Most marketers aspire for their function to be seen as an engine of growth within the business.

This is reflected in Marketing Week’s exclusive 2025 Language of Effectiveness research, in partnership with Kantar and Google, which asked marketers about their priorities within the organisation. Defending or growing sales (36.2%) ranks as the third most important priority for the more than 1,000 brand marketing respondents, behind growing market share (57.9%) and communicating a consistent and desirable brand image (54%). 

While it’s possible to grow market share at the same time as having shrinking revenues, the metric often provides an insight into brands’ growth versus their competitors.

The fact growing sales and market share are ranked so highly by marketers suggests the extent to which they aspire to drive growth. While this is a key way to build the standing of marketing within an organisation, driving growth comes with a proviso.

Ultimately, what we’re all trying to do, whether you’re in the marketing function or any other function of the business, is build sustainable profit.

Lee Grunnell, Womble Bond Dickinson

Profitable growth is the key objective uniting most businesses. Profitability is essential for attracting and retaining investors, as well as allowing a business to reinvest to drive future growth.

However, despite the importance of driving profitable growth, defending and growing profit margins through price actually emerged as the bottom priority (12.7%) in the Language of Effectiveness data.

This apparent lack of focus on profitability from marketers is concerning. Carlsberg CMO Yves Briantais implored marketers to understand both the top and bottom line of their businesses.

“If a marketer thinks profitability is not his or her job, there’s an issue,” he says.

All goals ladder up to the ultimate goal of profitable growth, argues CMO at law firm Womble Bond Dickinson UK, Lee Grunnell.

“Ultimately, what we’re all trying to do, whether you’re in the marketing function or any other function of the business, is build sustainable profit,” he says.

“That’s ultimately the reason we want to build a strong brand, because it leads to more sustainable profit.”

Every activity across a business, whether it’s in HR, sales or marketing, is ultimately aimed at that goal, he states. Therefore, Grunnell is surprised driving profit margins doesn’t appear higher on the list.

If delivering sustainable profit is seen as a whole business goal, perhaps some marketers don’t see themselves as solely responsible and may feel “a little bit removed” depending on their standing within their particular business, he suggests.

‘Pairing ambition with real marketing rigour’: Gousto marketing VP on profitable growth

While profitable growth will be a goal for almost every business, the emphasis placed on profit depends on the circumstances of the business. When Alessandra Bellini joined Tesco as chief customer officer in 2017, she came on board at a time when the retailer was in turnaround mode following its accounting scandal.

In those first few years at the supermarket, the emphasis was on restoring customer trust and delivering profitability. Everything the marketing team did had to be oriented towards driving profits.

“In everything we did, we had to deliver more money: in the way we spent the money, where we spent it, what we spent it on,” Bellini says.

Toilet roll brand Who Gives A Crap donates half its profits to sanitation projects worldwide. Given this donation policy, which marketing director David Titman describes as a “core fundamental” of the brand, driving profitable growth is key for the growing brand.

“The most important metric for us has always been the growth of our donations,” he says. “We have always looked at our impact as the guardrail of how we do business.”

While it’s a business with strong growth ambitions, Who Gives A Crap won’t turn to methods like deep price cuts to grow market share at the expense of its profit margins.

What driving profit looks like

Pricing and driving a premium is a key way marketing can help drive profit in an organisation, but there are many ways they can seek to influence profit margins.

When it comes to the promotional or advertising part of marketers’ jobs, they may be more likely to name driving brand equity or sales as goals, rather than profit, says Bellini.

However, return on investment (which just 39.4% of marketers “always” measure according to the data) is essentially a measure of the profitability of marketing spend, she notes, meaning a focus on profitability is essential.

Optimising marketing spend in a way that drives the strongest returns is familiar to marketing leaders and a key way profitability is driven by the business. Marketers have more power than ever to optimise given the amount of data at their fingertips, Bellini notes.

She also believes delivering profitability is a whole business job, meaning marketers may not see it solely as their responsibility and could, therefore, be less likely to rank it as a top priority.

Marketers wouldn’t be in their jobs or last very long if they were just driving growth at any cost.

Pete Markey

Marketers ought to be familiar with the levers that drive profitability at their brand, notes Grunnell, who explains this varies from sector to sector.

“If I think about the metrics that we talk about as a business, we’ll talk about debtor days, lock up, utilisation and effective billed rate,” he says. “All of these sorts of things, they are utterly specific to the world of professional services and law firms.”

If he were to get a job outside this sector in something different like retail, for example, those levers would become “utterly irrelevant”, Grunnell notes.

“There needs to be an onus on the marketer to understand the fundamentals of the category and the different profit levers at play,” he argues.

For former Boots CMO Pete Markey, the strategies to grow sales and profits go hand-in-hand. While driving profit through pricing is clearly not far up the priority list for many marketers, Markey would be surprised if many of his peers could truly abandon the idea of profitability in favour of driving sales.

“Marketers wouldn’t be in their jobs or last very long if they were just driving growth at any cost,” he says.

Click here to read all the Language of Effectiveness content so far.