What’s the ROI of salt?
Imagine you own a restaurant, and your investors see a line item in your budget for salt and demand you justify the ROI. Salt goes into nearly everything you make. A pinch here, a generous helping there. It’s always there, making everything taste better.
Could you isolate the ROI of salt? How does salt contribute to the sales of each dish? How does salt contribute to customer satisfaction with each dish? How does salt contribute to the overall success of the business? Would you run an A/B test serving some customers food with more salt and others with less in an attempt to correlate to sales or revenue? The whole exercise in this restaurant scenario feels ridiculous because it is. But marketers constantly face a version of this same exercise related to proving the ROI of brand.
CMOs are tasked with isolating brand’s contribution to the business. Show which sales wouldn’t have happened without brand investment. Quantify how many widgets were sold because of investments in the brand. Just like with salt, the questions miss the point. Brand is foundational; it makes everything else work better.
Brand is why your performance marketing converts better. It helps your sales team get meetings. It’s why your product launch gets coverage. It’s why customers choose you even when your pricing is similar to competitors’. Or why they are willing to pay a premium. Brand is the unsung hero, always there, quietly improving things, often without much fanfare or even recognition of its role.
Restaurant owners aren’t forced to prove the ROI of salt because people understand cooking. Marketing doesn’t have that luxury. Most executives see the performance marketing dashboard with its clean attribution and assume all marketing works that way. When they look at brand investment, they want, and now increasingly expect, the same kind of tangible proof.
We try to answer. We build attribution models, run brand lift studies, and do regression analyses. Sometimes we even convince people. But we’re still playing the wrong game. Salt doesn’t deliver ROI on its own. It makes everything else deliver ROI. Take it away, and everything suffers; nothing works quite the way it should.
The true value of a brand isn’t in what you can isolate, but in everything you can’t.
