Two of Australia’s leading marketers have dismissed the commonly perceived tension between short-term results and brand building, arguing that the best businesses are able to do both simultaneously.

Speaking on a panel on effectiveness at Nine’s Big Ideas Store, Henry Turgoose, Marketing Director, Reckitt Health, and Phil Springall, Sales & Marketing Director – Retail, Karcher, told the packed room that the binary between brand and sales was too often distorted or oversimplified.

“I am coming up to 20 years with Karcher, which is a family business,” said Springall. “It is the responsibility of every team member to run the sprint, but also I want the company to be able to achieve the marathon. It requires a level of trust between the board and the marketing team in terms of what we are collectively trying to do.

“We have had conversations with the board about are we advertising enough in order to achieve the goals we want?”

Reckitt Health’s Turgoose agreed, saying: “People aren’t going to overthink what pain relief they buy, so we know as a business, and so do the board, that brands need to be front of mind. The shopper has come into the store and they are not going to overthink the purchase. We need them to come with all the neural connections already there so that when they think pain relief they think Neurofen.

“If we invest in creating that connection in people’s minds then we win that purchase, and the board understands that.

“I also have profit and loss responsibility, as part of my role, and ultimately so too do the board. We all have to deliver the bottom line, and that’s what everyone’s first objective is about – but it’s the conflict between the two. In a good year there’s not too much conflict, but in a difficult year there may be some tough decisions. But that’s held across the business, not just with me.”

Fellow panel member Jonathan Fox, Nine’s Director of Effectiveness, said: “We often talk about this binary, but I think we have here two marketers who really have the finance team onboard.”

Fox added that in his view, achieving C-Suite and board buy-in on marketing was all about translating key marketing metrics into more tangible return on investment metrics.

“Econometrics gets a bad wrap and that’s because it can be explained in a very complicated way,” said Fox. “The simplest way is to cut the word in half: you have ‘econ’ and ‘metrics’, and it is using metrics to measure the impact on the economy. That same technique can be applied to sales, and typically you would need three years of weekly data to understand how movements in data can explain sales over time.

“It helps you explain things like the impact of price, promotion, distribution, weather, competitor activity and of course advertising, where we can draw out the incremental impact of that advertising. It allows you to determine the return on investment, which is the purest language of the CFO.”

Panel moderator Nicky Kenyon, Director of Nine’s client services division Powered, added: “At its simplest, it is why does marketing matter? Which is something a board absolutely would be asking of all marketers.”