How Brands Can Overcome Internal Obstacles and Create a Winning Marketing Mix

By Bradley Keefer, CRO, Keen Decision Systems  

It’s a competitive environment for brands right now. Consumers are cutting back on spending or switching to cheaper alternatives. As such, brands are facing increasing pressure from their finance teams to prove that every marketing dollar contributes to business growth.

While this will have some impact on the success of a brand, it’s simpler than that. Winning brands aren’t waiting for the perfect moment to come. They’re fully aligned with their finance teams, the ones ultimately calling the shots. They’re also more likely to find the right mix between the top and bottom funnel and have the right measurement tools in place.  

Here’s how they’re doing it. 

 Marketing and Finance Needs to Speak the Same Language 

Internal misalignment is the single greatest drag on marketing speed and performance. According to our June survey of senior marketing executives, nearly half (49.2%) have only a surface-level alignment between marketing metrics and overall business KPIs. Worse, 40.8% frequently override predictive media planning tools simply because recommendations clash with executive intuition. 

This disconnect slows decision-making before campaigns even reach consumers. 

When finance evaluates marketing through one lens and marketing reports performance through another, budget approvals become longer, planning becomes more reactive and optimization opportunities are missed. Meanwhile, competitors with stronger internal alignment move faster. 

Those brands are successful because they share how they measure and present investment decisions as revenue forecasts using the language that finance already uses, like incremental revenue, incremental profit and return on investment. 

That alignment should begin long before campaigns launch. Marketing and finance should jointly establish annual revenue targets tied to marketing investments, define expected returns for each channel and agree on how success will be measured. Once campaigns are live, marketers can report actual business outcomes against those agreed-upon forecasts rather than presenting disconnected marketing metrics. 

The result isn’t simply better reporting. It entirely changes the internal dynamic, creating greater confidence in investment decisions and reducing friction when new opportunities arise.

The Wrong Tools in the Toolbox 

Even when organizations are aligned internally, many marketers still lack the tools needed to make confident decisions. 

Our research found that analysis and modeling (50%) is the most time consuming part of the measurement and optimization cycle, while balancing software and services (35.8%) is the biggest challenge for analytics teams.

The result is slower optimization and less confidence in where budgets should move. 

Many organizations continue relying on measurement models that were built for a far less dynamic media environment. Today’s customer journeys span dozens of touchpoints, while AI is accelerating both media buying and consumer behavior. Static models simply can’t keep pace. 

 Modern AI-driven measurement platforms continuously refresh models, evaluate cross-channel interactions, conduct built-in incrementality testing and simulate future investment scenarios. Moving to this continuous learning system allows teams to compare projected outcomes against live performance, identify structural variances, and feed those learnings back into the planning model immediately. Forecast accuracy compounds over time, making every consecutive campaign more efficient. 

Connect the Entire Customer Journey 

Measurement gaps frequently mask a broader strategic flaw: fragmented full-funnel planning. Over half of survey respondents (51.7%) struggle to connect top-of-funnel brand awareness initiatives to bottom-of-funnel conversion outcomes, despite tracking both.

The issue isn't a lack of data; it is a failure of integration. Modern buyers move non-linearly across channels before making a purchase. Brands that optimize exclusively for last-touch bottom-of-funnel conversion end up starving top-of-funnel demand and misallocating capital.

A connected, full-funnel approach coordinates messaging, media weighting, and frequency across the complete buying cycle. Research from McKinsey demonstrates that brands deploying integrated full-funnel strategies capture 15% to 20% higher overall marketing ROI. Crucially, a unified strategy reveals how channels like retail media, linear video, and search compound each other's performance, steering budget toward maximum total growth rather than isolated attribution credit.

Market volatility will persist, but the biggest hurdles to expansion exist inside organizational walls, not outside them. The market leaders pulling ahead are building agile decision systems that align finance and marketing around business outcomes, power continuous forecasting, and optimize across the complete buyer journey.

In a market where every investment is under scrutiny, competitive advantage increasingly belongs to the brands that make better decisions, not simply those that spend more.