By Leanne Prewitt – President & Chief Executive Officer
If you’re running a business right now, you’re probably tired. I know I am.
The Supreme Court ruled 2025’s tariffs unconstitutional. The administration responded with a blanket 10 percent, then 15 percent tariff. But they’re temporary, set to expire in five months unless Congress approves them, which feels unlikely.
So here we are again: volatile, uncertain, ambiguous.
For many leaders, 2025 was a year of triage. When tariffs on Chinese goods spiked north of 150 percent, supply chains had to be rebuilt almost overnight. Contracts were renegotiated and pricing models were reworked. Entire sourcing strategies were thrown out and redrawn. No one was debating whether those moves were necessary. They were existential. And when you’re fighting existential fires, you pause what feels discretionary.
Often, that’s marketing. (Ouch.)
I don’t blame a single CEO for doing that. When cash flow is on the line, when inventory is stuck in ports, when margins evaporate in a quarter, you fix what keeps the lights on. But here’s the really unpleasant truth: we can’t afford to let 2026 look like 2025.
We cannot build organizations that spend every year in wait-and-see mode. We cannot keep reshuffling supply chains every five months and assume growth will simply restart when the dust settles. Because in most industries, the dust never really settles.
Marketing feels optional. It isn’t.
I get it. When the world is on fire, marketing can look like a “nice to have.” It’s not as urgent as sourcing or managing cost of goods. It doesn’t demand the same immediate board attention as cash flow.
When markets shift, customer behavior shifts with them, and that change shows up quickly in how people make decisions. Pricing pressure increases as companies protect margin, and competitors adjust their positioning to chase whatever advantage they can find. In that environment, going quiet may feel like the safest bet, but it often hands the narrative to someone else.
Done correctly, marketing is not about “making ads.” It is about clarifying your value when the rules change and aligning your go-to-market strategy to new realities. It’s a way to protect margin through positioning rather than discounting your way to relevance. In other words, marketing is a growth lever, not an expense line.
The real constraint is leadership bandwidth.
Most CEOs I talk to understand this intellectually but their capacity is limited. When you’re renegotiating supplier contracts, re-forecasting revenue and managing team anxiety, you simply do not have the time to simultaneously rework your brand strategy, rethink your channel mix or pressure-test your sales narrative.
So marketing stalls, not because it doesn’t matter, but because no one at the executive level has the space to lead it. And that’s where a fractional CMO model comes in.
An experienced marketing executive sitting alongside you can keep the go-to-market engine running while you handle the operational chaos. They can:
- Reevaluate positioning in light of new realities
- Adjust messaging to match buyer anxiety
- Align sales enablement to changing objections
- Protect and build brand equity while competitors go dark
You focus on stabilizing the business. Someone else focuses on ensuring it still grows.
You can’t control policy but you can control momentum.
No marketing partner can fix tariff wars. (Sorry, I wish I could.) But you can control whether your organization disappears from the market every time policy shifts. You can control whether your narrative evolves as fast as your cost structure. And whether you emerge from turbulence battered or better off.
As a business owner, I feel the same pressure you do. When things get tight, every expense is scrutinized. Including mine. (CFOs, amiright?!) I also know that if I want a different outcome next year, I cannot simply react to events. I have to keep building while others pause.
That’s the tension we are living in right now. If you’re in the middle of supply chain reshuffles and board-level uncertainty, marketing may not feel like today’s most urgent issue. I understand that. Just make sure it doesn’t become the thing you sacrificed that costs you tomorrow.