While it isn’t surprising that the pandemic led to marketing dollars being cut in 2020, it seems that the trend isn’t about to be bucked anytime soon.
According to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey, the proportion of company revenue allocated to marketing fell from an average of 11.0% in 2020 to just 6.4% in 2021 - the lowest proportion allocated to marketing in the history of Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey. Cuts impacted marketing budgets across all industries tracked in the survey, with no industry holding a budget of more than 9% of revenue in 2021.
CMOs in categories that were hit hard by the pandemic, such as travel and hospitality, faced significant belt-tightening. This is compared with budgets as a proportion of company revenue, which were down from over 10% to just 5.4% in 2020. Meanwhile, CMOs from consumer products companies reported the strongest 2021 marketing budgets at 8.3% of revenue. Still, that was a decrease from the prior year, showing that no industry was immune.