Marketing Procurement

Turning brand, performance and commerce into one growth engine

Ellen Hammett (EH): You don’t believe the current marketing operating model is fit for purpose. Why is that?

Alex Walker (AW): For many years, marketing has been organised around specialisms – in particular, brand, performance and commerce. The problem when these operate in silos is that effective optimisation becomes harder to achieve.

If brands take a channel-by-channel approach, it leads to conflicting KPIs and commercial blind spots: brand is measured on reach and recall, performance on ROAS, and commerce on revenue and stock turn.

Ultimately, it means media costs inflate while effectiveness plateaus, ROAS improves while margin erodes, and demand spikes without supply alignment.

Value leaks everywhere.

EH: So how do we plug those holes? What does a connected growth strategy look like?

AW: A fully connected approach transforms marketing from a collection of channels into a single, high-performance growth engine, which is how brands can solve real commercial challenges.

For example, forecasting stock sell-out before it becomes a problem, bidding to margins instead of restrictive ROAS targets, and building audiences that deliver long-term value and not just short-term sales spikes.

It is not about the number of channels you have, rather how many connected systems you have and how they work together to produce the best business outcomes. There needs to be shared metrics and goals across teams to feed into and own together.

At Havas Market, we talk about the ‘commerce revenue formula,’ which focuses on four key elements: traffic and footfall, basket size, conversion rate and loyalty. Being able to connect those is what enables true sustainable growth for many businesses.

EH: You mention loyalty, but retaining customers is a key challenge for many brands. How is long-lasting loyalty achieved?

AW: First of all, it’s important to understand that loyalty isn’t earned at the point of purchase. It’s earned in between, which means brands need to find a way to keep customers engaged.

Take one of our airline clients, for example. Customers probably only think about booking a holiday a handful of times a year, so the challenge for them was what to do about the crucial middle?

We have already seen one major airline scrap its loyalty programme, so we knew we had to do something different.

By creating ongoing meaningful touchpoints through a rewards hub in the app, rather than a simple points scheme, we gave customers a reason to engage with the brand even when they’re not actively booking travel.

Ultimately, staying front-of-mind requires brands to build engagement through loops that compound over time. That’s what turns one-off customers into long-term advocates – and loyalty from a programme to a profitable product.

EH: Where does procurement fit into a connected growth strategy?

AW: When procurement sits outside the operating model, those value leaks become even greater. Media is bought on the lowest CPM rather than the highest contribution; agency contracts incentivise outputs over outcomes; short-term cost control overrides longterm value creation.

In a connected model, procurement becomes a strategic growth partner.

It is the commercial guardrail, ensuring media costs are negotiated beyond vanity metrics, agency models support full-funnel growth, and forecasting connects investment to the supply chain – all the things that work together to drive growth.

Having a connected strategy run through a single agency can also create cost and time efficiencies for brands. It reduces duplicated technology, fragmented data flows and competing optimisation models.

This is especially important at a time when we are seeing dramatic restructuring at holding companies and marketing budgets under growing scrutiny.

Procurement is in a unique position to ensure the right commercial signals are embedded in contracts, data frameworks and measurement models.

EH: How can brands implement a connected growth model?

AW: There are four essential things brands should be doing. First and foremost, break down organisational silos so KPIs can be shared across teams and enable cross-functional planning.

Second, integrate data and measurement into unified dashboards and closed-loop reporting, so that marketing initiatives can be connected directly to sales revenue and commercial outcomes.

Thirdly, align incentives to profit rather than isolated performance metrics, for example, margin-led bidding, lifetime value metrics and incremental business impact. Procurement plays a key role here by structuring supplier agreements that reward collaboration across brand, performance and commerce.

Finally, embed experimentation and agile decision-making into the operating model. Testing, forecasting and scenario modelling allows brands to adapt investment quickly and ensure the system is continuously optimised for profitable growth.

EH: Can this be done in-house?

AW: While this can be done in-house, we find teams are often stretched and may not have the resource and flexibility needed to carry it out effectively. For many, bringing in an independent third-party with specific expertise, and which can adapt quickly to changes, can be helpful.

At Havas Market, our joined-up model has helped brands to predict sell-outs, protect margin, identify high-value customer segments, and scale profit in ways channel-by-channel optimisation simply can’t.

For example, we have helped a high street retailer join their offline and online data to fuel further attraction of multi-channel customers, an online furniture company analyse their margins to inform pricing strategy, and conducted full business profit tracking back to media to better understand ROI and budget optimisation.

It is the ability to adapt and react quickly that produces the best results.

EH: What does a connected growth model look like in an era of rapid digital transformation?

AW: The core problems remain the same, but AI amplifies the negative consequences. In the context of commerce, AI has fundamentally changed how users find products, which has created a problematic squashed funnel effect.

For example, if awareness, consideration and conversion all happen in one exchange through AI search, the traditional mechanics of brand building, discovery and competition change.

There are fewer opportunities to influence decisions and compete through different digital channels.

Procurement needs to understand the new search landscape and ensure suppliers are equipped to tackle new challenges that AI creates and the different tactics that may be required. Digital PR, for example, is more important than ever to be cited in AI conversations.

Additionally, if procurement teams make sure agreements are structured around incrementality, cross-channel performance and long-term value, AI can help to create deeper alignment between incentives and profit.

EH: What do you hope marketing and procurement professionals will take away from this?

AW: If the ultimate goal is to drive sustainable growth, and procurement’s fundamental role is to maximise value and minimise waste, then the two work hand in hand.

Procurement is often the missing piece in the connected growth puzzle, yet these teams have the power to drive real growth – from smarter investments to protecting profit.

Moving forward, I hope that procurement will become a greater part of the conversation, helping to shape future media investments, commercial impact and innovation amid the next stage of industry disruption.

About 

Alex Walker, Managing Director,  Havas Market

Ellen Hemmett is a freelance journalist specialising in media, advertising and business. Having previously held senior reporter roles at Marketing Week and Media Leader for more than a decade