Marketing spending and effectiveness are notoriously difficult to gauge—but companies are making it even harder, a McKinsey survey suggests. This survey asked chief marketing officers and other senior executives from around the world to describe how their companies assess their marketing campaigns, make their budgets, and plan new campaigns, as well as how their plans have changed as a result of the economic crisis.¹

Many companies, the survey shows, don’t use basic best practices such as clearly allocating—or even defining—marketing spending across the whole company or regularly reviewing the results.² Further, companies typically allocate their marketing budgets based on historical allocation levels and product-level priorities, rather than campaign effectiveness or the goals of the company as a whole.

The survey results begin to quantify another bit of common wisdom: that consumer-focused companies are stronger marketers. Indeed, the results show that these types of companies are much likelier to use most of the best practices. Further, though reaction to the economic downturn is varied, consumer-focused companies are more likely than others to be planning to increase their marketing spending. And regardless of where they focus, companies that use best practices—such as ensuring that marketing spending is clearly allocated and...