Don’t let short-term ROI re-write your marketing budget
Opinion
The very things that make in-store feel safe are precisely what make it risky when overused, writes Spark Foundry’s strategy partner.
Every few years, marketing rediscovers a familiar debate.
It usually surfaces when margins are tighter, finance is circling, and someone points at a bar chart showing short-term ROI and says: “Shouldn’t we put more money there?”
Right now, that “there” is in-store.
With raw material costs up and marketing teams under intense quarterly pressure, shifting marketing budget towards in-store activity feels like the responsible thing to do. It delivers visible impact, converts quickly, and reassures.
And in many cases, that instinct is right.
The problem only starts when in-store is treated not as part of a connected system, but as a replacement for it. What’s being framed as an optimisation often results in the liquidation of future demand to fund present sales.
ROI lives on different timelines
Let’s be clear: in-store works. It is the final, decisive moment where value is realised.
It captures shoppers who are already in market, at the point of choice. It amplifies availability, salience and value cues. In an environment obsessed with weekly numbers and immediate proof, it is an incredibly attractive option, with the potential to dramatically outperform expectations.
But the very things that make in-store feel safe are precisely what make it risky when overused. Not all returns arrive on the same schedule. Marketing doesn’t pay back on one timeline; it pays back on several. There’s the immediate spike, the medium-term return, and then the long, slow accumulation of brand effects that don’t show up neatly in a quarterly report, but quietly do most of the commercial heavy lifting.
On a 13-week payback window, advertising delivers an average short-term profit ROI of £1.87 for every £1 invested – which may not compete with in-store activity on paper. But extend the window to 24 months, and that ROI rises to £4.11.
In-store activity often delivers faster visible payback. Brand activity often delivers slower, broader impact.
Neither is wrong. They perform different roles at different points in the consumer journey.
Problems arise when only the fastest-paying parts of the system are funded, while the slower ones that replenish demand are quietly deprioritised.
Demand is not created and converted in the same place
There’s a structural truth that often gets lost in most “channel vs channel” debates.
Demand is shaped long before a shopper stands in front of a shelf.
Brand building primes memory, expectations and preference. It reduces price sensitivity. It increases the chance that when shoppers arrive in-store, the brand is already mentally available.
In-store activity then does what it does best: it efficiently converts that demand.
The data is unequivocal on this point. On average, 84% of purchases involve people choosing brands they’re already primed towards. Only about 16% of sales are meaningfully open to influence at the final conversion moment.
Cut the priming, and there is simply less demand to harvest.
What goes wrong when the system is broken
When budgets are shifted without considering the full consumer journey, a familiar pattern emerges.
Brand investment is reduced because its effects are harder to defend under short-term pressure. Over time, consumer preference softens. Promotions work harder to compensate. Discounting deepens. Shoppers become more deal-led, and market share declines.
Once lost, rebuilding consumer preference requires sustained excess share of voice, frequently far exceeding the savings made by cutting upstream activity in the first place.
The smarter question to ask
This isn’t an argument against in-store. It’s an argument against false tradeoffs.
The most profitable brands don’t ask whether demand creation or demand conversion matters more. They ask whether the system connecting the two is intact.
They protect the earlier stages of the journey that fill the pipeline. And they invest in in-store to ensure that demand is efficiently captured when it matters most. It’s about taking a joined-up, customer-centric view of the consumer experience, using behavioural data to connect channels in a way that makes strategic sense.
So the better question isn’t: “Should we move money from paid media into in-store?”
It is:
Are we managing the journey end-to-end, or optimising one moment at the expense of another?”
Because when demand creation and conversion stop working together, performance rarely improves. It just borrows strength from tomorrow to fund today.
The opportunity lies in ensuring each channel is sufficiently funded to do the job it is best designed to do, in service of the consumer journey.
Felicity Bowen is strategy partner at Spark Foundry