The CMO Survey (2026) — Marketing leaders under economic pressure

Summary:

This study is a central piece to understanding what senior marketers at U.S. for-profit companies are seeing and doing under economic pressure.

It covers the economy, tariffs, AI, marketing tech, growth, budgets, jobs, channels, and performance.

It comes from The CMO Survey, a long-running survey run by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business with support from Deloitte and the American Marketing Association. The main goal is to track marketing leaders’ views over time and use those views to spot where marketing is heading.

For this survey, the sample frame was 2,111 leaders at U.S. for-profit companies, and 308 replied, for a 14.6% response rate. Almost all respondents were very senior, with 97% at VP level or above. The survey ran in January 2026.

The biggest findings are that marketers felt squeezed.

• About half said they were less optimistic about the U.S. economy than the prior quarter.
• Nearly half said tariffs had no price impact yet, but more raised prices than lowered them, and more cut investments than increased them. I
• n response to economic shifts, the most common move was to focus more on loyalty and retention, followed by targeting new segments in current markets and premium segments.

On AI and marketing tech, companies said they are using AI in marketing about a quarter of the time now and expect that to rise to more than half of activity within three years. Generative AI use in marketing averaged about 22% of the time. The most common AI uses were content creation and personalization.

Reported gains from AI were modest but positive: roughly 14% better sales productivity, about 15% lower marketing overhead costs, and about 11% better customer satisfaction.

A few other results stand out.

Average online sales share was low, with many firms reporting none at all. Marketers said their organizations are mainly responsible for brand, digital marketing, advertising, and social media. They also said CEOs and CFOs often pressure marketing to prove its value, and the most common response is to focus on short-term impact over long-run gains.

The main catch is the low response rate, which raises the risk that the respondents are not fully representative. Many questions also have much smaller usable samples than the 308 total, often closer to 150 to 200, because of skipped questions.

Results are self-reported by executives, so they may reflect perception more than hard performance. Since this is a U.S.-only leadership survey, it should not be treated as a picture of all companies everywhere.