Dear B2B CEO,
You cut another marketing line item this quarter. The CFO walked into your office with a number, made the case, and you signed off. The case was reasonable. The numbers checked out. The cut was 20%, maybe 30%, maybe more depending on how the year is going.
You’ve done this before. Two years ago, possibly three. Each time, the case for the cut was the same. Marketing couldn’t show what the spend was producing. The dashboards looked busy but nothing on them connected to revenue in a way the CFO could defend to the board. So the budget shrank.
Each time, something else also happened that you may not have noticed yet. Win rates against your incumbent competitors started slipping. Sales cycles got a little longer. The deals that used to close because the buyer “had heard of you” started closing for the competitor instead. Nobody told you the slip was connected to the cut, because nobody on your team was measuring on a window long enough to see it.
Are we measuring marketing on a window that could ever show us the answer.
I’m writing because the next time you walk into a budget meeting like that one, I want you to ask a different question. Instead of “what did marketing produce last quarter,” try: are we measuring marketing on a window that could ever show us the answer.
What the Data Says
Gartner published a number in early 2026 that should have set off alarms in every B2B leadership team. 84% of companies are stuck in what Gartner calls a brand “doom loop.” Underfunded measurement leads to unclear impact, which leads to rising skepticism from finance, which leads to tighter budgets, which leads to even less measurement capacity. Each year, the case for cutting gets stronger because the case for protecting gets weaker.
By 2027, Gartner predicts that over 40% of CMOs who push for larger brand budgets will lose influence with the C-suite because they cannot demonstrate sufficient returns. Read that twice. The CMOs who fight for brand are the ones who get marginalized. The ones who quietly stop fighting keep their seat at the table.
You’re sitting on the other side of that conversation. When your CMO walks in with a 28-page deck defending brand investment, you discount the deck because it’s full of secondary research from other companies in other markets. The CMO can’t show you what your brand spend produced because the measurement window in her dashboard runs through a single quarter, and the work she’s defending takes longer than that to show results.
Here’s the part that makes the doom loop a doom loop. Binet and Field’s research established that brand-building work takes at least six months to begin showing measurable impact. Six months is the floor. The full effects compound over years. Marketing Week’s 2025 State of B2B Marketing research found that only 4% of B2B marketers measure brand impact beyond six months.
96% of the marketing organizations in your industry are using a measurement window shorter than the minimum time it takes for the work to produce results. And then they’re concluding the work didn’t produce results.
A tactical fix won’t close that gap. The entire marketing operations stack has been built this way for fifteen years. CRMs track conversions in a single quarter. Marketing automation platforms attribute revenue inside a fiscal year. Dashboards default to quarterly reporting. The entire data infrastructure your marketing team depends on was designed to optimize activity that produces a metric inside three months. Brand investment doesn’t fit that infrastructure, and the infrastructure tells you it doesn’t work.
The infrastructure is doing exactly what it was built to do. It’s just measuring the wrong window.
The infrastructure is doing exactly what it was built to do. It’s just measuring the wrong window.
What This Has Cost You
Now look at the second number. Binet and Field’s most powerful finding is the one that almost never makes it into the budget conversation. Companies that increased brand spend during a recession saw 5x more profit growth and 4.5x more annual market share gain than companies that cut.
Five times the profit growth.
The data has been around for years. Marketing Week, WARC, and the LinkedIn B2B Institute have published it repeatedly. And every time the next downturn hits, the first budget that gets cut is brand. CMOs know the data. The ones who try to use it still lose the argument. They walk into the budget meeting with secondary research from other companies in other markets, and the CFO discounts it because it can’t show what happened in their own P&L. Then the cycle continues.
50% of CMOs in Gartner’s 2026 research said that short-term needs impede their ability to execute long-term strategic planning. Half of all CMOs are admitting they cannot do the work that, by their own admission, would produce 5x the return.
Your CMO didn’t build this system. They inherited it.
Your CMO didn’t build this system. They inherited it. The incentives punish long-term thinking and reward quarterly performance, and everyone operating inside them knows it. You’re the only person in the company who can change those incentives, because you’re the only person who controls what the dashboards measure and what gets rewarded at the quarterly review.
I’ve been on the other side of this conversation. I’ve built marketing operations where the results arrived after the reporting window that would have shown them. The work was right. The timeline the board gave it was wrong. The CMOs you keep replacing are working on a deadline that’s shorter than the time it takes for their work to show. You set the deadline. You can extend it.
Why Your Win Rate Is Already Slipping
A week ago I wrote about the Front-Runner Effect. 68% of B2B buyers have a preferred vendor before the buying process starts, and 80% of the time that preferred vendor wins (Forrester Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2025). The activity that builds preference is brand work. Long-running, hard to measure, slow to compound. Exactly the work you’ve been cutting.
The connection is direct. The CFO who recommends cutting brand to fund Q4 demand gen is borrowing from your win rate two years from now to hit a quarterly target this year. The trade-off is invisible because the measurement system doesn’t capture it. By the time you notice that the deals you used to win are closing for the competitor, the brand budget has been cut for three years running, the CMO who tried to defend it has been replaced twice, and rebuilding the position takes longer than your runway allows.
Every company I’ve worked with that maintained brand investment during the lean years held its win rate against larger competitors. The ones that cut brand to fund short-term lead generation lost market share quietly for two years before anyone connected the cut to the slip.
You can’t see this happening in your business right now because nobody is measuring on a window that would show you. That’s the doom loop.
You can’t see this happening in your business right now because nobody is measuring on a window that would show you. That’s the doom loop. And you’re the one who has to break it.
What to Ask Instead
The next time the CFO walks in with the case for cutting marketing, ask three questions before you sign off.
First: are we measuring marketing on a window long enough to show us what the work actually does? If the answer is “we measure quarterly,” extend it. Track win rate against named competitors over a rolling 12 months. Track aided and unaided brand awareness within your ICP every two quarters. Track inbound inquiry volume by source over 12 months instead of last-touch attribution. None of this requires new tools. It requires choosing to look at a longer timeframe than the dashboard defaults to.
Second: which line items in this budget are activities that build preference before an account becomes a prospect, and which ones operate inside the buying process? The activities that build preference are the ones that determine win rate. The activities that operate inside the buying process take credit for it. Cutting them isn’t equivalent. Most CFOs don’t know the difference because nobody has explained it to them in P&L terms.
If the answer is “nothing,” you’re cutting blind. The cut might still be the right call. But you’re placing a bet, and it should be priced as one.
Third: if I cut this line item, what will I actually be able to measure in 24 months that would tell me whether the cut was a mistake? If the answer is “nothing,” you’re cutting blind. The cut might still be the right call. But you’re placing a bet, and it should be priced as one.
Why This Has to Break at Your Desk
The CMOs who survive the next two years will be the ones who change the measurement architecture before they try to change the budget. Most of them can’t do that without your authorization. The dashboards you fund, the metrics you reward at the quarterly review, the time horizons you allow on strategic work. Those decisions sit with you. The CMO can’t make them over your head.
If the brand doom loop is going to break in your company, it has to break at your desk first. The CMO can’t fix it from inside the system. The CFO won’t fix it because the system rewards them for the cuts. The board won’t fix it because the board is reading the same dashboards. You’re the only one with the authority to extend the window and the only one with the standing to defend the extension when the next quarterly review tries to pull it back in.
Spend the same. Measure longer. The math has been clear for a decade.
Spend the same. Measure longer. The math has been clear for a decade. Your dashboards just haven’t been allowed to see it.
Yours sincerely,
Tomek
