Global Stability Lets Brands Shift from Discounting to Premium Value.
A Reset that Demands Action
After half a decade of turbulence, 2025 opens on firmer ground. OECD forecasts suggest global growth will stabilize at 3.2% in both 2024 and 2025, while G20 inflation is projected to fall from 6.1% in 2023 to 2.1% in 2025. The IMF places global inflation at 4.5%.
This matters for marketers because a stable environment removes the alibi of volatility. It shifts responsibility back to brand leaders: rather than hiding behind shocks, they must prove marketing drives profit. WARC’s Voice of the Marketer study, fielded September–October 2024 across more than 1,000 marketers worldwide, shows 65% expect better conditions in 2025.
With WARC forecasting ad spend to rise 8.2% to $1.15 trillion, the opportunity is clear: marketing budgets are growing, but credibility will only be sustained if brands defend margins, not just volumes.
Pricing Power As The Fifth P
The single most important marker of marketing’s strategic contribution in 2025 is whether it can protect pricing. McCain in the UK illustrates the point. The brand has invested continuously in emotional creative and distinctive assets since 2014. By late 2023, that long-term consistency drove searches for “McCain” above generic “oven chips,” cut price elasticity by 47%, and raised base sales 44%. This is evidence that loyalty, not discounting, sustains growth. IPA Effectiveness research and System1 analysis both confirm that brands in the top fifth for advertising consistency generate the largest profit and share gains.
Yet WARC’s survey reveals the structural gap: 25% of marketers report no involvement in pricing, and only 20% hold primary responsibility. This undermines the credibility of marketing as a boardroom discipline. To correct it, profit and pricing must be re-cast as the fifth “P.” Marc Pritchard of Procter & Gamble reinforces this, arguing that true customer insight must drive every lever of the mix, not just communications. Without that expansion of remit, marketers will remain tacticians.
Insight As A Profit Engine
Economic stability does not eliminate consumer caution. WARC’s survey shows 72% of marketers citing the economy as a driver of their 2025 strategy. Kroger’s 84.51° unit reports that 46% of US households are cooking at home more often, even while discretionary travel and entertainment spend climbs. This bifurcation demands sharper segmentation. Brands must identify where consumers will pay for quality and where they expect affordability.
Easypaisa in Pakistan demonstrates how behavioural insight translates into value creation: by reading pressure on household budgets, the fintech introduced micro-value services that reinforced trust. Oppo in China applied the same principle from another angle, spotting consumer frustration with missed photography moments and designing a hardware quick-capture feature that allowed a premium experience at mid-tier pricing.
These examples prove that insight is not a research function but a profit engine, moving beyond stated preferences to shape pricing, product, and positioning.
From Behavior To Synthetic Foresight
Stated preference surveys are unreliable in unstable contexts. WARC highlights renewed investment in behavioural approaches that track what consumers do, not what they claim. More advanced players are experimenting with synthetic data, creating digital twins to model future behavior. While nascent, this promises sharper foresight into price sensitivity, channel choice, and category shifts. The point is not technology for its own sake but better anticipation.
Marketers who can demonstrate they see turns before they happen will earn credibility at the highest level of corporate decision-making.
Consistency is Growth Insurance
Another lesson is brutally simple: erratic advertising corrodes pricing power. WARC cites longitudinal analysis showing that consistent brand investment builds resilience against commodity shocks. McCain’s decade-long creative consistency demonstrates that this is not theory but commercial fact. Mark Ritson calls this the “reclamation of the four Ps,” with customer insight reinforcing pricing, product, place, and promotion as a coherent system. In practice, that means marketers who continue to treat campaigns as one-off bursts will see their ability to command price eroded.
Consistency is not conservatism; it is insurance against future volatility.
Recommendations For Marketers
The economic reset is not permission to relax but a demand to perform. Marketers must first embed pricing as a central KPI. This requires moving beyond reporting reach or impressions and linking brand building directly to margin defence. It also means re-framing campaigns as continuity rather than bursts. McCain’s example shows that equity compounds only through repeated, consistent exposure.
Next, marketers must elevate insight from a tactical input to a strategic driver. That involves fusing survey data with behavioural observation and preparing for the synthetic modelling era. When Easypaisa used real-time data to design financial services for cost-sensitive households, it did more than react; it engineered loyalty. When Oppo added design features based on observed consumer frustration, it created competitive differentiation that sustained mid-tier pricing. These are lessons every board understands: invest where the consumer shows willingness to pay.
Finally, marketers must assert their role in the boardroom. If 80% of practitioners lack primary responsibility for pricing, then the discipline will continue to be marginalised.
The reset offers a platform to change that. Those who present marketing as the discipline that sustains pricing power will not just defend budgets; they will expand them.
Bottom Line
In 2025, marketing will be judged on its ability to defend price, not on its ability to buy reach.
