On my first trip to Brazil, a local friend of a friend agreed to show me around Sao Paulo. One problem: I spoke no Portuguese and he spoke no English. We both spoke a little Spanish so that kinda-sorta got us through our time together.
That’s how I feel about my interactions with CFOs sometimes and I’m sure the feeling is mutual. The problem is that getting a taste of a new city has far fewer consequences than keeping a business and a brand thriving.
I am not alone nor is this something new. What is new, however, is the unprecedented uncertainty that’s making CFOs’ jobs almost impossible. Practically everyday, tariffs get announced, struck down, appealed, and reinstated under new authority. Then there’s geopolitical tensions that keep shifting while driving up costs. Monetary policy moves with every data release and don’t get me started on the impact of climate change.
In this environment, even I would expect CFOs to tighten the belts wrapped around their budgets. However, the mistake isn’t cutting costs. It’s confusing a reduction in expense with a reduction in risk. They are not the same thing.
That’s what our latest white paper: “The Uncorrelated Asset,” spells out in the language of CFOs. It’s a risk-management case for investing in the one thing on the balance sheet that isn’t moving with tariffs, courts, or the next headline: Your brand, your image.
We wrote this white paper because most of the arguments marketers bring into the room are still spoken in a language CFOs don’t speak fluently. Awareness, engagement, pipeline: good words but our terms, not theirs.
So instead of writing another piece that makes the case for brand in marketing language, we wrote one that opens the way a CFO’s own risk briefing would: the same tariff data, the same market volatility, the same credit for the hedging work their team is already doing. Only after all of that does it get around to making our actual case.
It contains 20 sourced data points spanning two decades, the kind of evidence a CFO can scrutinize rather than just nod along to. For example, it shares that only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any given moment. The other 95% are subconsciously deciding who they’ll remember, based on who stayed visible while everyone else went quiet.
If you’re a marketing leader, read it yourself first. We wrote it for you to hand it off, to the person who’s been saying no this whole time, in language they can’t wave away as just marketing speak.
If you’re that person, God love ‘ya and thank you for keeping us all afloat in these choppy seas! Dive in and let us know what you think.
