Instead, the morning explored how to turn marketing into a genuine growth engine – with brand investment, sharper KPIs and a stronger “measurement muscle” at the core.
The session brought together:
- Ossi Ahto, Founder of Ahto Advisory, marketing adviser & Interim CMO
- Andreas Nordfors, Managing Director – Nepa Marketing Acceleration Hub
- A panel of Nordic marketing leaders:
- Roope Ruotsalainen, Brand & Customer Director, SAKA
- Aliyar Hussain, Marketing Performance Director, Paulig Group
- Fedor Babkin, Senior Industry Manager & Global Client Lead, Google
- Moderated by Matias Karhumäki, Account Executive, Nepa
Below are the key themes and quotes from the discussion.
Do you want to download all slides from the presentation? Click here.
Marketing as a growth engine – not a cost centre
Speaker: Ossi Ahto, Founder – Ahto Advisory
Ossi Ahto opened by acknowledging what many in the room already feel: news is tough, consumer confidence is low, and pressure on marketing budgets and results is higher every year. In this environment, many organisations instinctively treat marketing as a cost to be trimmed.
Ahto argued that this mindset is precisely what holds companies back:
“If you just think [brand] as a cost, you tend to try to minimise it. That is not a long‑term winning recipe for growth.”
Instead, he positioned brand investment as the core of making marketing your growth engine. Strong brands, he reminded the audience, do three commercially crucial things:
- Justify premium pricing in the long run – when decision‑makers compare prices, the brand is often the only thing that earns you a higher margin.
- Create demand – retailers and platforms prioritise brands that move volume; in tough times the brands that remain are the strong ones and the very cheap ones, the middle falls away.
- Protect future share – if competitors continue to invest while you pull back, you are effectively pre‑spending your own market share losses.
He also referenced the well‑known ESOV (Extra Share of Voice) evidence: brands that consistently invest above their market share tend to grow; brands that cut investment below their share tend to decline. For Ahto, the lesson is clear: “saving your way to safety” is rarely a winning strategy.
Beyond spend levels, he broke growth down into three practical arenas:
- Creating new demand – deep customer insight, relevance to a broad enough audience, and distinctive brand assets that stick in memory.
- Catching existing demand – being present wherever people look for your category, removing barriers to purchase and making choice easy.
- Growing existing customers – preventing churn, cross‑selling and up‑selling together with sales, and ensuring that satisfied customers come back.
His advice for “growth builders” in 2026 was blunt and very practical: understand the customer right now, do fewer things but at a scale that people actually notice, maximise visibility rather than only chasing ever‑tighter ROI, be highly distinctive in the noise, and ensure that short‑term measurement clearly signals long‑term growth.
Building a marketing measurement muscle
Speaker: Andreas Nordfors, Managing Director – Nepa Marketing Acceleration Hub
Picking up where Ahto left off, Andreas Nordfors shifted the focus from why marketing must drive growth to how to build the capabilities that make this possible – especially when budgets are under pressure.
Nordfors framed the challenge directly: most organisations are not short of data; they are short of clarity and coordination. Departments and partners work in silos, data access drives attention towards what is easy to measure, and measurement often becomes a data‑science exercise rather than a business steering tool.
His answer is to build a “marketing measurement growth muscle”: a repeatable way of working where insights continuously inform decisions on budget, mix and execution.
At the heart of this are three elements:
- Rhythms – clear decision cadences (strategic, tactical, operational) and forums where marketing, finance, P&L owners and agencies regularly review evidence and act on it.
- KPIs – robust, proven metrics that cover all decision levels, with a demonstrated link from fast‑moving indicators (for example platform metrics) to slower, commercial outcomes.
- Toolkit – a holistic analytical toolkit that supports those decisions, rather than a patchwork of disconnected tools.
Nordfors reiterated one of Nepa’s central principles:
“You don’t need a tool – you need a toolkit.”
For Nepa, that toolkit is anchored in a “trinity” of methods that work together:
- Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) – to understand the incremental effect of all channels over time, both short‑ and long‑term.
- Brand tracking – to monitor brand health and connect it to future sales.
- Campaign evaluation – to diagnose creative and executional performance.
Used in combination, they allow marketers to see where to move money, whether problems sit in media or creative, and how brand and performance activities contribute to total ROI – not just last‑click results.
As Nordfors put it, the aim is to move from reporting marketing to steering marketing: using data to reallocate spend, rebalance brand and performance, and make the case for investment with the CFO.
Panel: where strategy meets reality
The closing panel brought theory and frameworks down to the day‑to‑day reality of running brands and performance across different categories.
With perspectives from:
- Roope Ruotsalainen (SAKA) on maintaining brand direction while markets and consumer behaviour shift quickly.
- Aliyar Hussain (Paulig Group) on balancing central frameworks with local market realities, and building a culture where teams use data rather than fear it.
- Fedor Babkin (Google) on the changing measurement landscape – from cookies to modelling, from last‑click to incrementality.
Several common themes emerged:
- Marketing must speak the language of business. Data and AI are only useful when they are clearly tied to profitability, customer value and risk.
- Discipline beats novelty. It is tempting to chase every new trend or shiny metric, but the winners are often those who commit to the basics: consistent brand building, clear KPIs and regular learning cycles.
- Progress can start small. You do not need a perfect blueprint to begin. One well‑chosen experiment, one pilot MMM, or one clarified KPI set can be enough to prove value and unlock the next step.
The discussion returned several times to the relationship with Finance. Panel members agreed that when marketing can show a coherent story – from brand activity to sales impact – conversations with CFOs change from “cost” to “portfolio of investments”.
Five takeaways for marketers facing tighter budgets
For marketing leaders whose 2026 budgets have been cut or heavily scrutinised, the session offered five clear lessons:
- Stop treating brand as a discretionary cost.
Thinking of brand spend purely as cost leads naturally to minimisation. Treating it as an investment in pricing power, demand and resilience changes the conversation. - Do fewer things, but at a scale that matters.
Fragmented, under‑weight activity is easy to ignore. In a noisy market, your work needs enough reach and distinctiveness to actually register. - Build a real measurement muscle, not just more dashboards.
Clarify decision rhythms, align KPIs across marketing and finance, and invest in a toolkit that can show both short‑term response and long‑term impact. - Make distinctiveness a non‑negotiable.
When products and services look increasingly similar, being easy to notice and remember is not a creative “nice to have” – it is a commercial requirement. - Use data to reallocate, not just to justify.
The real value of measurement lies in its ability to move money: away from low‑return activities and towards those that build both brand and sales over time.
Why this matters now
When budgets tighten, it is natural to reach for the red pen. The message from Helsinki was that the way you cut and the way you measure matters at least as much as the amount you spend.
Treating marketing as a growth engine, not a cost centre, requires courage – but it is not an act of faith. With clear KPIs, disciplined ways of working and a well‑designed measurement toolkit, marketers can show how every euro works twice: once for the customer, and once for the CFO.
And in a year when your marketing budget may well have been cut, that kind of proof is exactly what keeps growth ambitions alive.
Ready to turn a tighter 2026 marketing budget into real growth?
Fill in the contact form here and we’ll get in touch to explore how you can sharpen your KPIs, build a practical measurement toolkit and make every marketing pound work harder.
Published on: 5TH FEB 2026