Past forward: The modern rethinking of marketing's core

Marketing organizations in Europe are returning to fundamentals in their rediscovery of the strength of following established growth drivers like branding and budget discipline. However, our State of Marketing Europe 2026 report sees nearly everyone not being receptive to the transformative opportunities of AI and other technologies, and that may lead to a large number of European firms being on the brink of an AI reckoning. According to our report, the European marketing organizations have not gone further with their maturity of gen AI, with 94 percent currently being hindered by a hesitant leadership, a lack of experience, and decentralized efforts. However, the 6 percent of marketing executives who say their company is using gen AI in a mature manner are already enjoying significant dividends: they have already realized 22 percent efficiency gains, which they frequently reinvest in growth, and expect gains to reach 28 percent in the next 2 years.

This report is a collective effort by Aurelia Bettati, Jerome Konigsfeld, Jesko Perrey, Kai Vollhardt, Thomas Bauer, Tjark Freundt, and Victor Fabius, based on views of Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice. Although 50 percent of CMOs also consider gen AI-enabled marketing among the top three areas of fastest growing investment, when it comes to priority in 2026, it was number 17 of 20. The wider implementation of gen AI and its implementation might fasten the effects of branding activities, which have regained their strength. Marketing leaders cited branding at the top of their 2026 priorities because their perception of its role in creating differentiation, presenting a specific value promise, and demonstrating creativity is crucial in establishing competitive differentiation. Financial rigor was also a key objective but 72 percent of CMOs intend to spend more money in 2026 compared to sales, albeit they feel pressure to demonstrate better the ROI of marketing. The interactive list below prioritizes the complete list of 20 subjects that were named most important by the Europe marketing leaders.

Our report on the marketing leaders of Europe is compiled based on the survey of 500 senior marketing decision-makers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The study uses both standardized and in-depth expert interviews as part of its research to gain both quantitative and qualitative information. The population group members portray a cross section of the European marketing environment which comprises of CMOs of multinationals, small medium sized enterprises, advertising agencies, and thought leaders in academia. The surveyed companies include:

• B2B (44 percent)
• B2C (31 percent)
• B2B2C (25 percent)
• 14 industries (with top 3 being telecommunications, transport and logistics and industrials) Our participants are equally represented of the five countries where we conducted the survey. It is represented with firms of all sizes:
• Start-ups and scale-ups with annual revenues less than EUR 500 million (16 percent)
• Midsize companies exceeding EUR 500 million to EUR 5 billion (54 percent)
• Large corporations exceeding EUR 5 billion annual revenues (30 percent) The 20 areas of discussion involved in the research were obtained through initial interview with marketing executives. They span across the entire field of the discipline: old and tested areas like brand building to new directions like gen AI; and strategic approaches to operational marketing and analytics. In order to have a holistic perspective of the 2026 marketing environment, the subjects were intended to be as discrete as possible yet represent pertinent overlaps and interdependencies.

As Europe faces new trade uncertainty, sluggish economies in its key markets, and falling economic and consumer sentiment indexes within the European Union, marketing managers are pursuing the basics in their reach. That is logical: volatility and uncertainty do not touch on companies only but on the consumers, whose need to feel safe and to belong to a specific brand makes them pursue the strong, stable brands that stimulate trust and belonging. Out of the 20 priority topics, the following three themes came out.

Be steady: Brand and trust building are the new growth engines

CMOs are redefining brand as something not a relic but the foundation of stability and sustainable expansion. With the increased speed of the tools, the basics become even more important: the element of trust and emotional bonding becomes the reference point, which provides the customers with transparency, predictability, and the feeling of safety. Four out of five priorities (ranked #1, branding, #3, data privacy, and #4, authenticity, and employer branding) are indicating a change in short-term activation towards long-term, brand building and trust building.

Long term brand building happens to be branding (#1) in its core. The marketers will invest in uniqueness, perception of value and creativity. Three trends stand out:

• First, interactive brand building is turning into a two way communication
• Second, teams are shifting toward full-funnel programs which are brand-only campaigns, but that involve long-term equity building and short-term sales triggers
• Third, creative exploration and content generation is being implemented with gen AI, but there are still skill and technology shortages Strong data privacy (#3) has always been an essential aspect of developing strong, trusted brands but in Europe this has been an especially important aspect since the introduction of GDPR in 2018, where regulators have taken the highest standards concerning data security. Authenticity (#4) refers to a real manifestation of the values, mission and the identity of a brand in transparency and consistency that creates emotional resonance. Employer branding (#5) is an ongoing priority and is a replica of the bigger trends in the direction of authenticity. The modern day candidates seek valuable information about what a company is really all about: 83 percent of job seekers read company reviews prior to applying to the job and more prominent online employer ratings add significantly to the employer attractiveness.

Be smart: Demonstrate value and improve efficiency

Marketing decision-makers in Europe are also projecting optimism even though it is feared that the marketing budgets will face pressure because of the company-wide cost-cutting programs. Plans to grow budgets (49 percent actually did in 2025, relative to sales) show a large 72 percent of them plan to grow budgets, and 27 percent respondents saying they plan to maintain budgets. This translates to an idea of the possible future expansion in Europe. Nevertheless, this hopefulness is accompanied by more pressure on the part of the board, who put more pressure on CMOs to prove the worth of marketing expenditure and be more efficient. Interestingly, five out of the ten topics mentioned in our survey as most crucial in the minds of the European marketing executives focus on demonstrating and improving the role of marketing in business. At the same time, these same issues can be classified into two categories: The inter-relationship nature of such topics as the demonstration of the value of marketing through budget management (#2): sizing, allocating, and controlling marketing spend and the measurement of ROI (#6): measuring, steering, and maximizing return of marketing activities not only important but requires taking action. We witness the growing interest of CMOs in making sure that every marketing dollar produces quantifiable effect by allocating their budgets wisely and strictly monitoring ROI. By presenting the value of marketing through sound ROI determination, it is necessary to generate trust throughout the C-suite, as this will justify the budgets and open the door to further growth in the future. More effective operation of CMOs is also being sought by incorporating marketing into sales (#7) and customer experience (#8) and agile working (#9). There are two benefits of having a tighter-knit integration between the marketing, sales, and customer experience functions:

• One, companies can be more consistent in their way of brand representation, not only when conveying marketing messages, but also when touching upon the customer experience with a product or in terms of customer service
• Second, it is useful to reduce internal friction (e.g., between departments and functions) and external friction (e.g., with partners and agencies), which allows cost efficiencies Furthermore, CMOs are moving towards agile approaches more often as a way to improve cross-functional work and react promptly to fluctuations on the market.

Be bold: Seize the gen AI opportunity before it's too late

Marketing decision-makers in Europe do not prioritize gen AI and agentic AI as one of the top (they are rankings number 17 out of 20), but the necessity to act implies a much different result. In our opinion, such a placing underestimates the urgency, and the opportunity.

When this gap persists, the European brands will end up losing market share to the rest of the global leaders. The most important challenge is not just to push beyond the individual pilots but to centralize marketing-wide that will generate value consistently. The following four marketing topics under Be bold were put into three categories, as follows: Gen AI and AI agents (#17). At the scale of media optimization and personalization, executives are usually aware of the potential of gen AI. But many have not equalled faith with devotion. In the case of laggards, the barriers are the most widespread through the lack of strong foundations of data and technologies, lack of attention to adoption and scaling. Even more sophisticated players do not have a very clear strategy or operating model. Companies that face consumers directly will move faster towards the front and worry about front office applications whereas B2B firms will limit the use to back office efficiencies. Without a robust data and technology base, Gen AI projects will remain isolated pilots that have a small impact. There are two specifically, which serve as enabling features: Data-driven marketing (#10), and martech and adtech (#18). The signals models require high quality first-party data, consented identity, clean rooms and modern measurement. The martech and adtech stack combine tools and workflows to enable the deployment of gen AI in an efficient channel and use case. Gen AI is transforming the curve of the cost and speed of personalization (#12). One-to-one experiences could hardly be scaled to real experience because the unit cost of developing and maintaining thousands of variants, rules and decision trees was prohibitive in the absence of gen AI. Under gen AI, brands will be able to create and produce creative variations, compose modular content, and coordinate next best actions to everyone, in brand voice and privacy guardrails.

Our study identified the priorities mentioned by the marketing leaders in Europe as those in which action is most needed. Marketing leaders have more capabilities desired when it comes to branding, budget management, and marketing return on investment, or MROI, but they appear to be confident in their employer branding capability. However, the need to act with gen AI and AI agents has a contradiction with priorities because of a large majority of maturity laggards in that space that remain ambitious to make up with leaders.

In our study, marketing leaders of Europe are in search of creating intense relationships with consumers through branding as a genuine and innovative brand. They are also confident with the strength of their budgets, but they are not blind in the tough environment so efficiency and effectiveness comes first. And they are taking the gen AI transformative opportunities, looking to the potential of agentic AI that is emerging. To put it briefly, they are trying to get the essentials correct and establish themselves as the pioneers in the second stage of marketing innovation. The entire article can be read on the following PDF file. A partner in the Paris office is the partner, Victor Fabius, where Sarah Sahel is an associate partner; a partner in the Cologne office is Jerome Konigsfeld where Jesko Perrey is a senior partner, in the Frankfurt office, Kai Vollhardt, a senior partner, Thomas Bauer is a partner, and Caroline Meder is an associate partner; and in the Hamburg office, Tjark Freundt, a senior partner, with Dominik Muller as an associate partner.