Dive Brief:
- CMOs face steeper challenges to realizing long-term brand-building goals, yet many remain confident in their brands’ equity despite winnowing resources, according to new research from NielsenIQ.
- NIQ revealed 69% of surveyed marketing leaders believe their CEOs and CFOs support long-term brand investment, an 11 percentage-point slide from last year. Pressures to deliver short-term results have led 84% of CMOs to view return on investment as their primary metric when it comes to budget allocation.
- At the same time, the share of CMOs who are confident in brand purpose has dropped from 83% to 71%. Marketers must improve their ability to centralize data while making their technology more measurable in the face of these headwinds, NIQ said.
Dive Insight:
CMO struggles to balance short-term performance marketing with long-term brand building are well documented, but could be intensifying with added macroeconomic pressures. C-suite peers in charge of budget allocations for marketing — namely CEOs and CFOs — are showing a notable pullback in support for brand-building activities while expressing sharper scrutiny over ROI, according to NIQ’s “CMO Outlook: Guide to 2026” report. The research arrives as the industry enters the thick of an uncertain holiday period shaken by tariffs and with 2026 planning well underway.
“Every marketing dollar is now under the microscope,” said Marta Cyhan-Bowles, chief communications officer and head of global marketing COE at NIQ, in a statement attached to the report. “With organizations prioritizing cost reductions, CMOs are being challenged not just to spend wisely, but to prove how marketing directly drives awareness, growth, and loyalty. It’s no longer just about efficiency; it’s about proving impact — all with largely flat budgets.”
Despite belt-tightening measures, 83% of surveyed CMOs remain confident in their brand equity. Yet belief in marketing pillars like brand purpose — the values a brand stands for that extend beyond commercial goals — are in sharp decline in 2025. Brand purpose has been increasingly challenged in a divisive political climate that has seen companies swept up in backlash for championing issues like social justice, equality and sustainability.
Only 55% of marketing leaders are allocating 60% or more of their budgets to long-term brand building, a four percentage-point decrease from 2024. While more focus is shifting to short-term ROI, there are barriers to success there as well.
Fifty-four percent of CMOs struggle to thread together data from different sources, a major jump from 31% who reported the same last year and one that underpins greater difficulty in uncovering actionable insights. An intense degree of fragmentation is further reflected in one-third of marketers requiring between five and 15 tools to measure ROI. Just 37% claim to have a single, centralized data source that is accessible to all stakeholders in their organization.
Generative AI is positioned to alleviate marketing workloads and bolster efficiency but also remains a work in progress. Nearly 70% of CMOs now use AI for content generation while 64% leverage the technology for personalization and 55% for media planning and campaign optimization. As AI evolves from its experimental phase into greater enterprise maturity, CMOs are expected to be able to quantify the impact of these solutions and clearly articulate them at the executive level, NIQ said. Upskilling marketing teams to better understand and effectively deploy AI could be crucial for brand growth, per NIQ.
On the channel front, retail media is gaining further traction, with 69% of CMOs seeing it as critical and 67% expecting to increase their investments in 2026. Retail media networks help marketers place ads closer to the point of sale, further shoring up marketing ROI, but have sprung up at such a rate that has worsened marketplace fragmentation. NIQ emphasized a need to better integrate cross-channel data and wed off-site and on-platform retail media ads to create true full-funnel campaigns in 2026.
“Data, AI, and retail media networks are reshaping the marketing playbook, and the most successful CMOs will be those who connect these forces to demonstrate measurable value for the organization,” said NIQ’s Cyhan-Bowles.
