Marketing has a credibility problem with the C-suite. Gartner’s 2025 research found only 27% of CEOs and CFOs believed their CMO had exceeded expectations in the previous year. Just 34% agreed with CMOs about marketing’s role in supporting growth.
McKinsey found a similar disconnect. While 70% of CEOs measure marketing’s impact through revenue growth and margin, only 35% of CMOs use these as their top measures.
This matters to designers because the pressure is flowing downstream
Brand budgets are becoming harder to defend
Gartner reports that 84% of companies are caught in what it calls a “brand doom loop”.
Poor measurement creates uncertainty about brand’s contribution. That creates C-suite scepticism, which leads to less investment in brand.
Gartner predicts that by 2027 more than 40% of CMOs asking for increased brand budgets without demonstrating sufficient returns will lose influence with the C-suite.
At the same time, marketing budgets are tight. Gartner found they averaged just 7.7% of company revenue in 2025.
More data isn’t necessarily better measurement
Marketing has never had more data.
Clicks. Impressions. Engagement. Leads. Conversions. Awareness. Search traffic.
Measuring activity isn’t the same as demonstrating business impact.
LinkedIn found 78% of B2B CMOs say proving ROI has become more important, while 87% say measuring the long-term impact of campaigns is becoming increasingly difficult.
This creates a temptation to measure what can be measured quickly.
That favours performance advertising, leads and conversions. It disadvantages brand, positioning, customer experience, reputation and design, where impact can take much longer to emerge.
Designers can help
Marketing’s problem isn’t necessarily that it doesn’t work. The problem is demonstrating how it works.
Designers can help marketers connect design decisions to human behaviour and ultimately business results.
The chain is: Business outcome is measured though behaviour change related to human experience that gives evidence to inform design to change perception and behaviour leading to a commercial outcome.
Instead of reporting: Our new identity increased awareness by six percentage points.
Help the client say: Awareness increased six percentage points after the campaign. Before and after customer journey maps showed people now understand why the product costs more. Sales data shows fewer customers choosing the cheaper entry-level option leading to 20% increase in profits.
Now there’s a connection between design, perception, behaviour and commercial performance. Our contribution is understanding people.
Combine that qualitative understanding with the client’s quantitative data and design becomes much easier for marketing to defend in the boardroom.
And that makes design much harder to cut.
As always, happy to discuss further, just email.
Greg Branson
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