Embrace the virtue of prudence: Make the numbers make sense
Confession
Wrath usually conjures up anger, rage, and the occasional overturned table. Hopefully, none of those is a regular feature of your marketing department.
For our purposes, I’m more interested in what happens when strong emotion gets a vote in consequential decisions. Anger is one possibility, but so are frustration, fear, attachment, resentment, and even enthusiasm. Decisions made in that state tend to favor what feels right in the moment over what the evidence tells us is likely to work.
Marketing budgets are particularly vulnerable because too many organizations still treat marketing as a cost center. If the organization doesn’t understand what an investment produces, cutting it appears to eliminate an expense without putting anything on the other side of the ledger at risk.
That leaves plenty of room for the emotionally fraught and politically delicate dance of managing the budget. Someone on the board suggested a sports sponsorship because they hold season tickets. Leadership commented favorably on a campaign. Your absence at a high-profile conference would be notable. The media plan you know is driving appointments also has the most visible weight in the budget.
When marketing looks like a collection of expenses, the things people like can become easier to defend than the things producing value. Cutting $500,000 from media produces an immediate $500,000 savings, while the appointments, revenue, or market share that investment would have generated remain largely invisible.
That becomes particularly dangerous when the budget gets smaller but the growth expectation doesn’t. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found marketing budgets essentially flat at 7.8% of company revenue, 18% below their level four years earlier. At the same time, 73% of CMOs described leadership’s expectations for enterprise growth as high, very high, or overly ambitious.
Virtue
Prudence is thoughtful, measured decision-making grounded in long-term impact. For marketing teams, that means treating marketing dollars as investments intended to produce organizational outcomes.
Start with the outcome. If the organization needs growth, understand where it needs that growth and what kind of growth creates value. Then work backward into the people marketing needs to reach, the behavior it needs to influence, and the investment required to do it.
Healthcare marketers have become remarkably sophisticated at finding people and getting them to respond. As Jamie Mermelstein points out, the harder question is whether we’re connecting with the rightpeople to achieve the organization’s objectives. More leads, appointments, or patients don’t automatically translate into the growth the enterprise needs.
This is why last year’s budget or a benchmark for what similar organizations spend can only take you so far. The appropriate investment depends on what your organization is trying to accomplish, the opportunity in the market, the economics of that opportunity, and the role marketing can play in capturing it.
Then comes the responsibility to demonstrate what the investment produces. Prudent teams define success before the work begins and follow results as far downstream as their data allows. As Ben Fuqua argues, marketing analytics creates more value when it connects marketing activity to the financial and operational outcomes the enterprise cares about.
Perfect attribution isn’t always possible, and different investments require different measures. Build the strongest evidence you reasonably can. The more clearly marketing can connect investment to enterprise value, the less likely the budget conversation is to become a referendum on what people happen to like.
Repentance
When cuts are unavoidable, use the objectives and evidence you’ve built to decide what to protect, reduce, or eliminate.
Look at what each investment contributes and what you expect to happen if it changes. Some effects will be easier to quantify than others, so clean attribution shouldn’t become the price of admission for survival. A brand investment, sponsorship, or community program may require different evidence and a different time horizon than a performance campaign. You should still be able to explain the job each investment is doing.
Document what you expect the cuts to change. If you reduce media, pause a campaign, or leave a market, model the impact where you can and establish the measures you’ll watch afterward.
This work helps prepare you for potentially difficult conversations later in the year even if it doesn’t affect the need to make cuts. If volume falls, acquisition costs rise, or growth slows, you’ll know whether the change tracks with the assumptions you made when the investment came out. You’ll also have evidence to bring into the next planning cycle rather than relying on institutional memory about what happened and why.
Evidence gives you a stronger footing for the difficult budget decisions that inevitably involve competing priorities, preferences, and politics.
One small act
Pick one significant line in your marketing budget and ask three questions:
What organizational objective does this support?
What evidence tells us it’s working?
What do we expect to happen if we stop?
If you can’t answer all three, that’s a good place to start.
Take a deeper look at how Wrath shows up in healthcare marketing and how to embrace Prudence.
