Over the past two years, we've seen a significant shift in the environment marketing leaders are operating in.
Across large organisations, restructures, redundancies and tighter controls on permanent headcount have become increasingly familiar. In Australia, ABS data shows that 257,900 people were retrenched in the 12 months to February 2026.
For marketing leaders, however, reducing the size of a team rarely results in an equivalent reduction in what the organisation expects marketing to deliver.
The strategy is still there. The annual marketing plan is still there. Campaigns, content, digital channels, customer programs, stakeholder requirements and major projects all continue.
In many cases, expectations are actually increasing.
Businesses are looking for growth. Customer expectations continue to change. AI transformation has created an entirely new agenda. And marketing leaders are being asked to demonstrate greater commercial accountability while finding new efficiencies at the same time.
That combination is creating a significant challenge for enterprise marketing teams.
The growing gap between resources and expectations
The numbers reinforce what many marketing leaders are experiencing.
Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey, covering more than 400 CMOs and marketing leaders predominantly from organisations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, found that 59% believed they did not have sufficient budget to execute their strategy.
At the same time, 39% of CMOs were looking to reduce spending on labour, with the leading cost-saving measures including simplifying overlapping roles and reducing total headcount.
Marketing budgets averaged 7.7% of company revenue, unchanged from the previous year. Before the pandemic, average marketing budgets represented 11.2% of company revenue, with the average across the five years following the pandemic falling to 8.1%.
The combination tells an important story.
Marketing leaders are being asked to operate with tighter budgets and, in many cases, fewer people, while the expectations placed on the function continue to grow.
By 2026, another challenge had become increasingly apparent. Gartner found that labour's share of marketing budgets had increased from 21.9% in 2025 to 24.5% in 2026. At the same time, 38% of CMOs identified a lack of internal AI expertise and talent as the leading barrier to achieving AI-driven efficiency.
So the issue isn't simply about reducing costs or headcount. Organisations still need experienced people and increasingly need access to new capabilities.
Headcount freezes add another layer
Redundancies are only part of the resourcing challenge.
For many marketing leaders we speak with, headcount freezes can be equally difficult to navigate.
A position becomes vacant and approval isn't given to replace it. A new project creates a requirement for additional expertise, but there is no permanent headcount available. Someone takes extended leave and the rest of the team is expected to absorb their responsibilities.
In other cases, the marketing strategy itself has evolved and the team needs capabilities that weren't required when the original structure was designed.
None of these situations necessarily justify another permanent employee, and in many organisations, adding one isn't currently an option anyway.
But the work still needs to be delivered.
That can leave marketing leaders caught between the structure they're allowed to have and the capability they actually need.
The impact on the people who remain
The natural response to having fewer resources is often to redistribute the work across the existing team.
For a period of time, that can work.
But as a longer-term operating model, it creates challenges.
Experienced marketing people can find themselves spending increasing amounts of time on execution because there simply isn't anyone else available to do it. Strategic projects can move more slowly. Specialist work gets pushed towards generalists. Some initiatives are continually moved down the priority list.
The marketing leader can also become the person constantly deciding what won't get done.
This isn't necessarily a reflection of the capability of the internal team. In many cases, the team is highly capable.
Sometimes it's simply a capacity problem. In other situations, it's a capability problem. And increasingly, it's both.
Does every capability need to sit permanently inside the organisation?
The changes of the past two years raise a broader question about how enterprise marketing functions should be structured.
Traditionally, building capability meant building headcount. If a marketing function required additional expertise, the default response was often to create a position, recruit someone and bring that capability permanently into the organisation.
That approach still makes sense for many roles. But it doesn't necessarily make sense for every requirement.
A marketing team might need an experienced marketer for two or three days each week. It may need additional capacity for six months. A transformation project might require a particular capability for a defined period. Someone may be needed to cover extended leave.
Or the organisation may simply need additional experienced people while permanent headcount remains frozen.
This is where marketing can increasingly adopt an approach that is already well established across other corporate functions: managed services.
A more flexible layer around the internal marketing team
At The Marketing Room, we see this as complementary to internal marketing teams, rather than a replacement for them.
The internal team remains at the centre of the marketing function. Around that team, however, organisations can build a flexible layer of experienced marketing capability that can expand and contract as requirements change.
Through a Managed Marketing Services Provider model, experienced marketers can work within an organisation for one, two or three days a week, becoming part of the team and working within its systems, priorities and culture.
"Our model is built around giving both businesses and marketers a better way to work," says Tahnee Sharp, Founder of The Marketing Room. Importantly, that flexible layer doesn't operate in isolation.
Behind the individual marketer sits broader specialist capability, AI-enabled ways of working, delivery support and access to a wider marketing network. Group CEO Jonathan Sharp, whose remit spans the business's growth across partnerships, expansion and acquisition, has consistently pointed to this as the link that matters: marketing capability connected to sales and commercial strategy, not managed as an isolated function.
For the marketing leader, this creates another resourcing option between adding permanent headcount and sending the work completely outside the organisation to an agency.
It can also address both sides of the resourcing challenge.
Where the issue is capacity, experienced marketers can provide additional support to an overstretched team.
Where the issue is capability, specific expertise can be introduced without permanently changing the organisational structure.
And when the requirement changes, the resource can change with it.
Rethinking what an enterprise marketing team looks like
The events of the past two years may ultimately accelerate a change that was already underway.
The modern marketing function doesn't necessarily need to own every capability permanently.
Instead, organisations can maintain a strong internal team while surrounding it with a flexible ecosystem of experienced people, technology and specialist expertise that expands and contracts with the needs of the business.
For marketing leaders dealing with reduced teams, headcount freezes and increasing expectations, that flexibility provides another way to think about resourcing.
The objective shouldn't be to ask existing teams to simply keep doing more with less.
It should be to give marketing leaders access to the people and capability they need to deliver, without every change in requirement needing to become another permanent position. It's a philosophy The Marketing Room sums up in five words: "Effectiveness is greater than volume."
Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Job Mobility, February 2026. Gartner, 2025 CMO Spend Survey. Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend research.
