Marketers being asked to do more with less. Usually I’d push back, as would many others, but what if those asking this are right – but for the wrong reasons?

Because when it comes to communications, “do more with less” is almost (and I stress almost) the wrong advice.

Thankfully, there’s a mountain of data on the right way to navigate these conversations from some of the best minds in marketing.

Money talks

Blair Enns, expert sales trainer and founder of Win Without Pitching, says that if you want to get better at talking about budgets, you need to talk about them early and often – so let’s do that.

Firstly, most brands under-index on spend anyway. The management consultancy Gartner advocates that leading B2B brands invested circa 9% of their turnover in marketing during 2025. This is a number that likely feels unachievable for most SMEs even when spreading that spend across areas like staff, tech, media and agencies etc.

There’s plenty of data to suggest that this 9% investment level is just for the absolute elites; a Neilsen study of more than 150,000 global brands found that the median investment was closer to 3.9%.

So, the good news here is that (almost) everyone is in the same boat. On the other hand, the bad news from the same study is that there is a direct correlation between reduction in investment and the all-powerful return on investment.

This echoes the research on excessive share of voice as detailed in the seminal ‘Long and the Short of It’, by Field and Binet.

‘Go big, or go home’

Les Binet has also been making headlines in marketing circles again recently, with his latest work ‘Go Big, or Go Home’ (developed with Will Davies). In the piece, the pair advocate for either investing appropriately in advertising, or not bothering.

The killer insight? That budget size is 800% more important than creative quality or media planning.

While this concept is nothing new, it’s a heavy piece of data that should have marketers and their financial colleagues thinking twice about their plans. If the answer is to ‘go big, or go home’, how many campaigns can you afford to ‘go big’ on each year?

Whatever number you just landed on, the answer is ‘fewer’ – unless you said one, of course…

The mirage of more

Where content marketing was held up as nirvana for brands looking for big wins without the ad spend, you can’t run away from the weight of data that for decades has told us that the big brands win, and that the big brands win through consistency, familiarity and reach. It’s something covered wonderfully in System 1’s ’The Creative Dividend’ research, proving that consistent creative that is well branded and properly invested in will pay dividends.

So, what does that mean for brands looking to get to this level? In the short term it means stop diluting your budgets with too much comms, get your brand set (and then leave it alone), and focus your creative and budget for the long term.

Ed Hayes, Chief Strategy Officer at Bloom, summed it up perfectly in a recent issue of Management Today:

“When a brand’s foundations are no longer clear, adding new advertising does not resolve the issue. It creates more noise, more variation and more short-term activity, while the underlying identity continues to drift.”

When less really is more

Instead of a knee-jerk reactions to markets and campaigns that tick-a-box against this quarter’s sales initiatives, brands would often be far better placed focusing on strong messaging, identity and the ‘always on’ communications that actually cut through the noise and are investable for the long term.

What does that look like in practice? Here’s a few easy starting points:

Invest for the long term in distinctive brand assets – what can you build that will make you meaningfully different and recognisable among your competitive set? What can you be recalled for, and why will it matter to your audience?

Build out and invest in these brand codes – get out of your own way, resist the temptation to tinker and treat these codes as if they were items on the balance sheet. Done properly, they should be.

Work with human attention – the human brain is designed to tune out and save cognitive load for important tasks. Help your audience out by making them familiar and comforted by your brand. They may not start getting your brand tattooed on them, please God, but they should start to subconsciously notice patterns and familiarity. That’s a huge win, and truly rare air for most marketers.

Fight for a working budget, focus all the guns on landing one message, do it over and over again – this last part is important. You’ll be sick of your campaigns before your audience are even used to them. Listen to legendary planner Sarah Carter and build a mantra of ‘[your customers] don’t give a sh*t – if it helps, she suggests having this on a Post-it note stuck to your monitor’. Your customers can’t recite your ad line and that’s fine, just make them recall you when they need to and make them slightly more likely to consider you than your peers.

If 2026 is still a year of doing more with less, then fine; just make sure you show your business what more looks like, and the path to getting there.