Brand is the priority again, and the money is already moving. In NIQ’s 2026 CMO Outlook, built from a global survey of more than 250 CMOs and senior marketing decision makers, 55 percent of respondents said they now put 60 percent or more of their budget toward long term brand building rather than short term performance campaigns. Censuswide’s Voice of the UK CMO report, published in November 2025, found brand building ranked as the top priority among CMOs heading into 2026, with 62 percent actively tracking brand awareness as a core metric. After several years of marketing budgets chasing last click attribution, the pendulum has swung back toward brand.
The problem is that belief in brand is eroding exactly as spending on it rises. NIQ’s survey found that only 69 percent of CMOs say their CEO or CFO believes in the value of long term brand building, down from 80 percent the year before, even as 74 percent report facing increased scrutiny to prove marketing ROI. CMOs are asking the C-suite to trust brand investment at the same moment the C-suite is asking harder questions about what it returns.
Gartner says that gap is about to cost a lot of CMOs their influence, if not their jobs. In a February 2026 press release based on a survey of 426 senior marketing leaders conducted in the fall of 2025, Gartner predicted that by 2027, more than 40 percent of CMOs who push for larger brand budgets will lose influence with the C-suite because they cannot demonstrate sufficient returns. The firm says 84 percent of companies are caught in what it calls a brand doom loop: underfunded measurement leads to unclear impact, which breeds C-suite skepticism, which leads to tighter budgets, and those companies are 50 percent less likely to exceed their own growth targets. “Underfunded measurement breeds C-suite skepticism, which deprives brand of the investment it needs to drive growth,” said Sharon Cantor Ceurvorst, VP of research at Gartner’s marketing practice. Gartner analyst Julie Reeves put the fix more bluntly: CMOs earn influence by shaping the value proposition itself, meaning product, pricing, and commercialization decisions, not by asking for a bigger line item.
The honest number underneath all of this is 37 percent. That is the share of CMOs in NIQ’s survey who say they have a centralized data repository accessible to everyone who needs it, meaning most brand leaders are being asked to defend bigger budgets with worse infrastructure than the performance marketers they are now competing against for dollars. Brand is back in fashion for good reasons, reach and recall still predict long term growth better than last click metrics ever did, but fashion without a measurement system is how the previous swing toward attributing everything happened in the first place. The CMOs who hold their ground this cycle will likely be the ones who fixed the data problem before they asked for the budget, not after.
Sources referenced in reporting: NIQ, CMO Outlook: Guide to 2026; Gartner, “Gartner Predicts Over 40% of CMOs Who Push for Larger Brand Budgets Will Lose Influence With the C-Suite”; Censuswide, Voice of the UK CMO 2026.