2027 Marketing Planning: What CMOs Should Cut, Protect and Change

Your next marketing plan needs a few difficult decisions before it needs another slide.

There’s a moment in every annual planning meeting when someone opens last year’s presentation and chooses “Save As.”

And just like that, the future begins.

The dates change. The revenue target gets bigger. Someone adds an AI slide. The webinar series returns for its fourth season despite limited demand for the first three.

Eventually, everyone agrees the plan is ambitious.

It is. You’re expecting substantially better results from many of the same decisions.

For CMOs developing their 2027 marketing strategy, the important questions come before channel allocations: What is preventing growth? Which investments are helping? What should stop? And where could a different approach produce a better result?

At TheorySF, a San Francisco brand strategy and creative agency, we help B2B technology and challenger brands sharpen their positioning and turn it into marketing people notice. Our view of annual planning starts there: establish why customers should choose you, then decide how to invest behind that reason.

Otherwise, you’re budgeting distribution for an unresolved argument.

Where should CMOs start their 2027 marketing plan?

Start by identifying the biggest obstacle to growth and the evidence behind it. Use that diagnosis to guide positioning, creative, channel investment and measurement.

“We need more pipeline” is a reasonable request. It leaves a few things open.

Do enough potential buyers know you exist? Do they understand what you do? Are you getting considered and losing? Are deals stalling? Are customers leaving through a side door while marketing throws a welcome party at the front?

These are different problems. They deserve different plans.

If buyers haven’t heard of you, rewriting the nurture sequence probably won’t fix it. If they know you but can’t explain why you’re different, buying more impressions will spread that confusion efficiently.

And if customers are leaving because the experience is terrible, the acquisition team deserves to know what it’s being asked to refill.

Before assigning dollars to channels, finish this sentence:

“Our biggest obstacle to growth is ______, and we believe that because ______.”

The second blank should contain customer interviews, win-loss findings, sales patterns, retention data or research.

“The CEO mentioned it on Tuesday” needs a little more development before becoming the strategy.

As we explored in Why Your Pipeline Looks Healthy But Isn’t Converting, a busy funnel can conceal unresolved questions about why anybody should choose you. And when the activity looks healthy but buying decisions drag, it’s worth examining why your marketing feels slow.

Get specific before the channel owners arrive with their requests.

For a useful perspective on that connection, listen to our Marketing Mischief & Mayhem conversation with Eightfold AI CMO Navneet Singh, Brand Awareness Is BS. He makes the case for judging brand by how it helps buyers move toward a decision, rather than stopping at exposure.

What should CMOs cut from the marketing budget?

Cut or redesign programs whose contribution no longer justifies their full cost, including the staff time required to maintain them. Start with recurring commitments that somehow escape scrutiny.

Every marketing department has a few programs with diplomatic immunity.

The annual sponsorship. The report everyone downloads and nobody discusses. The newsletter whose most reliable reader is the person who sends it.

Ask why they’re in the plan and you’ll hear, “We’ve always done it.”

Yes. That’s the part we’re investigating.

Some programs consume modest budgets and extraordinary amounts of attention. Twelve people spending six weeks producing something customers barely notice is still expensive, even if nobody needed a purchase order.

Give recurring programs a fresh hearing:

• What specific job does this program do?

• What evidence suggests it’s doing that job?

• What would we lose if we stopped?

• Would we fund it today if it weren’t already here?

Allow for different kinds of evidence. An executive dinner may deepen five valuable relationships without generating fifty leads. Research may improve decisions rather than produce immediate sales.

But give every program a job.

“Maintaining a presence” needs an explanation. So does “supporting the ecosystem.” Somewhere underneath those phrases, actual people are spending actual money.

Trade shows deserve this scrutiny, too. Before renewing the same footprint and ordering another thousand branded water bottles, revisit You Spent $500,000 to Say “Powering What’s Next”. Sometimes the problem is what you’re paying to say once you get there.

Review your agency model as well. Are outside partners adding expertise you need, or duplicating capabilities you already have? We examine that question in You Don’t Need Another Full-Service Agency. You Just Need the Right People in the Room.

When you stop something, decide where its budget and staff time will go. Otherwise, the hours you recover will be quietly adopted by another unnecessary project.

They’re surprisingly resourceful.

Which brand investments should CMOs protect?

Protect investments that build awareness, buyer preference and customer trust, with clear objectives, appropriate measurement and enough time to evaluate their contribution.

A budget review can eliminate waste. Sadly, it can also eliminate everything whose value takes longer to appear.

A customer already knows your name. A prospect trusts your expertise. Someone recommends you in a meeting you weren’t invited to.

None of these events is especially cooperative with attribution software.

Yet they can change the sales conversation.

In Your B2B Buyer Has Already Picked a Favorite. And You Haven’t Even Met Yet., we explored how buyers develop preferences before contacting sales.

Your CRM records the introduction. It missed the courtship.

Protect the investments that help your company become familiar, credible and worth considering before somebody needs you. Depending on the business, those may include distinctive creative, original research, customer advocacy, useful thought leadership or consistent participation in a relevant community.

Our podcast conversation with Kristin Oelke, Marketing Trust, explores how credibility and buyer confidence contribute to B2B growth. Those are useful considerations when deciding what deserves another year of funding.

Then agree on how you’ll judge progress.

Establish a baseline. Define the audience. Measure recognition, understanding and preference where feasible. Ask prospects what they knew before contacting you and where they encountered the company.

Connect those signals with commercial outcomes such as consideration, win rate, sales cycle and retention, while recognizing that several factors influence each.

Set review dates appropriate to the investment.

Patience should come with evidence. Impatience should, too.

Our guide to how CMOs can prove brand marketing works develops that measurement approach further. For evaluating a specific initiative, see How to Measure the ROI of a Branding Initiative.

And be careful when shifting money toward the channels with the cleanest reporting. As we explain in Why Performance Marketing Can Make Your Brand Invisible, campaign efficiency and brand effectiveness deserve separate scrutiny.

A beautifully optimized campaign still needs to give people something worth remembering.

How should AI change the 2027 marketing plan?

Fund AI around specific business problems. Evaluate the complete workflow—including human review—and decide how any savings will improve marketing effectiveness.

Somewhere in the 2027 plan, someone will promise that AI allows the team to produce five times as much content.

Before applauding, ask whether customers wanted the original amount.

If your current messaging is forgettable, you’ve just industrialized the problem.

AI can help with research, analysis, production, adaptation and routine work. Start with a specific task and an actual constraint. Establish its current time, cost and quality. Test the new workflow. Include review, correction and rework when calculating the benefit.

Then decide where that benefit goes.

Could faster production fund a stronger creative idea? Could less reporting administration create more time with customers? Could easier adaptation help a successful campaign reach markets you previously couldn’t afford to serve?

Those choices belong in the plan.

“Everyone should use AI more” is difficult to manage.

“Reduce the time required to adapt approved creative, maintain quality, and reinvest the savings in testing” gives someone an assignment. It also gives you a way to judge the investment.

In our podcast episode AI Is Easy. Different Is Hard., Jay Manciocchi discusses which tasks marketing can hand to AI and where human judgment remains essential. It’s a useful conversation to have before purchasing another platform.

As we argued in Why AI Is Making Marketing Sound the Same, increased output makes distinctive positioning and creative judgment more consequential.

Preserve some time for thinking. If every efficiency gain becomes another deliverable, your team will be extremely productive and too busy to notice anything.

Budget for how buyers use AI, too

Your internal workflow is only part of the planning question. Consider what happens when prospective customers use AI to research your category and compare companies.

Review whether your website clearly explains what you do, who you serve, how you differ and what evidence supports your claims. Check whether customer stories and independent coverage reinforce that explanation.

We explore this in Your Category Leader Has a New Salesperson. It’s ChatGPT., and examine the implications of more delegated research in The Buyer Has Left the Funnel and Sent an AI Agent Instead.

Your next customer may arrive with a comparison table you didn’t write.

Give them better source material.

What should change in your brand positioning and sales story?

Test whether customers, marketing and sales share a clear explanation of why your company is worth choosing. Resolve important inconsistencies before increasing campaign investment.

Ask five salespeople why customers choose your company.

Separately. No conferring.

If you get five incompatible answers, you’ve found an assignment for the first quarter.

Your positioning needs to survive a trip from the campaign to the website to the sales conversation. Ideally, it should survive being repeated by a customer who has other things to remember.

That requires choosing what leads.

Every capability cannot be the main reason. Every audience cannot be the priority. And “AI-powered” will need considerably more company if it’s expected to carry the positioning.

In The Courage Gap: Why Most B2B Tech Positioning Fails, we examined what happens when companies find a distinctive position and then negotiate away everything distinctive about it.

The 2027 planning process is a good time to settle that argument.

Talk to customers. Review competitive claims. Identify the difference that matters, the evidence supporting it and the language people actually understand. Our Five Pillars of Brand Differentiation offers a starting point for that discussion.

Then give your creative team something specific to dramatize.

Media is a costly place to discover that nobody agreed on the message.

How should CMOs build internal support for the plan?

Align leadership around the business problem, strategic choices and measures of success. Give contributors clear roles and establish who has final decision authority.

Internal support matters. A plan that sales, product and leadership don’t understand will struggle long before customers see it.

Margaret Dawson explores this in our podcast conversation, Why Internal Brand Alignment Matters More Than Marketing.

But shared understanding does not require fourteen people to rewrite the headline.

Agree on the strategy, invite relevant expertise and assign decision authority. Product can verify accuracy. Legal can evaluate risk. Sales can bring evidence about buyer response. The CMO needs the authority to make the final marketing decision.

Otherwise, the positioning becomes a seating chart. Everyone gets represented. The customer gets confused.

That’s the problem behind CMO, Clear the Room!.

For more on the leadership required to make distinctive work happen, listen to Why CMOs Need More Courage, our conversation with Coder CMO Chris Kent.

The planning meeting should give the team direction and permission to act. Try to avoid creating six new approval meetings in the process.

How can CMOs turn these decisions into an actionable plan?

The most useful page in your 2027 marketing plan might explain what won’t happen.

At TheorySF, we recommend a simple planning exercise:

Cut three things What will stop, why, and the budget or time recovered

Protect three investments Their role in growth, evidence of progress and review dates

Change one meaningful approach The hypothesis, accountable owner, resources and success criteria

The numbers force a choice. Adjust them to fit the business, but resist turning the exercise into an inventory of everything the department already does.

Take the trade-offs to leadership.

If the company wants another priority, show what it will displace. If it wants faster results, explain the investment or narrower scope required. If everything is essential, someone needs to make a decision.

Preferably before the team starts working evenings to demonstrate that arithmetic is negotiable.

A credible marketing plan makes those choices visible. It gives leadership something to commit to and the CMO something to manage against.

And yes, put AI in it.

Just make sure you’ve changed more than the hat.

Planning your next stage of growth?

TheorySF is a San Francisco brand strategy and creative agency helping B2B technology companies and challenger brands develop differentiated positioning, clearer messaging and distinctive creative campaigns.

Explore TheorySF’s brand strategy and creative services, read more Brand Theories, or hear how senior marketers approach these challenges on Marketing Mischief & Mayhem.

If your 2027 marketing plan has plenty of activity but a suspiciously familiar story, talk with TheorySF about the strategy behind it.

We’ll bring questions. You’ve probably got enough slides.

About the author: Russell Quinan is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of TheorySF and host of Marketing Mischief & Mayhem. His work focuses on brand strategy, positioning and creative marketing that helps companies stand apart and gives customers a reason to choose them.