The boardroom wants marketing ROI. Here’s why brand delivers – just not how you’d expect

This edition has been guest written by Michelle Alexander. Michelle Alexander is Marketing Director for Brand at Keyloop, where she leads Content, PR, Digital and Customer Marketing. With over 20 years of experience spanning iconic brands including M&S, she specialises in building brand strategies that drive commercial growth. Michelle is passionate about the power of brand to drive measurable business outcomes and believes that in every industry, great marketing is fundamentally human.

Let me tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to say out loud in the boardroom.

For too long, marketing has been cast as the colouring-in department. The team with the scented glitter pens, the flashy creative and an inexplicable ability to spend 20 minutes discussing shades of green. The fun ones, perhaps. But not exactly the people driving the P&L.

After spending 20 years in marketing, from M&S to the fast-moving world of automotive retail technology, I can tell you that tired narrative isn’t just wrong, it’s expensive.

McKinsey research shows that companies in the top quartile for brand strength grow revenue at twice the rate of their bottom-quartile peers. Not incrementally more. Twice. Yet marketing still finds itself fighting for credibility in conversations about growth, profitability and commercial strategy.

That’s something I’d like to change. Because I care about ROI every bit as much as anyone else in the room. Perhaps that’s because we still treat brand as a soft metric and commercial performance as a hard one.

But anyone who has ever sold anything knows the truth. Trust, confidence and emotional connection are often the variables that determine which way the numbers eventually fall.

People buy from people. Full stop.

Think about the moment someone falls in love with a car. Not the spec sheet, the actual moment they sit behind the wheel and feel something shift. The primal pull of imagining the future version of themselves driving it away. That feeling isn’t incidental to the decision. It is the decision. And the person who sold them that car? They didn’t win on features, they won on trust.

Now think about the person working at the dealership on the other side of a B2B deal; signing off a significant software investment that they believe will transform how their business operates. They have fears, ambitions, a team counting on them, and a career on the line. They want to feel understood, and they want to believe in the company they’re backing.

That’s not B2B or B2C. That’s H2H — human to human. And it became the starting point for how we chose to build the Keyloop brand.

At Keyloop, we work with automotive retailers, manufacturers, financiers and fleet providers. It’s an industry of enormous scale and relentless pace that has, for all its ambition, been largely underserved when it comes to brand. Legacy systems, disconnected data, siloed processes all mean our customers are dealing with compounded complexity every day. For too long they’ve been sold to on features and functions alone. Nobody was speaking to what it actually feels like to operate in that environment — or to the obsession of the people trying to change it.

For us, that meant looking beyond products and propositions and posing a different question. So we asked ourselves: what emotional territory will truly speak to this audience? These are people who know their businesses better than anyone, and they deserve to be spoken to as the experts they are. With empathy. With edge. With confidence in what’s possible.

That gap between what our customers are capable of achieving and the systems holding them back? That’s the space we’re building our brand in. We call it the Empathy Gap, and it shapes everything: our brand platform, the campaigns we’re developing to position Keyloop as a genuine enabler of our customers’ goals rather than simply a vendor of connected software, and our emotional territory,  confidently progressive.

And then came the question every brand marketer eventually faces in the boardroom.

The vanity metrics question

“How do you measure a shift in perception?” It’s the question that makes brand marketers squirm, and rightly so, because the honest answer isn’t tidy. You can’t draw a straight line from a brand campaign to a won deal the way you can from a paid search click. Bear with me, finance friends.

What you can do is point to the signals.

Brand perception shift shows up in the conversations your sales team starts having; warmer, more strategic, less anchored to price and more focused on possibility.

How can you help us transform our business today and scale into the future?

How are you thinking about AI, so we’re always ahead? 

When customers start asking those questions, something has shifted. They’re no longer evaluating a vendor; they’re considering a long-term partner. That is ROI.

It shows up in the commentators and influencers who reference your business unprompted, in your presence within the conversations shaping your sector, and in your Share of Voice across industry coverage. At Keyloop, our Share of Voice increased from 33% to 47% year on year.

But it doesn’t stop there. It shows up in the calibre of talent you attract, the awards you win, the way partners talk about you when you’re not in the room, and in customer feedback that moves beyond transactional satisfaction to reflect how you actually want to be perceived.

And over time, remember this for those boardroom discussions, a brand that commands genuine respect commands a premium. Research from Bain & Company found that top-quartile B2B brands carry a 7–9% price premium over median competitors, widening to over 12% in markets with high switching costs. That’s not soft value. That’s margin.

None of these are vanity metrics. They are leading indicators; the signals that precede pipeline, that precede retention, that precede the compounding commercial value strong brands are proven to deliver.

The challenge, then, isn’t proving that brand creates value. It’s helping the board recognise it early enough to keep investing in it.

Earn the room

Here’s what I’ve learned about keeping the boardroom’s faith: it’s not a measurement problem. It’s a relationship problem.

Everyone in that room needs to see that you understand what’s at stake commercially. So build a measurement framework that layers brand health metrics alongside business KPIs, and report against both with transparency. Be honest about what you can prove now and what will take time to surface. Boardrooms keep faith with plans that are clear about their horizon, not just their highlights.

Beyond the metrics, build the narrative. Brand investment is the infrastructure beneath every other commercial effort. Demand generation doesn’t work as hard without it. Doors don’t open as easily without it. Retention doesn’t hold without customers feeling something about who you are.

And find your allies. We are fortunate at Keyloop to have a leadership team that is itself confidently progressive. People who understand brand not as decoration, but as direction. That kind of belief doesn’t arrive fully formed; you earn it by showing up with clarity, consistency and the willingness to have the honest conversation.

The boardroom keeps the faith when you treat them as partners in the brand story. Not an audience to be convinced, but people who need to believe in what you’re building together.

That, in the end , is just H2H.

The CMO Insider is aimed at supporting senior marketeers succeed and do well. When not being guest written, it's Adrian Nicholls adrian@cloudhuman.co.uk and Clint Lovell clint@cloudhuman.co.uk. If you would like to guest write, then contact us with your ideas or let us know what subjects you would like covered next. For more of these subscribe https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/cmo-insider-7426637269622595584/