Your competitors will spend £53.5 billion on marketing next year. What's your plan?
There's an age old tale in business. Revenue is tight and costs need trimming. Effective marketing takes a lot of time and effort, so marketing often goes first.
To do so is one of the most expensive decisions a business can make, and there is now enough evidence to say so with some confidence. Those that don’t appreciate the value of marketing will be the ones to lose revenue in the end, which is an argument backed by public accounts, peer-reviewed research and thirty years of data.
The companies growing fastest are the ones spending most on being known
Start with Coach. Its parent company, Tapestry, has taken marketing investment from roughly 3.5% of revenue to more than 11% over three years. Tapestry's CFO put the logic plainly to Fortune: there are no barriers to entry in their category, but significant barriers to scale. Anyone can make a handbag, but almost nobody can become the handbag people think of first.
The results are not subtle. In its third quarter of FY2026, Tapestry boosted marketing spend up to around 50% year on year, with Coach alone approaching $1 billion annually. Coach's revenue grew 29% in constant currency, with Greater China up 58% and both North America and Europe up 27%. The brand added two million new customers in a single quarter. Full-year sales hit $8 billion, a 17% increase, resulting in a three-year plan being delivered in year one.
Ralph Lauren has run a near-identical play. In 2024 the company had already doubled its marketing budget to about 7% of revenue, which CEO Patrice Louvet credited with letting the brand reach people across far more platforms than before. It has kept going: marketing reached 8.2% of sales in a recent quarter, up from 7.5% a year earlier and more than double pre-strategy levels. In Q2 FY2026, revenue rose 17% and earnings per share rose 44%.
Both companies did this while the wider luxury market was flat or shrinking. Both chose to spend more on being visible precisely when their competitors were pulling back.
What happens to the businesses that go quiet
The mirror image is better documented than most business owners realise.
Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute tracked hundreds of brands that stopped advertising for a year or longer, publishing in the Journal of Advertising Research. The pattern was consistent: market share fell by around 10% after one year, 20% after two and 28% after three, relative to the last year of advertising. Smaller brands fared worse than large ones, since they have less stored-up familiarity.
The decline is slow, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. Nothing breaks in the first month. You don't get an invoice for the enquiries that never arrived. By the time the trend is obvious in the sales figures, you've lost ground that takes years and more money to win back than you saved.
Harvard Business Review studied 4,700 public companies across three recessions and found that 17% didn't survive and around 80% of the survivors hadn't regained their pre-recession growth rates three years later. Only about 9% came out genuinely stronger. The strategy that most reliably produced those winners wasn't cutting hardest. It was disciplined operational efficiency combined with investing more than rivals in marketing.
Cutting marketing to protect margin is a real strategy. It's just a strategy for shrinking politely.
The UK context: standing still means falling behind
Total UK advertising investment reached £46.7 billion in 2025, up 6.4%, according to the Advertising Association and WARC. The first quarter of 2026 was up 9.3% year on year to £11.7 billion, with the full year forecast at £50.5 billion and 2027 forecast to reach £53.5 billion.
Read that as a competitive fact rather than an industry statistic. Your market's total volume is rising. If your marketing budget is flat, your share of voice is falling, and that is what determines whether a buyer thinks of you at the moment they're ready to act.
You are not choosing between spending and not spending. You are choosing between spending and becoming quieter every year by default.
But this only works if the underlying business is sound
Here's the part most agencies leave out.
Tapestry applied the same marketing machine to Kate Spade that it applied to Coach. In the same quarter Coach grew 29%, Kate Spade's revenue fell 11%. Same owner, same budget discipline, same capability. Different results.
Marketing amplifies whatever is already true about your business. If the product is right and the proposition is clear, investment compounds. If the proposition is muddled, spending more simply tells more people about a thing they don't want, faster and at greater cost.
Which is why the sequence matters more than the size of the budget:
Get the message right first. What are you actually for, and to whom, in a sentence a customer would repeat? Most businesses skip this and go straight to channels. It's why their advertising underperforms and why they conclude marketing doesn't work.
Make it consistent. The compounding effect in all the evidence above comes from being recognisable over time, not from a good quarter. Campaigns that change direction every six months reset the clock.
Fund it as an investment, not a leftover. A percentage of revenue, committed in advance, survives a bad month. A discretionary budget doesn't and the businesses that cut in the bad month are the ones that never recover the ground.
Balance short and long. Lead generation pays this quarter. Brand-building is what makes lead generation cheaper in two years. Coach's shift toward top-of-funnel work is the whole story of its acquisition numbers.
Measure what you can, and accept what you can't. Some of the return arrives as enquiries that mention you already knew who they were. That's not unmeasurable, it's just not attributable to a single click.
The honest version
Marketing is not magic and it is not a rescue plan. It won't fix a weak offer, a pricing problem or a business people are choosing not to buy from for good reasons.
What it does is it takes a business that deserves to be better known and makes it better known - reliably, cumulatively, and at a cost that falls the longer you keep at it. The evidence on that is about as strong as evidence in business gets.
The question for 2027 isn't whether marketing works. It's whether you'd rather be the business gaining ground while the market gets noisier, or the one quietly losing 10% of it a year while the spreadsheet looks fine.
POW Marketing is a UK marketing agency working with ambitious brands on brand strategy, design and performance marketing. If you're not sure whether your message is the problem or your visibility is, that's the conversation to have first. Get in touch.
