For decades, marketers in the B2B Food & Nutrition (F&N) sector have focused on quantifiable, tangible returns: lead generation figures, conversion rates and direct revenue attribution. While these metrics remain important, they tell only part of the story. In today’s competitive F&N landscape, marketers face a fundamental challenge: balancing immediate commercial targets with long-term brand building.
Our 2025 B2B Food & Nutrition Marketing Benchmark reveals that 62% of respondents identify the balance between brand health and immediate ROI as a major challenge. This tension between quarterly results and sustainable growth has contributed to a sector-wide problem: with marketing teams focused on short-term metrics, many brands struggle to invest in the long-term differentiation strategies that would help them stand out. The result is what we call a ‘differentiation dilemma’, with 64% of B2B F&N marketers citing brand awareness and differentiation as their top hurdle.
In this article, we’ll explore how Value on Investment (VOI) offers a powerful framework for addressing this challenge, providing practical measurement approaches and implementation strategies based on findings from our latest benchmark research.
Understanding value on investment
VOI metrics assess marketing effectiveness through broader indicators that don’t immediately translate to revenue but significantly influence long-term business health. Unlike ROI’s focus on attributable financial returns, VOI acknowledges that brand building creates durable competitive advantages where value extends beyond quarterly results.
This approach encompasses improved brand perception, increased customer retention, enhanced audience engagement and stronger market positioning. These elements enable F&N marketers to justify investments in differentiation and creative storytelling that may not deliver immediate sales but are essential for sustainable growth.
Four ways of implementing VOI measurement in practice
For B2B F&N marketers looking to shift towards VOI-focused approaches, several practical strategies can help translate this concept into actionable frameworks.
- Perception studies with key audiences provide a good metric of VOI. Regular research with customers, prospects and industry influencers creates valuable benchmarks for measuring brand impact over time. By tracking shifts in perception, awareness and brand associations, marketers gain visibility into how positioning evolves and strengthens—even when these changes don’t immediately affect quarterly sales. This longitudinal perspective helps justify continued investment in brand-building activities by showing meaningful progress against strategic objectives that traditional ROI metrics might miss.
- Engagement depth metrics offer another valuable lens. Moving beyond basic impressions or click rates, meaningful VOI approaches examine how audiences engage with content over time. By analysing content consumption patterns, cross-channel engagement and progression from awareness to consideration materials, marketers can identify audiences developing genuine relationships with their brand. These engagement indicators often signal future business value long before it registers in traditional ROI measurements—showing the foundations of preference being established before purchase decisions occur.
- Voice-of-customer programmes provide essential qualitative context to quantitative metrics. Numbers tell one story, but customer voices complete the picture. Regular feedback through advisory panels, surveys, social listening and sales team channels often reveals brand value that attribution models miss entirely. This qualitative perspective captures important nuances—like content being shared within customer organisations or influencing specification processes—that demonstrate brand strength in ways quantitative metrics alone cannot measure.
- Sales cycle analysis connects brand awareness to sales efficiency. By identifying correlations between brand familiarity and sales velocity, marketers can demonstrate how strong positioning shortens decision timelines, reduces price sensitivity or streamlines competitive evaluations. This translate to tangible business value—even when warm leads progress through the pipeline with fewer touchpoints, VOI is in action, reflected in improved sales efficiency that traditional ROI calculations often overlook.
The business case for VOI
The balance between immediate results and long-term brand investment isn’t just a marketing challenge—it’s a business imperative. Smart companies recognise that brand strength delivers tangible advantages: faster sales cycles, reduced price sensitivity, stronger customer loyalty and greater resilience during market downturns. These benefits contribute directly to financial performance, even when they don’t show up neatly in traditional ROI formulas.
Creating a measurement approach that places VOI indicators alongside conventional ROI metrics gives leadership a clearer overview of the marketing matrix. This balanced perspective acknowledges both the short-term wins and long-term value creation, helping secure broader organizational buy-in for strategic marketing investments that might otherwise be difficult to justify.
Moving forward: a balanced approach
Our benchmark reveals a significant shift in industry thinking. The most successful marketers in the B2B Food & Nutrition space are embracing more balanced strategies that nurture brand equity alongside driving immediate results. With 73% of marketers now prioritising brand perception improvement, the sector is moving from a defensive, short-term mindset toward proactive, strategic brand building.
Final thoughts
The path forward for marketers requires moving beyond purely sales-driven tactics to further embrace creative storytelling, exploring diverse channels and positioning marketing as a strategic investment rather than just a cost centre.
By complementing traditional ROI measures with thoughtful VOI metrics, marketers can better articulate their full contribution to business success and secure the resources needed to build truly distinctive brands that stand out.
Want to learn more about what’s on the mind of Food & Nutrition marketers today? Download our 2025 F&N Marketing Benchmark for a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and opportunities.