As companies face tougher growth conditions, the mandate is shifting from spending less to proving where the money works.
I’ve been paying close attention to earnings calls this season, and two themes keep surfacing.
The first is uncertainty. Consumer spending is uneven, costs are shifting, and tariffs, supply-chain pressures and changing product cycles are making the next six months harder to predict.
The second is quieter, but just as important. Companies are getting much more disciplined about the investments they can control, including marketing.
Those two conversations are increasingly connected. When the external environment becomes harder to predict, companies have to get better at understanding the economics of the investments they are making today. And for most, marketing remains one of the largest pools of discretionary investment.
Discipline does not mean cutting marketing every time conditions get tough.
Discipline means knowing which dollars are creating incremental value, where additional investment can still produce growth, and where money can be moved or eliminated without sacrificing business outcomes.
The pressure is real, but cutting is not the strategy
You can see the tension clearly in retail right now.
Dick’s Sporting Goods recently cited macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures, higher fuel costs and supply-chain headwinds, while its Foot Locker business is operating in what management called challenging conditions for athletic footwear.
JD Sports has similarly described a tough, highly promotional market shaped by consumer and cost-of-living pressures.
Neither story is simply about pulling back. Dick’s highlighted strong results from marketing tied to the World Cup, while Foot Locker has seen encouraging performance from its first major brand campaign in more than a decade. JD, meanwhile, credited focused marketing as one factor supporting resilient online performance in North America.
A difficult market does not automatically make marketing less valuable. It makes ineffective marketing more expensive. That puts a premium on knowing which investments are generating additional business outcomes and which are not, rather than applying broad budget cuts in the name of efficiency.
Efficiency is not the same thing as austerity
Procter & Gamble provides another good example.
P&G described fiscal 2026 as a year shaped by a “very challenging geopolitical and economic environment” and expects volatility to continue. At the same time, the company has made clear that it intends to keep investing in the business and fund those investments through productivity improvements.
That reflects a broader definition of efficiency: improving the return produced by the budget, not simply reducing the budget itself.
One channel may warrant more investment because additional spend is still producing strong incremental returns. Another may appear efficient in platform reporting but contribute little incremental growth. A third may work well at current levels but hit diminishing returns quickly if spend increases.
For executives, the more consequential question is: What did this investment actually add to the business, and what happens if we take away, move or add money?
The companies with an advantage can move when the economics change
Speed matters more when consumer behavior, promotional intensity and category performance are moving quickly. A media plan can become outdated before the budget is fully spent.
Tapestry closed fiscal 2026 with 14% annual revenue growth and expanded operating margin while continuing to invest behind its brands. Growth and efficiency are often framed as competing priorities, but they do not have to be.
The advantage comes from being able to identify where there is still productive headroom and move investment toward it, while recognizing where returns have weakened and moving money away. That requires measurement to operate at roughly the same speed as the business.
If a company only receives a comprehensive view of marketing effectiveness a few times a year, it may be very good at explaining what happened but too slow to change what happens next.
Marketing measurement is becoming financial infrastructure
For years, marketing measurement was designed primarily to answer marketing questions: Which campaign performed best? Which channel had the highest ROAS? Which audience converted?
Those questions matter, but they are no longer enough when CEOs and CFOs are scrutinizing every major investment against growth, margin and profitability. They also need to know how much revenue would have happened without the investment, where returns are beginning to diminish, and what is likely to happen if spend goes up or down.
Answering those questions requires a comprehensive measurement system that can see across the full media portfolio and drill down into channels, tactics and campaigns. It needs to understand incrementality, show how returns are changing as spend changes, and deliver insights while there is still time to improve the outcome.
That changes the role of measurement inside the business. Instead of explaining performance after the fact, it helps leaders decide where to invest more, where to pull back and where the next dollar is most likely to create value.
Uncertainty raises the value of knowing what works
No measurement system can remove economic uncertainty. Marketers cannot control fuel prices, tariffs, consumer sentiment, category slowdowns or geopolitical shocks. What they can control is how quickly they understand what those changes mean for the investments they are making.
When those answers arrive quickly enough to act on them, measurement becomes a way to adapt the business rather than simply document what already happened.
When growth is harder to come by and every dollar faces more scrutiny, companies need to know which investments are worth protecting, which have room to scale, and which are no longer earning their place.
That is the P&L value of better measurement: not certainty, but the ability to make better investment decisions when certainty is unavailable.
To explore how finance leaders are addressing these challenges in practice, download our latest guide, Why Marketing Measurement Deserves CFO Attention, a practical framework for evaluating, governing, and modernizing marketing measurement.