Interesting chatting to CMOs on the shifts in marketing spending during the apocalypse. The majority I’ve chatted to reflect The CMO Survey at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business which found that 30% of marketers surveyed have not experienced changes to their marketing budgets while 41.3% even reported gains and just 28.4% reported losses. On average, marketers reported a 5% increase in budgets during the pandemic and expect digital spending to grow by 4% in the next year. The top two goals? Building brand value and retaining current customers. Social media continues to be a key part of marketers’ planning. In fact, the report found that 84.2% have used social media for brand-building and 54.3% have used it for customer retention.

The nutty bit of those last two sentences IMHO is the expected impact of social on brand. I get it for customer retention but brand building, nope.