Late December and early January is an awkward moment for marketing decisions.
You’ve got your dashboards open. You’re shaping your budgets. Your forecasts are half data, half finger in the air hope. You’re most likely somewhere between “we can’t afford to stand still” and “we should probably do more,” and the idea of increasing marketing spend starts to feel inevitable.
Not exciting. Not reckless. Sensible.
Most founders, CFOs and senior marketers arrive here for the same reasons. Costs are up. Results have flattened. What worked last year isn’t working as well now. Doing nothing feels like drift. Increasing spend feels like progress.
The problem is that spend increases often solve the emotional discomfort of uncertainty rather than the commercial problem underneath it.
Before you commit more budget in 2026, there are a few things worth reviewing carefully. Not because spend is wrong, but because spend is a multiplier. It amplifies what already exists, good or bad.
Why increasing spend feels like the safest move
When pressure is on, teams default to actions that look controllable.
Increasing budget is visible. It can be approved, scheduled, and justified. It creates activity. It buys time. It signals decisiveness to boards and leadership teams.
It also avoids harder conversations.
Questions about whether your marketing is remembered. Whether your messaging still carries weight. Whether effort is disappearing into coordination, rework, and inefficiency instead of building future revenue.
Spend increases are often framed as performance decisions. In reality, they are decision quality tests. If the underlying system is efficient and recall is strong, more spend can accelerate growth. If not, it simply makes inefficiency more expensive.
Spend does not fix inefficiency. It magnifies it.
This is the really uncomfortable part.
When spend goes up, teams expect performance to rise proportionally. When it does not, the instinct is usually to push harder, optimise faster, or add more channels (which leads to burnout and knee-jerk decisions). Rarely is the question asked whether the spend itself is flowing through a structure that can convert attention into commercial advantage.
I have seen this pattern repeatedly. Strong teams. Smart people. Good work. And yet, each budget increase delivers less incremental impact than the last.
Not because the team forgot how to market, but because the system they are feeding is already leaking value.
This is what most people mean when they talk about marketing efficiency. Not whether campaigns technically perform, but whether spend compounds over time or resets every quarter. Efficient marketing makes future growth easier. Inefficient marketing makes every gain more expensive than the last.
Before increasing spend, it is worth reviewing where that leakage might be coming from.
Decision quality before performance metrics
If your primary evidence for increasing spend is that “results are slowing,” take a pause.
Slowing results are the outcome. The more important question is whether the decisions leading to those results are still sound.
Are you clear on which activities genuinely influence buying decisions and affect revenue and profitability versus those that simply generate movement in dashboards?
Can you explain, with confidence, why a specific increase in spend should produce a specific commercial effect over time?
If the rationale is “we need more volume to hit targets,” that is a volume problem, not a decision one. If the rationale is “this reliably compounds outcomes we already see,” that is different.
Spend increases should be grounded in decision confidence, not discomfort with uncertainty.
Recall, not just reach
Most marketing activity today is busy and forgettable. Sorry, it had to be said.
Content is produced. Ads are served. Impressions are logged. Very little of it sticks.
Before increasing spend, ask whether your business is remembered when prospective buyers enter the market (in their buying moments), or whether you are relying on constant visibility to stay relevant.
If your marketing only works while money is flowing, spend increases become a tax, not an investment. The moment you pause, momentum disappears.
Recall creates leverage. It allows past spend to keep working. Without it, efficiency erodes quietly while costs rise.
If you cannot point to evidence that your marketing is remembered beyond the campaign window, increasing spend will not fix that gap. It will simply make forgetting more expensive.
Efficiency of effort, not activity volume
Many teams are already operating at capacity, and marketing burnout is becoming a ‘thing’. More spend often adds complexity rather than clarity.
New campaigns. More formats. Additional platforms. Extra reporting.
Before increasing budget, review whether your current spend is doing too much rather than too little.
Are teams stretched thin trying to maintain breadth instead of depth?
Is effort fragmented across initiatives that never quite reinforce each other?
Efficiency problems rarely show up as failure. They show up as rising costs for the same outcome.
If your system requires constant novelty to perform, it is fragile. Increasing spend into fragility rarely produces stable returns.
Structural friction in the buying journey
Marketing performance often plateaus not because of creative fatigue or channel saturation, but because friction exists beyond the marketing function.
Sales processes that do not align with messaging. Offers that require too much explanation. Internal handoffs that slow momentum. Pricing structures that create hesitation.
Before increasing spend, review where interest goes after marketing does its job.
If marketing is generating attention that stalls or degrades further down the line, adding more fuel will not fix the blockage.
Spend works best when it flows through a system designed to convert attention into action with minimal resistance.
The cost of being wrong
Finally, consider how costly it can be if this decision turns out to be the wrong one.
Increasing spend feels reversible. In practice, it often locks teams into expectations, targets, and operational commitments that are hard to unwind.
If the decision is wrong, the cost is not just wasted budget. It is lost time, eroded confidence, demotivated team members and the opportunity cost of not addressing the real constraint.
This is why reframing spend increases as decision problems rather than performance problems matters.
The question is not “can we afford to spend more,” but “are we confident this spend will compound, not just perform.”
Increasing marketing spend in 2026 may well be the right move.
But it should come from clarity, not pressure. Confidence, not habit. Understanding, not assumption.
Pausing to review decision quality, recall strength, efficiency of effort, and structural friction does not slow momentum. It protects it.
If you are considering increasing marketing spend in 2026 and want an independent second opinion before committing budget, that is the work I do.
Caroline Thomas helps leadership teams understand why marketing looks busy but underperforms, and how to tell whether it’s learning and compounding to be as efficient as possible.
