Marketing Trends for 2026 and Beyond

This year’s CMO Survey data reflects a market in flux. In a period of heightened volatility, companies are trying to do more with less while simultaneously navigating pricing pressure, cost inflation, and uneven demand. As a percentage of revenue, marketing budgets have declined dramatically, even as companies raise prices.

Source: Spring 2026 CMO Survey

Marketing, once dominated by creatives, is evolving into a complex system of data, infrastructure, and capital allocation that determines who scales profitably and who gets left behind.

In this article, we examine the following insights based on this year’s CMO Survey:

• Margin pressure is driving short-term decision-making within marketing.
• Volatility is creating a trend away from new market expansion and toward client retention and product development.
• AI adoption continues to accelerate and is producing measurable ROI, but outpacing the organizational readiness to deploy it.
• Digital spend continues to outpace other channels, with many companies outsourcing execution.
• A lack of talent constrains the desire to build more sophisticated marketing technology to support it.

Each year, we apply learnings from the CMO Survey, a collaboration between Duke University, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association, to help private companies make decisions about sales and marketing investment. Survey respondents are primarily private companies with Chief Marketing Officers (both B2B and B2C), who spend more on marketing than Vistage companies. Yet, their annual review provides a useful overview of trends within the dynamic world of marketing.

A More Constrained Growth Environment

Volatility is underpinning a fundamental shift in how companies think about growth. In our strategy practice, we typically see organizations place bets on new markets as a way to diversify and reduce customer concentration risk. Today, we are seeing the opposite. Providers are reallocating resources away from new market development and toward client retention and product development, selling more within existing markets. This is also a subplot in a broader trend towards vertical integration, where providers try to bundle more services.

The market is split, with roughly half of the companies passing on tariff costs through higher prices. “Animal Spirits” are very much in play, where companies are making decisions based on fear. And as we learned during the pandemic, fear can paralyze buyers, elongating sales cycles. The impact on marketers? The need for more frequent bite-sized touches with clients and prospects.

When visibility is limited, companies default to what they know: existing customers, known channels, and proven offerings.

Margin pressure is framing spend.

How Companies Are Spending Their Marketing Investment

Marketers report spending roughly 70% of their time focused on today, and only 30% on tomorrow. At the same time, approximately one-third of companies are outsourcing digital marketing activities due to skill gaps.

The focus is on content creation and personalization. AI is enabling the production of professional segment-specific content, such as white papers, case studies, and videos. Not surprisingly, many organizations say they want marketing, but they are not investing enough in resources to support it. Of particular concern, they are having difficulty staffing marketing with specialists who can support sophisticated technology tools.

AI Adoption is not a Technology Problem

AI adoption has surged, facilitating content creation, personalization, automation, analytics, and targeting. Returns are compelling, with improving sales productivity and customer satisfaction while often reducing overall spend. Investment in AI marketing tools is expected to grow more than 130% over the next three years.

Most organizations are not fully equipped to capitalize on AI. The constraints are organizational, talent gaps, system integration challenges, and limited internal bandwidth. Marketing teams are often ahead of the rest of the organization, making it difficult to integrate their tools.

For example, a common problem within our Vistage member clients is poor deployment of CRM tools and agents within such systems. If marketing is at the ready with marketing automations, but sales lacks strong data integrity and engagement within the CRM, those tools will not be fully utilized.

What This Means Going Forward

Marketing is no longer a discretionary growth function. It is becoming part of the business’s operating system, expected to deliver measurable results and align with financial outcomes.

For private companies, the goal is not to spend more, but to build the right capabilities. The winners will align strategy with capital, build AI infrastructure, and connect marketing directly to revenue and profitability.

Takeaways

• Always begin with the end in mind through corporate strategy. But in the current cycle, focus on AI enablement and selling more to the customers you already have.
• Ensure you have an effective product management function (this applies to service businesses that need to productize).
• Shift marketing from activity to accountability, tie spend to outcomes. Measure return on marketing investment.
• Utilize marketing automation to enable more frequent, bite-sized touches
• Treat AI as an operating model shift, not just a tool.
• Reassess marketing technology spending. Outspend your competition.
• Use AI to foster deeper relationships, in part, but provide more personalization for customers and prospects.
• Use outsourcing selectively, keep strategy internal. However, consider outsourcing marketing technology deployment that extends beyond your team’s skill set.

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