The Purpose of marketing is behavioural change. It’s about getting people to act differently.
Over-focusing on ROI metrics kills creativity and long-term brand value.
ROI obsession makes companies underinvest in customer service and retention, since these benefits take longer to show.
Example:
Expedia once received 20 million customer service calls a year.
The top reason?
“Can you resend my itinerary?”
Instead of hiring more agents, they fixed the email system so customers automatically got their email confirmations.
– Millions of calls disappeared.
– Customer satisfaction skyrocketed.
– Support costs dropped.
“Customers no longer needed to call support — their behaviour changed because the system removed the friction.”
That’s upstream thinking. This problem won’t happen again because they fixed the root cause.
And that’s what real marketing does: It changes behaviour, not just dashboards.