Why Companies Are Investing More in Brand Marketing Again

Industry & Competitive Context

Between 2015 and roughly 2023, global marketing organizations shifted a disproportionate share of budgets toward performance marketing: paid search, paid social, and other directly trackable, conversion-oriented channels. This was driven by the availability of granular digital attribution, the rise of programmatic buying, and pressure from finance functions to demonstrate marketing’s return on investment in measurable terms. By 2023 and into 2024, however, multiple independent industry surveys began documenting a reversal in stated budget intentions, with executives signaling renewed interest in brand-building investment even as performance marketing retained the larger share of total spend.

This shift is not uniform or universally confirmed across every data source, and an honest reading of the public record shows a genuinely contested picture rather than a single consistent trend line. The BoF–McKinsey “State of Fashion 2024” executive survey found that 71 percent of fashion industry executives planned to increase brand marketing spend in 2024, compared with only 46 percent who intended to increase performance marketing spend, citing social media fatigue, diminishing reach, rising costs, and tightening data privacy regulation as the forces undermining performance marketing’s prior advantages. In parallel, WARC’s Global Advertising Trends research, published in December 2025, projected global ad spend reaching 1.19 trillion US dollars in 2025 (up 8.9 percent year-on-year), with further growth to 1.30 trillion dollars in 2026 and 1.40 trillion dollars in 2027. Within that survey, WARC’s “Voice of the Marketer” data found that 51 percent of practitioners overseeing larger 2026 budgets planned to direct incremental spend toward brand-building formats, and WARC analysts noted that because much of the recent ad-market growth has come from price increases rather than volume growth, the strategic value of brand equity in supporting pricing power has risen even as underlying consumer demand remained soft.

At the same time, other credible sources complicate a simple “brand marketing is back” narrative. The Ebiquity and World Federation of Advertisers 2025 Media Budgets Survey found that 42 percent of global advertisers planned to increase the performance-marketing share of their budgets for 2025, compared with only 24 percent planning to increase the brand-building share — a reversal from 2024, when the equivalent figures stood at 21 percent and 35 percent respectively. Ebiquity’s chief executive, Nick Waters, characterized this as a move toward “short-termism and a need for results now,” while WFA chief executive Stephan Loerke warned that the pattern created risk for “the long-term health of brand building.” The UK’s IPA Bellwether Report, a quarterly survey of roughly 300 UK marketing professionals conducted by S&P Global Market Intelligence, showed total marketing budgets returning to growth in both the second and third quarters of 2025 after a Q1 2025 decline, but the report also noted that this growth was led by tactical categories events and direct marketing rather than by “main media” brand advertising, prompting IPA President Karen Martin to caution that “as budgets grow, it’s vital we don’t fall into the trap of short-termism.”

Taken together, the public record supports a more precise framing of the industry context than a blanket claim of resurgence: aggregate global ad spend is growing strongly, a meaningful and growing cohort of marketers (documented at roughly 40 to 71 percent depending on sector and survey) report intent to increase brand-building investment, and several large, publicly listed consumer companies have documented actual increases in brand and marketing investment in their financial disclosures. At the same time, other surveys and tactical budget data show continued or even increased emphasis on short-term, performance-oriented spending in specific markets and periods. The accurate characterization of the trend, therefore, is a rebalancing and a renewed strategic debate about brand investment, rather than a uniform industry-wide pivot away from performance marketing.

Brand Situation Prior to the Shift

The period preceding this rebalancing was marked by heavy reliance on performance marketing across sectors including fashion, consumer packaged goods, and B2B. According to the BoF–McKinsey research, fashion and apparel companies, including many direct-to-consumer labels built on the “trackable, targeted performance-marketing playbook,” had structured their marketing organizations and budgets around short-term, conversion-focused metrics. The BoF–McKinsey report documented that the effectiveness of this approach was eroding due to several converging factors publicly cited by industry executives: increasing competitive saturation and “social fatigue” within paid social channels, diminishing organic reach and engagement, rising costs of performance media, and new data-privacy regulation restricting the granular audience targeting on which performance marketing had depended.

Within consumer packaged goods, Procter & Gamble’s own public disclosures illustrate the pressure performance-oriented, cost-conscious marketing approaches placed on brand investment during periods of margin pressure. Marketing Week reported that in a quarter in which P&G experienced its first sales decline in five years, then-chief financial officer Andre Schulten told investors the company still viewed sustained brand investment as a priority, stating: “We believe this is a rough patch to go through, not a reason to reduce investment in the long-term health of the business.” That same reporting documented P&G increasing its advertising spend by 140 million US dollars in the relevant quarter even during a period of sales contraction, framing brand investment as a counter-cyclical commitment rather than a discretionary cut.

Strategic Objective

Across the documented examples, the stated strategic objective of renewed brand investment is consistent: to rebuild long-term brand equity, trust, and pricing power that companies judged had been under-supported during the performance-marketing-dominated period, while retaining performance marketing’s role in driving short-term conversion. P&G’s public commentary, reported by Marketing Week and the company’s own annual disclosures, frames this explicitly around “superiority” across product, package, brand communication, retail execution, and value — language drawn directly from P&G’s FY2025 Annual Report, which describes its portfolio strategy as one in which “performance drives brand choice.” WARC’s analysis similarly frames the renewed strategic emphasis on brand-building as a response to an environment in which, since 2021, global ad spend has consistently outpaced GDP growth, and in which, per WARC’s reporting, much of advertisers’ revenue growth has come from price increases rather than volume — a dynamic that depends on strong brand equity to sustain price premiums without eroding demand.

The IPA’s public commentary adds a complementary strategic objective: avoiding what IPA President Karen Martin termed the “trap of short-termism,” in which short-cycle budget increases flow disproportionately into tactical, immediately measurable categories at the expense of the “big, brand building activity” that the IPA and its economist, Maryam Baluch, have publicly argued underpins durable, long-term business growth.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

Because this trend spans an industry rather than a single branded campaign, “execution” in this context refers to the documented mechanisms by which companies have operationalized increased brand investment, as disclosed in earnings calls, annual reports, and trade press.

Procter & Gamble’s execution has been documented through specific, quantified increases disclosed to financial analysts. Marketing Week reported that in its fiscal fourth quarter of a recent year, P&G increased marketing investment by 300 basis points compared with the same period the prior year, which the company’s leadership described to investors as a “meaningful increase,” while simultaneously offering assurance that the spend was being deployed efficiently. In an earlier period, under then-CEO David Taylor, P&G disclosed a marketing investment increase of 170 basis points, layered on top of a 270 basis point increase in 2020, which Taylor connected publicly to improved net sales performance and to specific brand campaigns such as Ariel’s “Every Degree Makes a Difference,” which encouraged consumers to wash clothes at lower temperatures as both a sustainability and product-performance message. In its India operations, P&G’s home products entity (Procter & Gamble Home Products Ltd) publicly reported, per regulatory filings cited by Storyboard18, that advertising and sales promotion spend rose 21.5 percent to 930.03 crore rupees in the fiscal year ended March 2025, up from 765.15 crore rupees the prior year, alongside a 19 percent rise in net profit a documented instance in which increased brand and marketing spend coincided with improved, not merely maintained, profitability.

Other large consumer companies have shown documented but more varied execution patterns in the same period, underscoring that the shift toward brand investment has not been monolithic even within the same sector. According to trade press coverage of Q1 2026 earnings calls compiled by Portada, Unilever’s marketing spend rose approximately 3 to 4 percent year-on-year in Q1 2026, which the reporting characterized as a smaller increase than the total global ad-market growth rate but still representing materially higher investment than pre-2024 levels. By contrast, the same reporting documented that Kimberly-Clark’s marketing expense in Q1 2026 actually declined compared with Q1 2025, with the company confirming a “flat-to-lower” marketing cost trajectory going forward, described by the reporting as a posture of “disciplined brand support” rather than expansion. PepsiCo’s publicly stated posture, per the same compiled earnings-call reporting, was that marketing investment would grow in line with or slightly below revenue growth a moderate, revenue-linked execution approach rather than an aggressive brand-spend acceleration. This divergence is itself an important, verifiable finding: publicly disclosed execution among large CPG advertisers in the same period ranges from active expansion (P&G, Unilever) to disciplined restraint or reduction (Kimberly-Clark), indicating that the “return to brand marketing” is a selective strategic choice made by specific companies under specific competitive and margin conditions, not an industry-wide mandate.

At the channel level, WARC’s Global Ad Trends research documents that execution of the broader brand-building intent is occurring within an advertising ecosystem increasingly concentrated among a small number of large technology platforms. WARC reported that Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta were on track to capture 56.1 percent of global ad spend excluding China in 2025 (equivalent to 556.6 billion US dollars), with that combined share projected to rise to 58.0 percent in 2026 and 58.8 percent in 2027. This means that, as a matter of public record, even brand-building budget increases are substantially being executed through, or in competition with, the same small set of platform intermediaries that previously dominated performance-marketing spend, and retail media — which WARC reported had grown to represent 14.7 percent of global ad spend — has emerged as a new, publicly documented channel category sitting at the intersection of brand and performance objectives.

Positioning & Consumer Insight

The consumer and market insight underlying the renewed emphasis on brand investment, as documented across these public sources, centers on three converging, independently verifiable observations. First, data-privacy regulation and platform policy changes have measurably reduced the precision of performance-marketing targeting, a factor the BoF–McKinsey State of Fashion 2024 report explicitly cited as a driver of fashion executives’ intent to shift budget toward brand marketing. Second, WARC’s research documents that the growth driving global ad-spend expansion since 2021 has come disproportionately from price rather than volume, meaning advertisers are increasingly dependent on consumers’ willingness to pay premium prices a willingness that marketing effectiveness research broadly attributes to brand equity rather than short-term promotional activity, a position echoed publicly by IPA leadership in its commentary on the Q2 and Q3 2025 Bellwether reports. Third, survey data from EMARKETER and StackAdapt’s 2025 B2B marketing report found that 62.7 percent of B2B marketers surveyed said brand was “critical to long-term success,” while simultaneously acknowledging, per the same report, that “traditional measurement frameworks still struggle to quantify the impact of brand” a documented tension between stated strategic belief in brand value and the practical difficulty of proving its return on investment to finance stakeholders.

This measurement gap is itself a verifiable and strategically significant finding. The EMARKETER/StackAdapt data showed that while 40.0 percent of B2B marketers planned to increase brand-building budgets in 2025, a larger share, 45.5 percent, said they would allocate more than half their marketing budget to brand-building activity “if budgets weren’t a barrier” indicating that intent to invest in brand marketing among B2B marketers specifically exceeds actual disclosed or planned budget allocation, constrained by internal resource limits and the difficulty of justifying brand spend in return-on-investment terms acceptable to finance functions.

Media & Channel Strategy

Publicly available data on channel-level execution is more limited than campaign-level data, but several verified patterns exist. The IPA Bellwether Q2 2025 report documented that, within the overall rebound in UK marketing budgets, growth was led specifically by events budgets and direct marketing, with these categories outperforming “main media” brand advertising categories; the IPA’s own commentary characterized this as a pattern tilted toward “tactical approaches” even as total budgets grew. The Q3 2025 Bellwether update confirmed that events and direct marketing continued to lead budget growth into the following quarter. Separately, WARC’s Global Ad Trends research documented that retail media had grown to represent 14.7 percent of global advertising spend by the end of 2025, a channel category that did not exist at meaningful scale in prior advertising-market reporting and that sits structurally between brand-building (through in-store and platform-level brand presence) and performance objectives (through close proximity to the purchase decision).

Business & Brand Outcomes

Documented business outcomes associated with increased brand investment are available primarily at the company level through financial disclosures rather than through campaign-specific attribution data, consistent with the restriction against inferred or undisclosed metrics. Procter & Gamble’s FY2025 Annual Report shows net sales of 84.3 billion US dollars (up from 84.0 billion in FY2024), operating income of 20.5 billion dollars (up from 18.5 billion), and net earnings attributable to P&G of 16.0 billion dollars (up from 14.9 billion), alongside reported organic sales growth of 2 percent and core earnings-per-share growth of 4 percent for the fiscal year, a period in which the company’s public commentary described a “meaningful increase” in marketing investment. Procter & Gamble Home Products Ltd in India reported a 19 percent rise in net profit to 683.29 crore rupees in FY2025 alongside its 21.5 percent increase in advertising and sales promotion spend, even as revenue grew a more modest 3.4 percent a publicly disclosed instance in which profitability growth outpaced both revenue growth and the rate of marketing spend increase in the same reporting period. No verified public information is available establishing a direct, company-confirmed causal link between these specific marketing spend increases and the associated profit or sales outcomes; the companies’ own public statements characterize the relationship as directional and strategic rather than as a disclosed attribution model, and this case study does not assert causation beyond what the companies themselves have publicly claimed.

At the industry level, WARC’s December 2025 Global Ad Trends report documents that global advertising spend is on track to reach 1.19 trillion US dollars in 2025, representing 8.9 percent growth and a 1.5 percentage point upward revision from WARC’s own September 2025 forecast, with further growth to 1.30 trillion dollars forecast for 2026. WARC’s commentary explicitly attributes part of this growth pattern to the increased “strategic value of brand-building” as advertisers’ growth has shifted from volume-driven to price-driven, though this remains WARC’s interpretive analysis rather than a figure directly attributable to brand marketing’s financial return.

Strategic Implications

The verified public record supports several strategic conclusions appropriate for MBA-level analysis, while requiring explicit acknowledgment of the limits of that record. First, the renewed interest in brand marketing documented across BoF–McKinsey, WARC, and EMARKETER/StackAdapt survey data appears to be a genuine, multi-source, independently corroborated directional shift in marketer sentiment and stated intent, driven by publicly cited factors including privacy regulation, diminishing performance-marketing returns, and the need to sustain brand equity capable of supporting price-driven revenue growth. Second, this shift in intent has translated into disclosed, quantified spending increases at specific companies, most clearly documented at Procter & Gamble across multiple fiscal periods and geographies, and at Unilever in its most recently reported quarter as of this case study’s preparation. Third, the shift is neither universal nor uncontested: the Ebiquity/WFA 2025 Media Budgets Survey documents a counter-trend toward performance marketing in the same period, the IPA Bellwether data shows UK budget growth concentrated in tactical categories rather than brand “main media,” and Kimberly-Clark’s disclosed Q1 2026 marketing expense decline demonstrates that at least one major, publicly listed consumer company has moved in the opposite direction during the same period others were increasing brand investment. Fourth, the measurement gap documented in the EMARKETER/StackAdapt B2B data in which stated belief in brand’s long-term importance (62.7 percent) exceeds both disclosed budget commitment (40.0 percent planning increases) and marketers’ confidence in proving brand ROI represents a structural organizational constraint on how far this trend can extend without further advances in brand-measurement methodology acceptable to finance functions. Finally, WARC’s documentation of increasing ad-spend concentration among Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta (projected to reach 58.8 percent of global spend excluding China by 2027) suggests that however brand-building budgets are reallocated, a growing share of that spend is likely to be executed through the same small set of platform intermediaries that previously dominated performance marketing, which has implications for how distinct “brand marketing” and “performance marketing” remain as operationally separate disciplines going forward.