 case studies—shows that emotional campaigns are nearly twice as effective at driving long-term profit growth compared to rational, message-heavy ones. Binet and Field’s landmark study The Long and the Short of It (2013) quantified the optimal split: 60% brand building / 40% activation. This balance maximizes both short-term efficiency and long-term effectiveness.

Evidence from Data and Analysis

• Econometric modeling: Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) consistently find that brand advertising produces lagged but compounding effects. For example, Nielsen (Consumer Neuroscience) reports that ads eliciting above-average emotional response were associated with a 23% increase in sales versus average ads.
• Test vs. control studies: Brands running regional “brand-heavy” campaigns see statistically significant uplifts in market share and price resilience even months after the campaign ends. For instance, a 2021 Google geo-experiment showed that sustained YouTube brand campaigns increased baseline search queries for the brand by 15% over six months, while performance-only regions stagnated.
• Surrogate metrics: Share of search, a metric validated by Les Binet, represents ~83% of share of market on average across categories. Brands that build emotional salience see consistent growth in share of search before revenue upticks appear.

Translating Brand Effects for CFOs

CFOs think in financial language: margins, cash flow, and risk. To bridge the gap, marketers must translate brand outcomes into these terms:

• Price elasticity: Brands with high emotional salience can raise prices with lower churn. Kantar BrandZ data shows strong brands command an average 13% price premium over weaker competitors.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Emotional loyalty reduces acquisition costs over time. Bain & Company found that increasing retention rates by just 5% can boost profits by 25–95%.
• Market share forecasts: Share of search and brand consideration can be modeled as leading indicators of growth, enabling scenario planning (“cutting brand spend by 10% today could reduce market share by 2–3% in three years”).

Practical Tools to Bridge Accountability

1. Econometric / MMM models: Quantify both immediate and lagged effects, providing CFOs with a clearer attribution of brand’s role.
2. Geo-experiments / holdouts: Provide real-world causal evidence of brand impact by controlling exposure.
3. Composite dashboards: Blend hard ROI metrics (sales lift, CLV, margins) with brand health indicators (share of search, distinctiveness, NPS). This frames brand as an asset on the balance sheet, not a discretionary expense.

Conclusion

The gap between what grows brands and what gets measured is real—but not unbridgeable. Emotional campaigns are harder to tie directly to quarterly returns, but the data is clear: they build long-term equity, pricing power, and profitability. The marketer’s task is to use rigorous models, smart proxies, and CFO-friendly framing to make the invisible visible. When done well, brand building is not a leap of faith—it is a disciplined investment in future cash flows.

Resources

• Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. “Effectiveness.” IPA. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025. https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/advertising-effectiveness.
• Binet, Les, and Peter Field. The Long and the Short of It: 10 Key Principles of Success (presentation). IPA, 2013 (PDF refreshed 2024). https://ipa.co.uk/media/14463/long_and_short_of_it_presentation_final_030424.pdf.
• Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. “The Power of Emotion.” IPA/FT EffWorks. n.d. (PDF). https://ipa.co.uk/media/8849/0116_ftresearch_emotion_v5.pdf.
• Franses, Philip Hans. “Adstock Revisited.” Journal of Advertising, 2024. Erasmus University (PDF). https://pure.eur.nl/files/136498538/Adstock_revisited.pdf.
• Nielsen. “Advertising + Emotions = Increase Sales.” Nielsen, Apr. 2022. https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/advertising-emotions-increase-sales/.
• Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. “New Findings from the Cross-Industry IPA Share of Search Think Tank.” IPA, 12 Oct. 2021. https://ipa.co.uk/news/share-of-search.
• Millward Brown and Kantar Worldpanel. Why Being Different Still Makes a Difference. Magnetic Media, May 2016. PDF. https://magnetic.media/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016_Report_-_Why_being_different_still_makes_a_difference.pdf.
• Hollis, Nigel. “Marketing’s Mission: Make It Meaningfully Different.” Harvard Business Review, 25 Oct. 2013. https://hbr.org/2013/10/marketings-mission-make-it-meaningfully-different.
• Reichheld, Frederick F. “Prescription for Cutting Costs.” Bain & Company, 2001. PDF. https://www.bain.com/insights/prescription-for-cutting-costs/.