You are Marta Zielińska, chief marketing officer of Dom & Styl, a Warsaw home-and-lifestyle group with 38 stores and a brand almost every Polish homeowner can name. The new Chair has frozen your budget and wants proof that it earns its return. Before the marketing committee meets in April, you must tell it how you read the PLN 64 million.
The situation
Dom & Styl sold PLN 920 million of furniture, décor and small appliances in FY2025 at a 9% operating margin. 71% of Polish homeowners name it unprompted. Yet only 11% of revenue comes through its own website, which turns 1.4% of visits into orders against a category benchmark of 2.6%. Nationally, online already takes 18% of the category and grows 22% a year. The chief executive's diagnosis fits in four words: famous but not found.
On 9 March the board gave you four quarters to lift digital's share of revenue to 20%, on a marketing budget frozen at PLN 64 million. Miss 16% at the half-year review on 30 September and the budget is cut by 20% and channel decisions go to an outside agency. Bartosz Rejman, the new Chair and a former private-equity operating partner, has made it plain that he will not accept assertion in place of proof.
The problem is the shape of the budget. 62% of it — about PLN 39.7 million — goes to television, catalogue and trade promotion, and nobody can say what any of it returns. Blended acquisition cost has risen 34% in two years to PLN 240 a customer. Ewa Sadowska, who runs brand and trade marketing, holds that the 71% recall is what keeps acquisition affordable. Piotr Lenart, head of digital, answers that a brand nobody can buy from is a museum. Two of Sadowska's brand managers have said they will resign if performance marketing eats the brand.