Beyond the cost centre: Why Marketing must deliver today’s performance - and build tomorrow’s Growth

For years, marketing leaders have been trying to escape the same debate:

Is marketing a cost centre or a growth engine?

I increasingly believe that is the wrong question.

Marketing has to be both commercially rigorous and growth-oriented.

The pressure to prove efficiency is real. And it should be. No function should be exempt from accountability.

But there is a danger in focusing so intensely on the cost of marketing that we gradually reduce the organization's ability to create future demand.

That tension has only become sharper.

Marketing budgets remain constrained, while expectations continue to rise. Gartner's 2026 CMO research found that average marketing budgets represent 7.8% of company revenue—only marginally above 2025 levels—while 56% of CMOs say they lack the budget required to deliver their strategy. At the same time, leaders are expected to deliver growth, improve efficiency and lead AI-enabled transformation.

This is not simply a resource problem.

It is a leadership and prioritization problem.

The question is no longer whether marketing should be efficient.

The question is: efficient at what—and in service of which business outcome?

The danger of becoming efficient at the wrong things

When budgets tighten, the instinct is understandable.

Reduce costs. Consolidate agencies. Automate work. Optimize campaigns. Produce more with less.

Some of these actions are necessary. But efficiency alone does not create growth.

In fact, AI is making this distinction impossible to ignore.

Many marketing organizations have already demonstrated that AI can save time, reduce costs and increase output. But Gartner's recent research points to a widening gap between AI ambition and organizational readiness: marketing leaders are increasing investment in AI, yet only 30% report mature or fully developed readiness to scale those capabilities effectively.

The implication is important.

Buying technology is not the same as building capability.

And automating existing work is not the same as transforming how marketing creates value.

Being able to produce twice as much content, faster, does not automatically mean the business is creating more demand.

Optimizing a campaign does not necessarily mean improving the quality of the decisions behind it.

Reducing the cost of execution does not guarantee greater customer relevance.

As Gartner has increasingly emphasized, the more advanced opportunity is to move beyond AI as a productivity tool and use it to improve decisions and create measurable business impact.

Being more efficient at doing yesterday's marketing is not transformation.

The real opportunity is to rethink what marketing does, how it works and where it creates value.

Marketing's credibility challenge is also a business challenge

There is another tension that marketing leaders cannot afford to ignore.

CEOs want growth.

But marketing's contribution to that growth is not always clearly understood.

McKinsey's research found a significant decline in the share of CEOs who believe marketing is clearly defined and understood by the C-suite—from 90% in 2023 to 70% in 2024. The same research points to a disconnect between the growth expectations placed on marketing and how clearly its role and contribution are understood.

That should concern every CMO.

Not because marketing needs to defend its existence. But because if marketing cannot make its contribution to business performance visible, the organization will inevitably evaluate it through what is easiest to measure:

its cost.

This is where the conversation needs to change.

Marketing cannot simply report on activity.

Nor should it attempt to claim credit for every commercial outcome.

Its role is to establish a credible line of sight between investment, customer behaviour and business performance.

That requires a much deeper understanding of the business itself.

Where will growth come from?

Which customers and markets matter most?

What is changing in customer behaviour?

Where is demand being created, captured or lost?

And where can marketing influence outcomes in ways that other functions cannot?

Those are not marketing questions alone.

They are business questions.

From campaigns to orchestration

One of the biggest shifts in marketing is that the customer increasingly experiences the company as one system.

They do not separate marketing from sales.

They do not distinguish between a campaign, a website, a service interaction or a product experience.

They experience the organization.

Yet many companies are still organized around functional ownership.

Marketing optimizes one part of the journey.

Sales another.

Service another.

Product another.

The result is often a fragmented experience and, equally importantly, fragmented accountability for growth.

McKinsey has highlighted this challenge, noting that departmental fragmentation and unclear ownership of customer-related functions can make it difficult for businesses to deliver seamless customer experiences.

This is where marketing's role needs to evolve.

The future of marketing is not about owning every customer touchpoint.

It is about helping the organization orchestrate them around the customer and the value the business is trying to create.

That requires CMOs to work beyond the boundaries of the marketing function.

To connect customer insight with strategic choices.

To influence how experiences are designed.

To work with sales, product, service, technology and finance.

And increasingly, to help the organization learn faster.

This is a much more demanding role than running campaigns.

But it is also where marketing can become strategically indispensable.

The new dual mandate: performance and possibility

I still believe the original idea behind this article holds.

Marketing needs rigor. But rigor alone is not enough.

Today's marketing organizations need to operate with a dual mandate.

1. Deliver today's performance

Marketing needs to be disciplined about how resources are deployed.

That means:

• stopping activities that consume resources without creating sufficient value

• improving the quality of investment decisions

• measuring contribution rather than simply reporting activity

• building greater productivity into workflows

• using AI and technology where they genuinely improve performance

• making clearer trade-offs between competing priorities

In a constrained environment, saying yes to everything is not ambition.

It is often a failure to prioritize.

CMOs increasingly have to decide what to stop, protect, scale and reinvent.

2. Build tomorrow's possibilities

At the same time, marketing cannot become so focused on immediate efficiency that it loses the ability to identify and create future growth.

That means continuing to invest in:

• understanding changing customer needs and behaviours

• identifying emerging sources of demand

• testing new propositions, experiences and business models

• developing new capabilities

• experimenting with technologies that can create competitive advantage

• building the organizational capacity to adapt

This is where the tension becomes real.

The activities that protect this quarter's performance are not always the same ones that create the next source of growth.

And under pressure, the future is often the first thing to be cut.

That may improve the next quarter.

It can also quietly weaken the business's ability to compete over the longer term.

Gartner's 2026 research makes a similar point: CMOs face constrained resources while being expected to deliver growth and AI transformation, making portfolio choices and deliberate resource reallocation increasingly important.

The answer is not simply to spend more.

It is to become more deliberate about what the organization is funding and why.

AI raises the stakes

AI has added another layer to this challenge.

There is understandable pressure to show immediate returns.

And there are immediate returns to be found in productivity, automation and efficiency.

But that cannot be the end of the ambition.

The more important question is:

How can AI help us make better decisions, understand our customers more deeply, adapt faster and create more value?

That requires more than tools.

It requires changes to data, workflows, governance, talent and leadership.

Gartner's 2026 CMO research found that AI investment is rising, but many organizations still lack the process maturity and capabilities needed to implement and scale it effectively.

This should be a warning.

Technology does not transform an organization on its own.

People still need to decide what problems are worth solving.

Leaders still need to make trade-offs.

Teams still need to learn new ways of working.

And the organization still needs to connect technological investment to a meaningful business outcome.

AI can amplify a weak system just as effectively as a strong one.

The advantage will not necessarily go to the companies using the most technology.

It is more likely to go to those that are better at redesigning how technology, people and customer understanding work together.

From proving marketing's value to creating it

Perhaps this is the biggest shift required from marketing leaders.

For too long, the conversation has focused on proving marketing's value.

Of course, accountability matters.

But the more powerful question is:

How can marketing actively create more value for the business?

That shifts the role of the CMO.

From defending a budget to shaping investment decisions.

From reporting campaign performance to influencing growth choices.

From optimizing individual channels to helping orchestrate the customer experience.

From adopting AI tools to redesigning how marketing works.

And from asking for a seat at the table to contributing to the decisions that determine where the business grows next.

This does not mean marketing should try to own growth alone.

Growth is an enterprise outcome.

But marketing should be able to articulate—and demonstrate—where it creates disproportionate value within that system.

The questions I believe CMOs should be asking now

The environment is unlikely to become simpler.

Customer behaviour will continue to change.

Technology will continue to evolve.

Budgets will remain under scrutiny.

And expectations of the CMO will continue to expand.

That makes prioritization a core leadership capability.

I would start with five questions:

1. What are we doing because it creates measurable value—and what are we doing simply because we have always done it?

2. Are we measuring marketing activity, or are we building a credible understanding of marketing's contribution to customer and business outcomes?

3. Where could AI help us redesign work and improve decisions—not simply reduce the cost of execution?

4. Are our investments balanced between delivering today's performance and building tomorrow's growth opportunities?

5. What do we need to stop so that we can create the capacity to do what matters next?

The last question may be the most difficult.

Because in most organizations, transformation is not held back by a lack of ideas.

It is held back by the inability to make choices.

The real mandate

Marketing should not expect to escape the demand for rigor.

Nor should it.

The ability to demonstrate commercial contribution, allocate resources effectively and make difficult trade-offs is fundamental to the credibility of the function.

But marketing cannot be reduced to a cost management exercise either.

A business that only optimizes existing demand eventually reaches the limits of what efficiency can deliver.

Someone still has to understand what customers need next.

Someone still has to identify new opportunities.

Someone still has to connect those opportunities to the business's capabilities and

turn them into demand.

That is where marketing can play a far more consequential role.

The future of marketing will not be secured by proving that marketing is a cost worth keeping.

It will be secured by demonstrating that marketing is a capability the business cannot afford to underuse.

The challenge for today's CMO is therefore a demanding one:

Deliver today's performance. Build tomorrow's possibilities. And make the connection between the two visible.

That, increasingly, is what it means to move beyond the cost centre.