Next year’s marketing plan is on your desk, and you have read it before.
It is this year’s plan with the numbers moved. More of what worked. A little less of what did not. The same events, the campaigns that produced something last spring, and a demo and discovery-call target slightly higher than this year’s, because targets go up.
Every line can be defended. You could forward it to your CFO without adding a single note.
Nothing in it could embarrass anyone. Nothing in it could change your year either.
You know what you want to write in the margin. Where is the new industry vertical? Where is the repositioning away from “full-service technology partner” that everyone privately agrees is overdue? Where is the bet?
And a second thought is already forming behind the first one. Maybe this person is simply not bold enough, and the next one will be.
Before you act on that thought, try a less comfortable reading. The plan is cautious because caution is the rational response to how failure gets treated in your company. And you are the one who decides how failure gets treated.
What Marketing Does When You Push
I get why you push. You have funded marketing that could not tell you what it produced, and asking for proof is the least a CEO should do.
The people running marketing feel it. The CMO Survey’s 2026 edition polled senior marketing leaders at US companies, most of them in B2B, and 58.8% said they feel increasing pressure from their CEO to prove the value of marketing. The CFO was close behind.
The survey then asked how marketing copes with that pressure. It offered four possible answers, and every one of them is a form of retreat. So the useful part is which retreat people choose.
Seventy-one percent chose focusing on short-term impact over long-run gains. Nearly half chose returning to established marketing strategies. A quarter chose limiting the ambition of marketing’s goals.
Read that list again with your plan in front of you. Short-term. Established. Less ambitious.
The survey has already described the document on your desk.
It also asked where the time goes. On average, these leaders spend about two-thirds of their time managing the present and one-third preparing for the future.
There Is a Name for This
Decision researchers call it a defensive decision. A manager believes option A is best for the organization and picks option B, because B protects them if something goes wrong.
The clearest measurement I have found comes from Gerd Gigerenzer’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. In 2019 they published a study of 950 managers in a German public administration organization. About 80% said at least one of their ten most important decisions in the previous year had been defensive. On average, a quarter of those decisions were.
Sure, that is a public bureaucracy, and you may think a bureaucracy is the natural home of covering yourself. The Max Planck Society’s own write-up of the study mentioned preliminary findings from private corporations showing defensive decisions were even more widespread there. No numbers were published, so I will not lean on them. The objection does not get you off the hook either way.
A follow-up study, published in the Journal of Business Research in 2025, studied 315 managers in another large German public organization. They admitted that 24% of their own most important decisions were defensive. They estimated 36% for their colleagues.
Admitting to a defensive decision is, apparently, a risky decision.
Then the researchers asked what it cost. The managers estimated that the safe option they chose was worth about 70% of the option they believed was right.
Thirty percent of the value, given up. By the judgment of the person who gave it up.
Who Sets the Temperature
That 2025 study did something more useful than count. It tested what causes defensive decisions, by giving managers descriptions of different workplaces and then asking what they would do in five situations built from real cases inside the organization.
Two things varied. Whether the team felt safe to take actions with an uncertain outcome, knowing mistakes would not be held against anyone. And whether the leader behaved openly: asked for feedback, sought out the views of people who disagreed, and admitted mistakes when they happened.
Neither one on its own made a reliable difference. The combination did.
When the team did not feel safe and the leader was closed, managers chose defensively most often. When the team did not feel safe but the leader was open, defensive choices dropped by about a third. An open leader was enough to offset an unsafe climate.
The authors are candid about the limits. It was a public organization, the situations were hypothetical, and real workplaces are messier. But look at what the leader in the better condition actually did. Nothing heroic. They asked who disagreed. They said so when they got something wrong.
For your marketing function, you are that leader. Whoever runs marketing reads how failure is treated from how you react when a bet misses.
An earlier study by some of the same researchers, published in 2021, adds the other half. Psychological safety reduced defensive decisions. Job insecurity increased them.
Now think about the history of the marketing seat in your company. If you have replaced two heads of marketing already, the third arrived knowing exactly how that ended. I wrote about why the same problem tends to outlast every hire. The churn does something to courage as well. Your current marketing lead watched the last one leave, and wrote the plan accordingly.
It is the same calculation the champion inside your buyer’s company runs before backing you, which I explored in Someone Is Staking Their Career on Choosing You. It runs inside your building too.
I have sat on both sides of this desk, running a company and running marketing inside other people’s companies. The side you are on sets the temperature. The other side reads it and plans around it.
Before You Stop Asking for Results
It would be easy to read all of that and decide to back off. Stop asking what marketing produced. Let people explore.
That would be the wrong lesson, and the research says so.
In 2017, a team including Philip Tetlock published the results of a ten-month forecasting tournament with more than a thousand participants, randomly assigned to be judged on their results, on their process, on both, or on nothing. Being held accountable for results improved accuracy more than being held accountable for process, and the gap grew over time. The combination beat process alone on accuracy and beat results alone on how well people shared what they knew.
So results matter. Holding people to outcomes works.
Pressure on outcomes alone has a known side effect, though. In 2021, organizational psychologists Bart Verwaeren and Bernard Nijstad reported, from two surveys and a lab experiment, that outcome accountability pushes people toward exploiting what they already know, while accountability for how they decide pushes them to explore. That is the same retreat to established strategies the CMO Survey recorded.
The answer is to judge both, and to fix the terms of the judgment before anyone knows the result.
Before a bet starts, write down four things. What you are trying. Why you believe it could work. What you expect to see, and by when. What would make you stop.
Then judge the result against that. A bet that was well reasoned, reviewed on schedule, and stopped when the signal said stop is a good bet that missed. A bet nobody can explain that happened to work is luck, and luck does not repeat on request.
Most companies never write the brief. So when a result comes in, it gets judged by the mood in the room that week. People learn to protect themselves from the mood, and the cheapest protection available is last year’s plan.
That is what structure is for in a marketing function. A place where the brief lives before the money is spent, and a date on the calendar when someone reads it again. Without that, nothing is judged against anything, and caution is the only strategy that survives every review.
The Plan You Get Next Year
Go back to the plan on your desk. Every line in it is defensible, and now you know who it is defending.
Before the next one lands, tell whoever runs your marketing what a good failure looks like in your company. A bet you would be glad they made, even if it misses.
If you cannot describe one, you already know which plan you are going to get.
