The Marketing Week Podcast: How to address marketing’s ‘culture of short-termism’ 

In the latest episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, we’re discussing why short-termism is becoming an even bigger issue for brands and what marketers can do to mitigate it.  

Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness survey, in partnership with Kantar and Google, reveals 63.1% of marketers say their business has increased its focus on short-term activity over the past 12 months.

Just 17.3% strongly agree their business invests sufficiently in long-term brand health, while more than half (52.9%) believe their campaigns are too focused on performance or sales. 

The barriers to investing in brand range from a lack of data and budget, to scepticism from leadership and a lack of agreed metrics. As a result, just 11.1% of marketers claim to be able to comprehensively demonstrate the effect of brand marketing and its overall business contribution. 

Only tenth of marketers ‘very successful’ at demonstrating brand impact

To dig into these stats, host Charlotte Rogers, deputy managing editor and head of insight at Marketing Week, is joined by senior reporter Niamh Carroll, Rhea Fox, marketing director for gift experiences at Moonpig Group, and Pete Markey, former Boots CMO and Marketing Week Marketer of the Year 2023.  

“The fastest way to trade your way out of something is to do something through offers, deals, promos and performance media,” says Markey.

“It is often the thing you go to first, but there is the inherent danger that you’re not then looking at the long term, you’re just dealing with your everyday, but no board is patient enough to go: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got this. We’ll solve it in six months time.’

“Performance media is the only thing that says: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got this – we’ll solve it in six minutes time.’”  

Ahead of the next episode in Marketing Week’s regular series, find The Marketing Week Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Acast.