It’s the oldest magic trick in corporate life: the board produces a rabbit, the CMO is handed a hat, and somewhere between the two you’re expected to conjure a record‑breaking set of results.

The rabbit, of course, is “growth” – plump, photogenic, and destined first for half-year results and then the annual report. The hat is your budget – threadbare, moth‑eaten and this year, mysteriously smaller than last. Yet the applause will be measured not in sympathy but in revenues and ROI.

The past 12 months have been a masterclass in this sleight of hand across the industry.

The legacy of D2C has morphed into the wonders of AI-driven hyper‑personalisation. This has no doubt shifted even more resources and focus away from maintaining and growing brand salience, to yet more bottom-of-funnel performance marketing and digital optimisation.

WPP’s latest earnings call and the IPA’s Bellwether report tell the same story in different dialects: client budgets under pressure, media spend contracting, digital performance marketing – and a high amount of wishful thinking – on the rise. The message is clear: do more with less, do it faster and prove the value to within an inch of its life.

Rebound in marketing budgets driven by short-term media

But, experience teaches that ‘more with less’ is not a strategy – it’s a dare. It forces marketers into a kind of commercial contortionism: stretching campaigns and activities to cover more channels, bending creative ideas to fit smaller, less engaging formats, and twisting performance metrics until they resemble success.

The danger is that in the rush to please each quarter as it comes, we quietly mortgage the year and ultimately the whole three-year plan – and by the time the debt comes due, the leadership team has already moved on to its next rabbit: M&A or diversification.

Within all this is a seductive strategy that can be seen across sectors, time and again, as customer data collection becomes more prevalent: greater personalisation, dynamic pricing and loyalty schemes that make customers feel like insiders, while quietly harvesting behavioural data that fuels precision marketing.

The past few years have been a slow‑motion case study in how confidence in marketing can be squandered.

On the surface, it’s a win-win. But look closer and a familiar pattern emerges. Pressure on budgets for in-year trading performance and the constant requirement to prove efficiency in minute detail feeds a retreat from broad-reach brand investment, leading to the slow erosion of the very channels that once built mass-market dominance.

It’s a Promethean paradox: in stealing the fire of data-driven intimacy, organisations risk unbinding themselves from the mass-market myths that once gave them scale and salience. Precision becomes the pyre on which broad appeal is sacrificed. And like Prometheus chained to the rock, brands may find themselves punished not for the theft, but for what they neglected in its pursuit.

The truth is, for any leading brand, you can dial down media and brand investment in year one with little discernible impact. There will be worrying lead indicators in year two, especially if competitors move into the share of voice space vacated, and by year three things will be very obvious. This is what happens when categories and businesses defy the gravitational force of share of voice and investing in brand presence at scale – not just to win new customers, but to retain existing ones too.

A familiar story

If all this feels familiar, it’s because the “growth at any cost, but please spend less” paradox is not a child of the digital age; it’s a recurring character in the long‑running soap opera of commerce.

Cast your mind back to the early 1990s recession, when FMCG giants were slashing TV budgets even as they demanded double‑digit volume growth. Or further still, to the oil‑shocked 1970s, when British Leyland tried to sell more cars while cutting the very dealer incentives and ad campaigns that kept its showrooms busy. Different decades, different jargon, same essential plot: the belief that you can prune your way to a bumper harvest.

The lesson from those eras is as unglamorous as it is stubborn: brands that treated marketing as a cost centre often emerged weaker, while those that held their nerve – or at least ring‑fenced their core brand spend – tended to grow faster and for longer.

It’s a truth that has been dressed up in countless strategy decks, but it remains awkward to say out loud in a budget meeting with finance when cost envelopes are shrinking.

Which brings me, reluctantly, to the view from my own desk. The past few years here have been a slow‑motion case study in how confidence in marketing can be squandered.

Under previous stewardship, there was no coherent marketing strategy, no unifying plan in our leading brand – just a confetti-scatter of disconnected activity that looked pretty, kept teams busy, but achieved little.

The result was predictable: the executive team in that business quietly downgraded marketing from “growth engine” to “cost to be contained”. The budget followed suit, and ultimately, the CMO removed.

Year by year, the oxygen thinned until anything resembling brand‑building at scale became impossible. But perhaps worse, the core business foundations for growth in a digital age weren’t sorted out either.

The budget didn’t just grow – it was reclassified in the minds of the leadership team from ‘marketing cost’ to ‘growth insurance’.

When I was parachuted in, the patient was still breathing, but only just. In the last year, we managed to reset expectations – to remind the business that brand building and strategic marketing are not a decorative expense but a lever for growth and retention.

With support from the CEO, the core brand budget has grown – not to where it needs to be, but we have doubled media investment for the next three years; it’s early days and the trust account is still being rebuilt. My task remains to make the case, in hard‑nosed commercial terms, that building and sustaining a strong brand is not a luxury but a hedge – a way to de‑risk future cash flows, by keeping and growing our existing customers, while setting ourselves up to win tomorrow’s customers before the competition does.

And here’s the leadership challenge in its rawest form: it would be far easier to take the path of least resistance. To keep feeding the machine with short‑term tactical activities, to chase the easy metrics, to avoid the awkward conversations about patience and payback.

But doing the right thing – not the easy thing – demands tenacity to keep making the case, resilience to absorb the knock‑backs, clarity of purpose to hold the line when others waver, and imagination to show a sceptical leadership what the future could look like if we invest in it.

That means more than just moving numbers on a spreadsheet to show a positive ROI. It means rewiring the mindset of teams who have been living on a diet of 100% tactical activity – too much of it unmeasured, all of it short term.

It means building the capability to think beyond the next click‑through, ‘like’ or TikTok reset, to see the compounding value of brand equity, and to have the patience to invest in it. In other words, it’s not just a budget transformation; it’s a cultural one. And like all cultural shifts, it will be measured not in quarters, but in years.

Learning from experience

A few years ago, I watched a peer in another sector face almost the same equation I’m wrestling with now: anaemic budgets, a leadership team allergic to long‑term spend, and a marketing department trained to chase only the most immediate, measurable wins at the behest of sales or some proposition team.

Instead of pleading for a windfall, they started small – carving out a modest, protected slice of spend for brand and strategic marketing activity – treating it like a pilot investment. Every pound was tracked not just to clicks or leads, but also to shifts in consideration, preference, and inbound demand over time – all the while putting the foundations in place.

They paired that with a forensic clean‑up of the performance budget: killing unmeasured activity, tightening targeting, and using the savings to feed the brand pot and invest in future capability. Within 18 months, the data told a story the CFO could not ignore: customer acquisition costs were falling, repeat purchase rates were climbing, and the sales pipeline was less volatile. The budget didn’t just grow – it was reclassified in the minds of the leadership team from “marketing cost” to “growth insurance”.

That’s the arc I’m aiming for. Not a single grand gesture, but a series of deliberate, compounding moves that prove brand and strategic marketing investment are not the garnish on the plate – they’re the protein. Because the truth is, the paradox between growth and shrinking budgets will never vanish entirely. The trick is to build enough equity – in the market and in the boardroom – that when the knife comes down, it’s aimed somewhere else.