Downturns don't kill brands. Cowardice does.

Many CMOs in Germany are being told to cut their marketing budgets right now. Few are being asked what to protect — and what to double down on to get out of this year alive.

I get it. The pressure is real. The economy is brutal and nobody wants to be the one who bet on the wrong thing. But the biggest risk right now isn’t spending too much. It’s cutting the wrong things.

The default playbook for times like these sounds responsible: protect what’s measurable, cut what’s not. Keep performance, kill brand expense. But the measurable stuff is also the most commoditised. It’s what everyone else is running too. Doubling down on it doesn’t protect you. It puts you in a price war with every competitor making the exact same cut that ends in a loose-loose situation for everyone.

And cutting down on brand and communication, the things that are not measurable and easy to switch off sounds great in boardrooms, but is it really? Kristina Bonitz made a great point in her latest Horizont piece: in saturated markets, communication is the weakest instrument you have. You can’t communicate your way out of decisions you’ve been avoiding. And the other move, investing in technology like AI, automation, better targeting etc. now may feel like progress without the pain - but in many cases, it’s just avoidance. An alternative to doing the work that actually matters: making clear decisions, letting things go, finding real focus.

Alex M H Smith wrote something recently about business strategy and positioning that seems really relevant to this right now: most companies are stuck solving problems — answering questions their market already has, competing on the same ground as everyone else. The alternative is creating value — offering something people didn’t know they needed, landing somewhere unique and defendable. One keeps you in a race you can’t win. The other gets you out of it. And when everyone is fighting over the same shrinking pie, that shift might be the most strategic move a brand can make.

Both are pointing at the same thing. And that’s actually good news. Because the answer to the current marketing dilemma isn’t “do more with less.” The answer is: get sharper. And sharper doesn’t have to take forever.

Here are three things any CMO can do this quarter that take courage, but can change more than the usual budget shifts and prayers for better times:

• Strip back to your sharpest position. What do you offer that nobody else does — and does your market actually know it? If your own team can’t say it in one sentence, your customers can’t either. Fix that before you touch the budget.
• Kill the work that was already coasting. Every marketing team has a layer of “we’ve always done this” that nobody would miss. Campaigns on autopilot. Channels kept alive out of habit. That’s what you cut. Not strategy. Not brand. The stuff that was average before the downturn and will be invisible after it.
• Build one thing that only you could build. Not more “me too” content. Not another funnel. One position, one offer, one piece of work that makes it obvious why you exist. Something no competitor could copy even if they wanted to. Bonitz calls these costly signals — decisions that are credible precisely because they have a price. And in a saturated market, they’re the only currency that still works.

Now — I know this sounds clean on a screen. In practice, it’s some of the hardest work there is. Stripping back means confronting what’s not working. Killing things means fights with people who built them. And making a costly decision means putting your neck out in a moment when everything in the organisation screams “play it safe.” But that’s exactly why the ones who do it will stand out. Because most won’t.

Downturns don’t kill brands. Cowardice does.

And the CMOs who come out of this stronger won’t be the ones who cut the most. They’ll be the ones who used the pressure to get sharper. I’d bet on them every time.

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First published on LinkedIn, 16.04.2026. Cover photo: Plufow Le Studio on Unsplash.