The Marketing Society UAE recently held its inaugural Fellows’ Forum, led by Asad ur Rehman and supported by Bloomberg Media, where 12 senior leaders came together to debate why the case for long-term brand investment keeps failing despite overwhelming evidence. The answer, it turns out, is less about proof and more about governance and language.
Every CMO recognises the dynamic. The evidence for brand investment sits on the table, supported by decades of market data proving that long-term brand equity drives commercial growth. Yet when capital allocations are finalised in the boardroom, long-term brand building loses out to short-term demand conversion.
This tension formed the center of discussion at the inaugural Fellows’ Forum dinner in the UAE, hosted by The Marketing Society. A newly launched initiative intended for global expansion, each Fellows’ Forum brings together roughly 12 senior business and marketing leaders for candid, peer-led debate hosted by a Society Fellow. Over dinner, leaders from across brands and agencies examined why marketing leaders struggle to secure capital for long-term equity, exploring structural pressures, regional execution friction, and the governance failures that undermine the marketing function.
Short-termism and the structural trap of demand conversion
A core driver of underinvestment is short-termism, enforced both by market structures and board-level pressure. The average tenure of a chief marketing officer globally remains about four years, lower than chief executive officers, financial directors, or other board members. With limited time horizons, leaders face immense pressure to deliver immediate, countable returns.
This environment pushes marketing teams to focus heavily on demand conversion at the expense of demand creation. Rather than continuously building equity to bring new buyers into the funnel, organizations harvest existing demand to hit quarterly targets. Over time, this creates a compounding cost liability. Recent corporate history highlights the risk: major consumer goods companies that slashed ad spend down to single-digit percentages of turnover eventually faced massive multi-hundred-million-dollar brand write-offs. Private equity ownership structures often exacerbate this cycle, prioritising operational efficiencies and short-term growth over enterprise value creation.
The regional divide: Centralized strategy vs. local execution
The debate highlighted a sharp division between industry models and geographic structures. B2B and B2C organisations operate on vastly different dynamics. In B2B sectors, marketing budgets face constant pressure against direct sales headcount.
Regional structures present another hurdle. In the Gulf, regional teams frequently find their responsibilities restricted to last-mile tactical execution, while global HQs retains control over brand budgets and global campaigns. Participants noted that centralized global creative often fails to resonate with local audiences. While sectors like luxury hospitality have successfully shifted authority back to regional teams to deliver localised campaigns around moments like Ramadan, many technology and financial services entities still starve regional offices of brand-building capital.
Measurement chaos and the governance crisis
Marketing remains one of the few executive functions operating without standard metrics. While financial directors oversee numbers and operations leaders manage output, marketing performance is judged through more than 150 competing measurement frameworks. Without a single recognised standard for brand value, financial leaders view marketing expenditures as discretionary costs rather than capital investments.
The shift toward real-time digital metrics and short-term tracking tools like Net Promoter Scores has exacerbated this issue. Leaders often treat real-time digital signals as superior proof points, funneling budget into digital performance channels without requiring the verification or transparency demanded of traditional media.
Ultimately, the issue comes down to governance. While physical assets receive protected, long-term capital allocation, marketing budgets are routinely cut to manage short-term earnings. Marketers often fail to speak the financial language of the board, relying on vanity metrics like reach and impressions instead of enterprise value, risk mitigation, and shareholder growth.
