What Your 2027 Budget Says About Your Brand

By Eric Hughes, VP of Accounts

For most CMOs, there’s an uncomfortable truth about marketing: Your brand is being defined less by your positioning strategy, audience insights, or the values laser-etched into the lobby wall, and more by your budget. 

And right now, if you’re prepping your 2027 budget for finance, you might feel like you’re watching a scary movie you already know the end to. So before you submit it, let's look at what CMOs across the industry are telling survey-takers, because collectively, you and your cohort are saying some fascinating things.

“I need more money, but my CFO still doesn’t get it.”

Let’s start with the good vibes. According to Forrester's 2027 Budget Planning Guides, 89% of B2B marketing leaders and 91% of B2C marketers expect their budgets to increase next year, and as many as a quarter expect growth of 10% or more.

Great! Except expectations are not the same as appropriations. 

Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders found budgets have been sitting on a plateau of 7.8% of company revenue since 2022, roughly 18% below where they were four years ago. So, the “raise” is just refilling a hole. All the while, the demands for increased revenue keep going higher and higher. That’s why, despite the aforementioned good vibes, more than half of CMOs say they haven’t had the budget they need to execute their 2026 strategy.

Still, 90% are confident that next year is the year that changes. Marketers tend to be optimists, but that’s the equivalent of the person at the blackjack table who keeps telling themselves that they’re due. Maybe they are. But your CFO has seen that person before and does not carve up the pie according to “who’s due.”

If your 2027 ask is "same plan, bigger number," you're telling leadership your brand has no new argument. The CMOs who get the increase will be the ones who show up with an argument worth funding, not a percentage.

“We’re AI leaders who aren’t ready for AI.”

Per Gartner, CMOs are now putting 15.3% of their budgets into AI initiatives, and 70% say becoming an AI leader is a critical goal. But only 30% report having the organizational sophistication to actually scale it.

What’s that mean? Many of us have declared ourselves leaders of a thing that very few of our brands are prepared to do. So, we’ve purchased the treadmill, but the treadmill is currently an expensive place to hang laundry.

Forrester's 2027 guidance is basically a polite intervention on this point: stop buying AI and start funding the boring stuff that makes AI work, like data quality, governance, and workflow redesign. The firms that win in 2027, Forrester argues, won't be the ones spending the most on AI, they'll be the ones whose foundations let the spending pay off.

When your budget has an AI line item without a readiness line item, you’re saying your brand has a press release about AI, not a plan. 

“We’re funding awareness. Sort of. In the cheapest way possible.”

Here's where it gets genuinely interesting for challenger brands. Gartner found that awareness and conversion now claim 62.6% of total media spend (up more than 10% since 2024). Meanwhile, loyalty and retention spending has fallen 29%, to under 15% of media budgets. Paid media is now the single largest and only growing budget category, at 31.4%.

On paper, that sounds like brand building is back. But it's really acquisition media wearing brand building's clothing. Brands with that budget strategy are buying awareness the way you buy a gym membership in January. High volume, low commitment, and easily canceled.

Here's a wrinkle worth pondering: Gartner notes that the most AI-mature marketing organizations allocate their budgets the opposite way. They devote more to loyalty and retention, less to the easily optimized digital channels. This suggests that the less mature crowd may be over-indexing on whatever's easiest to measure. Of course, head-scratching correlations doth not a clear strategy make. AI-mature companies tend to have bigger budgets, so maybe they can just afford both. But at minimum, it should give you pause that the organizations with the best tooling for short-term optimization are the ones spending the least on it.

Meanwhile, Duke's CMO Survey, run by Christine Moorman, polled 308 marketing leaders in the same window and found nearly half of them are prioritizing retention over acquisition, turning their focus back on existing customers in response to economic uncertainty. Two credible surveys, same season, opposite budgeting philosophies. 

When your budget devotes all your growth spend to bottom-funnel tactics, your brand is saying it doesn’t have a long-term growth strategy. Not really. What you have is a money-in, customer-out vending machine that raises its prices every year while your roll of quarters stays the same or gets smaller.

“We are being graded on a test we haven't studied for.”  

Two more numbers, quickly, because they explain the anxiety behind all the others. Gartner found 62% of CMOs say that missing 2026 growth expectations will trigger budget cuts. And as we all know, if you miss the target, you likely lose the tools to hit the next one. But 57% say they lack the talent to execute their current strategy. The stakes are rising, and your bench is thin. 

And then there's the test nobody's syllabus included. Forrester reports 94% of business buyers now use generative AI during their purchase journey, and its official 2027 recommendation list tells marketers to prioritize Answer Engine Optimization (showing up in AI-generated answers) as a core investment. Your next customer is increasingly asking a machine who to trust, and the machine names two or three brands and ignores the rest. There's no page two of ChatGPT. There isn't even a page one. There's just the answer, and you're in it, or you're not.

If there's no line for how your brand shows up in AI-mediated discovery (clear positioning, consistent messaging, a website machines can actually read), your brand says it's optimizing for a version of the internet that's leaving.

Your Budget Is Your Brand

Red alert here. We’re not saying your brand can’t win without a bigger budget. But the collective mindset of many CMOs and Directors of Marketing, particularly among challenger brands, could be summed up as “We want more money for a technology we're not ready for to buy short-term attention in increasingly expensive auctions, while our more sophisticated peers fund loyalty and clarity, and our customers quietly outsource their shortlists to machines that only recommend brands they can tell apart.”

You don't have to outspend your competitors. But you do have to out-decide them. Fund the foundations that make AI useful. Keep enough long-term brand investment that your paid dollars have something to convert. And make distinctiveness (that creative and relevant message that gets you remembered) an actual line item instead of an assumed asset.

Because in 2027, your budget won't just fund your brand. It will be your brand. Might as well make it say something worth repeating.

If this made you want to look at your budget with fresh suspicion, we’re sorry. Sort of. And if you'd like a partner for the big lifts your in-house team shouldn't have to carry alone—the new site, the launch, the brand positioning—let us know. Yes, we're aware we just spent 1,200 words telling you to scrutinize where your money goes and are now asking for some of it. Let’s do this scrutiny thing together.