Performance marketing metrics have earned their place in the modern marketing stack. ROAS, conversion rate, short-term sales lift – these are legitimate signals of campaign effectiveness, and the infrastructure built around them has made marketing more accountable than ever before.
But there’s a growing tension that senior marketers across APAC are quietly reckoning with: the tools that measure what happened last week may be capturing only a fraction of what marketing is actually producing.
MMA Global’s Brand as Performance studied this gap across three major brands. In Kroger’s case, traditional measurement tools captured just 17% of the full sales impact, leaving 83% unmeasured. Ally Bank and Campbell’s told a similar story, with conventional approaches undervaluing marketing’s contribution by 44% and 60% respectively. The returns weren’t absent. They were happening downstream, over a longer timeframe than most campaign reports are designed to track.
Favorability Is Where The Compounding Begins
At the core of the BaP research is what the MMA calls the favorability pathway: brand marketing increases consumer favorability, and favorability has a measurable effect on every commercial outcome that matters: acquisition rate, purchase volume, and retention.
Across the three brands studied, favorable consumers converted at between 2.9x and 4.7x the rate of non-favorable consumers, tracked over a 9 to 10-month period. That’s not a marginal lift. It’s a structural difference in how consumers with higher brand affinity behave in the market.
This effect only became visible when consumer-level survey data on brand sentiment was connected to actual purchase behavior over a long enough timeframe – a connection that standard attribution models don’t make.
The BaP research also quantified something that most marketers intuit but struggle to evidence: marketing’s long-term impact is significantly larger than its short-term effect. Across the three brands studied, long-term conversion rate lift ranged from 1.8x to 6x the short-term result.
The Kroger finding is particularly instructive. Seven months after a three-month brand campaign ended, long-term sales impact was 6x the short-term figure and 70% of that long-term impact came from favorable consumers created during the campaign period. Brand messaging drove the favorability shift among non-customers. Performance messaging reinforced conversion among existing ones. Each tactic played a distinct role across the purchase timeline.
For Ally Bank, maintaining a brand-forward strategy was projected to generate 16% more customers and 29% more accounts over two years compared to an equivalent short-term performance approach. The returns compounded well past the point where most campaign reports stop looking.
What This Means For How Marketing Teams Plan
The measurement challenge here is structural. When attribution windows close within weeks, longer-duration brand effects become difficult to account for, not because they don’t exist, but because the data infrastructure isn’t built to track them.
The BaP methodology addresses this by integrating ad-serving data, brand sentiment surveys, and conversion behavior at the individual household level, then tracking outcomes for nine months or more using causal lift experiments. The result is a measurement framework that captures both the immediate efficiency and the longer commercial arc of a campaign.
For CMOs across APAC operating in markets where digital ecosystems are maturing fast, brand trust functions as a durable competitive advantage, and finance teams are scrutinising marketing returns more closely, this distinction matters. In high-consideration categories like financial services, FMCG, and e-commerce, the gap between what short-term attribution captures and what marketing is actually producing can be significant enough to reshape how investment decisions get made.
Closing The Measurement Window
The brands that consistently grow market share tend to treat favorability not as a soft metric, but as a leading indicator of future commercial performance. Campbell’s data illustrated this clearly: favorable consumers purchased at 2.9x the rate of non-favorables, and had a 21% higher retention rate, effects that accumulated over nine months and would have been invisible in a standard post-campaign report.
Building measurement systems that connect brand sentiment to long-term purchase behavior is increasingly how marketing demonstrates its full value to the business. The dashboard will always tell you what happened last week. MMA’s Brand as Performance research makes a compelling case that the more consequential question is what last week’s campaign is still producing six months from now
Learn more about Brand as Performance program here.
