Why CMOs Are Rethinking What Budget Actually Controls

Marketing budgets have become the answer to every effectiveness problem. When campaigns underperform, the instinct is to ask for more. When the numbers disappoint, the assumption is that spending was too low.

But talk to the people running marketing at major organizations, and a different picture emerges. They're not arguing for bigger budgets. They're questioning whether budget is the right variable at all.

A recent Marketing Week roundtable with senior marketing leaders surfaced something the industry rarely says out loud: budget affects how fast and how broadly you can move. It does not determine whether your marketing actually works.

Effectiveness Is a Choice, Not a Cheque

Munnawar Chishty, CMO at Carlsberg Britvic, gets to the core of it quickly.

"Budget affects the speed and scale of impact, but not the standard," she says. "Effectiveness comes from choices. Where to play, what to prioritize, and how consistently we invest."

That framing does something uncomfortable. It moves responsibility away from the finance team and back to the marketing leader. The budget excuse stops working when a senior CMO is publicly saying that standard does not require a bigger number.

Chishty's definition of effective marketing is also worth noting: "Effective marketing is when clear strategy, creativity and execution combine to deliver measurable business outcomes." Three ingredients. Budget is not one of them.

This matters because many organizations spend considerable energy justifying budget increases while putting far less rigor into the strategic clarity that would make any budget worthwhile. More money spent without clear choices is just faster waste.

The Vanity Trap Most Campaigns Fall Into

Paul Davies, director of marketing and audiences at the BBC, names the failure mode that most marketing leaders quietly recognize but rarely diagnose clearly.

"Effective marketing should both drive talkability and action," he says. "Action without memorability is merely a transaction, and memorability without action is just vanity. Great marketing needs to deliver on both."

That is a precise dissection of where most campaigns go wrong. They pursue one at the expense of the other. Performance marketing teams optimize for action and produce results that no one remembers and no one talks about. Brand campaigns chase awareness and emotion and never quite convert.

Davies' framework is simple and practical. Ask of any campaign: does it make people remember you, and does it make them do something? If the answer is only one of those, the budget was partially wasted regardless of how much was spent.

The Strategy-First Argument Most Organizations Skip

Barney O'Kelly, head of solutions and product marketing at Alix Partners, introduces what should be the most obvious starting point but is often skipped entirely.

"Effective marketing starts with a clear outcome or objective in mind," he says. "Starting with the end in mind is critical. It will give you the basis for your strategy and inform the tactical planning that will get the job done."

The tactical planning is where most marketing organizations begin. The outcome is treated as something to discover, not something to define. Channels get chosen, budgets get allocated, and the objective gets reverse-engineered afterward to fit the work that was done.

O'Kelly's point about budget is perhaps the most honest framing in the entire discussion. "Budget is always a consideration but seldom the only one. A good strategy can be delivered in many different ways. Budget is often just the length of the lever."

The lever metaphor is useful here. A longer lever moves things with less effort. But if you are pushing on the wrong thing, a longer lever just makes you wrong faster and at greater expense.

Consistency Is the Variable Nobody Wants to Hear About

The roundtable converges on a theme that is unglamorous but significant. Across all three perspectives, consistency appears as a defining characteristic of marketing that actually works.

Research supports this. Brands committing to long-term strategic consistency see 2x profit gains compared to those constantly pivoting strategy, and brand consistency drives revenue growth of up to 23%. According to McKinsey, companies that maintained marketing investment through the 2008 downturn achieved 150 percentage points more cumulative TSR over the following decade, with roughly 70% becoming long-term top-quintile performers.

This is harder than it sounds in practice. Marketing leaders face pressure from multiple directions to change, refresh, and respond. New platforms demand attention. New formats require adaptation. Senior stakeholders want to see something new.

But the evidence these marketers describe suggests that strategic through-line, the consistent connection between every campaign, channel, and message back to a defined objective, is what separates effective organizations from expensive ones.

In a fragmented media environment, where audiences are spread across more channels than ever, that coherence becomes more valuable, not less. More touch points mean more opportunities for inconsistency. The brands that maintain a clear direction through the noise are not those with the largest budgets. They are those with the most disciplined choices.

What This Means If You Are Running Marketing Right Now

The argument these three leaders are making is not that budget does not matter. It clearly does. More resources genuinely expand what is possible.

The argument is about causation. Budget does not cause effectiveness. Strategy causes effectiveness. Clarity of objective, consistency of direction, and the discipline to pursue both talkability and action together: these are the variables.

According to Gartner, marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of total company revenue while 59% of CMOs say those allocations are insufficient to execute their strategy. The budget squeeze is real. But the data suggests the more urgent problem is strategic clarity, not budget size.

Organizations that get this wrong spend more and wonder why results do not improve. Organizations that get this right often discover that the budget they already had was sufficient. The problem was never the size of the lever. It was knowing where to push.