Erin Core.
Erin Core, Managing Director, Veracity
Recently I was part of an event by The Marketing Club, where we asked a simple question: What does good marketing actually look like in 2026?
The answers were wide ranging, depending on who was answering the question - which highlights the real problem: the definition of “good” depends on who you ask.
Ask marketing, and ‘good’ might look like engagement or reach.
Ask digital, and it’s efficiency.
Ask finance, and it’s growth.
All valid but all incomplete.
And without a shared definition, marketing performance becomes almost impossible to prove. That’s why the same question keeps coming up: “Is this actually working?”
ROI is answering the wrong question
Marketing has become more accountable - but also more narrowly measured.
We’ve optimised for ROI, CPA and channel efficiency, but those measures answer one question well: “How efficiently did we spend?” They don’t answer the more important one: “How are we growing?”
As Les Binet has argued recently, profit is far more sensitive to how much you invest (scale) than marginal improvements in ROI. And that’s the tension. When you optimise for efficiency alone, you often reduce scale and limit long-term brand growth.
Brand and performance aren’t the trade-offs
One of the clearest themes from the discussion was that brand and performance aren’t competing priorities, they’re teammates.
The evidence* backs it:
- Growth comes from balancing brand (future demand) and performance (current demand)
- Overweighting performance leads to declining effectiveness over time
- Integrated approaches deliver stronger returns overall .
Put simply: brand creates demand, performance captures it and growth needs both.
Most teams don’t lack data, they lack a connected view of it. They’re tracking channel performance, campaign outputs and efficiency metrics; but not consistently connecting those to customer responses, behaviour change and commercial outcomes. So marketing gets reported in disparate pieces, and that’s where confidence breaks down - both internally and at an investment level.
This is exactly the problem the 90s idea of the “Balanced Scorecard” was designed to address. - not by adding more metrics, but by linking them.
The Balanced Scorecard connects four important things:
- Financial outcomes (revenue, profit, growth)
- Customer outcomes (perception, demand, behaviour)
- Internal performance (how value is delivered)
- Capability (what enables future performance)
Critically, it recognises that financial results are lagging indicators and customer, process and capability measures are leading indicators. The real power comes from the cause-and-effect chain between those attributes.
The uncomfortable reality
None of this is new. The Balanced Scorecard has been around for decades. But an approach that looks at the wider lens of cause and effect still isn’t properly in place in many organisations.
Instead, we see disconnected dashboards, siloed reporting, over-reliance on short-term signals and no clear link to growth. This, predictably, leads to teams chasing short-term signals of “good” instead of building long-term performance systems.
You don’t need organisation-wide buy-in to change this initially. Start with a marketing scorecard. Keep it simple and track a small number of measures across the following:
- Performance (now)
Sales, conversions, demand capture - Are we converting demand today?
- Brand (future)
Awareness, salience, consideration, trust - Are we building future demand?
- Customer (reality check)
Behaviour, usage, satisfaction, recommendation - Are we actually changing what people do?
- Business (what matters)
Revenue, market share, profit - What is marketing contributing?
Then, track them over time, not in isolation, but as a system, because that’s what most marketing teams are missing.
What changes in 2026
The idea of a Balanced Scorecard isn’t outdated, but its role is evolving. In 2026, we need more than a measurement framework – we need a system that shifts from reporting performance to driving decisions.
In most organisations today, scorecards still answer: “How did we do?” But in 2026, that’s not enough. The question becomes: “What should we do next?”
The 2026 scorecard looks different, with:
- Fewer metrics, sharper signals – a focus on what actually drives decisions
- Leading + lagging connected - Not just what happened, but what’s coming next
- Continuous, not static - Ongoing monitoring, not quarterly reporting
- Cross-functional, not siloed -One view across brand, performance and business
- Explicitly decision-led - Built around key trade-offs and actions
The next generation of scorecards tells you: what changed, why it changed, what it contributed, and what to do next.
That’s the difference between measurement and management.
After all the discussion and debate, one thing became clear:
“Good” isn’t a single metric. It isn’t brand. It isn’t performance. It isn’t efficiency.
Good marketing is clarity. It is clarity on what you’re trying to achieve, how you measure it, how it connects to growth, and what decision comes next.
Put simply: good marketing isn’t about doing more. It’s about knowing what matters - and acting on it.
If you can’t confidently show how marketing contributes to business revenue, profit and growth, the issue probably isn’t your activity, it’s your measurement system. Because in 2026, the advantage won’t come from having more data for data’s sake, it will come from having better connections, clearer signals and faster decisions.
Confidence doesn’t come from more reporting. It comes from clarity, connection and decision-making. And ultimately, that’s what enables marketers to answer the question that matters most: “Yes – this is working. And here’s exactly why.”
*Sources:
Small thinking, small profits: Les Binet warns marketing is shrinking itself
Warc's The Multiplier Effect - A CMO’s guide to brand building in the performance era
The Multiplier Effect: How Brands Unleash Full-Funnel Growth