That finding, from a new survey of almost 1 400 senior executives by Bain & Company and Google, recasts adversarial relationships between CMOs and CFOs as one of the most underrated growth levers a company has.

Yes, the divide between marketing and finance is real. But it was never a clash of values, or about creativity versus rigour. It is, and always has been, about proof of performance.

The same survey reveals that the two functions are far more aligned than the antagonistic stereotype allows. More than half of both marketers and finance leaders named demonstrating direct revenue impact as the single most important thing marketing can do to strengthen its standing with finance.

Both groups pointed to return on marketing investment and revenue impact as the ones that matter most.

About 70 per cent of both groups, the research found, expect performance investments to pay back within months or quarters. Roughly 40 per cent of each accept that brand investment needs a year or more to work. 

Financial Folk Are Rational Sceptics — They Want Proof

Finance is not uniquely hostile to the long term. The Bain and Google researchers write that finance leaders scrutinise marketing the way they scrutinise every line in the business. They do this because they are trained to challenge assumptions and pressure-test the evidence. That is the job.

So if we agree on the goal, the metrics and even the time horizons, why does the relationship so often feel like a standoff?

Because the friction was never about priorities; instead, it lies in data quality and in how results are communicated and validated. Marketing's problem, bluntly put, is that finance does not always believe the numbers we bring to the table.

This is not a fresh wound. 

Let Me Tell You Something You Already Know — Marketing Needs to Earn Trust From the C-Suite

As long ago as 2011, the Fournaise Marketing Group reported that 80 per cent of chief executives said they did not really trust, or were unimpressed by, the work of their marketers. The same research revealed that 90 per cent said they trusted the judgement of their finance and technology chiefs.

Over a decade on, the credibility gap has proved stubborn. The CMO Survey, run twice a year by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, has logged the same quiet frustration for years. A large share of senior marketers concede they cannot demonstrate the impact of their spending in hard, quantitative terms. 

The Bain and Google work sharpens the point. Only 41 per cent of marketers, it found, feel they have the right data, tools and measurement capability to tie their performance to business outcomes.

When you cannot prove it, you are left to assert it. And assertion, in a room full of people paid to be sceptical, is the quickest way to lose an argument, and a budget with it.

Integration is Rewarded by Financial Benefit — Which Starts With Alignment

Now let's return to the good news. The massive benefit when CMOs and CFOs work together. Alongside the near-doubling of revenue growth, companies with a strong relationship between their marketing and finance chiefs are almost 1.5 times more likely to lead their sectors, Bain and Google found. 

The researchers defined leaders as those growing market share by at least seven per cent in the previous year, or growing share by at least four per cent alongside revenue growth of 11 per cent or more. Trust between these two functions is a growth driver in its own right.

The mechanism is intuitive. When finance believes marketing's numbers, capital flows to marketing faster and stays there longer. When it does not, every campaign is disputed, every horizon is shortened, and the organisation retreats to the safest, most measurable, most short-term spending it can find. Spending that, perversely, is often the least effective. 

Peter Field, whose effectiveness studies for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising have shaped the field, warned in 2019 of a "crisis in creative effectiveness" as brands chased quarterly proof points and starved the long-term brand building that actually compounds. A finance team that distrusts marketing does not merely withhold money; it quietly tilts the whole enterprise towards short-termism.

Transparency, Alignment and Unity Create Competitive Advantage

Three habits, each borne out by the Bain and Google research, separate the partnerships that work from those that do not.

The first is radical transparency with the data. The strongest marketing–finance relationships, the study found, are 2.5 times more likely to rest on credible data. This credibility comes from showing the numbers plainly, refusing to cherry-pick, and reporting the failures alongside the wins.

This is counter-intuitive for an industry trained to sell. Yet nothing buys standing with a finance chief faster than volunteering that a campaign underperformed, and explaining exactly why. Be candid, too, about what cannot yet be measured cleanly. Finance can live with honest uncertainty; it will not forgive a number dressed up as more certain than it is.

The second is to lock the metrics before the campaign launches, not after. The leaders in the study agree on a shared measurement framework that is owned jointly by marketing and finance well before budgets are committed.

The third is to agree realistic payback horizons, and then defend them together. This is where marketing must teach finance something, and where the evidence is firmly on our side. The landmark studies by Les Binet and Peter Field for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising established the now-famous benchmark that a roughly 60 / 40 split between long-term brand building and short-term activation delivers the strongest results over time.

And as the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's research, popularised by LinkedIn's B2B Institute as the "95-5 rule", has shown, at any given moment only about five per cent of buyers in a category are actually in the market to buy. Brand investment is not a leap of faith; it is the rational way to stay remembered by the 95 per cent who will buy later.

Bring your finance chief inside that logic before you ask them to fund it, and a brand campaign stops looking like self-indulgence and starts looking like a bet with a known, if longer, payback curve.

None of this works if the effort travels in one direction only. The most productive partnerships I have seen involve finance chiefs who have deliberately built a marketing mindset of their own. 

Technology Offers Valuable Predictive Tools

The good news? Artificial intelligence is beginning to close the data gap that has dogged this relationship for a generation, sharpening real-time information and forecasting. The marketers furthest ahead are using it precisely to raise the quality of what they can prove to finance. Transparency, as it happens, is becoming easier to deliver just as it becomes more valuable.

The reward for getting this right is not merely a quieter budget meeting. It is freedom. When marketers consistently hit the targets they have set jointly with finance, they earn the licence to make longer-horizon bets without having to justify the timeline afresh every quarter.

That is the reframe the best organisations have already made. They have stopped treating marketing and finance as a transaction to be endured and started running it as a growth alliance.

The proof is in the profit. CMOs and CFOs that make this work do better. Two and a half times better than anyone else.

For more information, visit www.bravegroup.co.za. You can also follow Brave Group on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, or on TikTok. 

*Image courtesy of contributor