• by Jamie Olson , Op-Ed Contributor, 9 hours ago

Ask most marketing leaders where their next media dollar should go, and they’ll have an answer. Ask sales where to put the next trade dollar, and they will, too. Commerce teams can tell you which retail media investments are delivering the strongest returns. 

But ask a slightly different question: Where should the company’s next dollar go?

That answer gets a lot harder. 

As companies head into FY27 planning, I think it’s one of the most important questions growth leaders can ask. Gartner reports that marketing budgets average just 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, 18% below their level four years ago, while expectations for growth remain high. 

There simply isn’t a lot of new money coming. Which means making the dollars we already have work harder matters more than ever. 

The good news is that companies have become incredibly sophisticated at optimizing individual areas of investment. Marketing has media mix modeling, attribution, and brand measurement. Sales has trade promotion and retailer performance data. Commerce has ROAS, conversion, and new-to-brand metrics. 

All those tools are valuable. But optimizing each part of the system doesn’t necessarily optimize the whole. 

A strong retail media ROAS can tell you an investment performed efficiently. What it can’t necessarily tell you is whether the company’s next $500,000 would create more growth there than in brand building, shopper marketing, trade support, or expanding distribution. 

That’s the bigger challenge. It’s not just an optimization problem. It’s an allocation problem. And solving it requires us to connect decisions that have traditionally been made separately.

Brand building and sales activation aren’t competing agendas. They’re different levers against the same growth objective. Strong brands make commerce investments work harder, and every commerce interaction is an opportunity to strengthen the brand. 

So, the question shouldn’t be which matters more. It should be: What does the business need most right now, and which combination of investments will get us there?

Yet many organizations still plan in functional lanes. Marketing, sales, and commerce each build individual plans, and each team manages a budget and its own measures of success. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Different functions should own different metrics and bring different expertise to the table.

The problem comes when separate metrics lead to separate definitions of growth. A company can have an efficient media plan, a productive trade program, and a high-performing retail media campaign and still not make the best decisions about its total commercial investment. 

FY27 planning gives leadership teams an opportunity to approach the process differently. Instead of starting with “How much should marketing get?” or “What should we spend with this retailer?” start one level higher: What are we trying to grow?

Get clear on that first. Then determine which combination of investments has the greatest opportunity to move the business forward. Because growth doesn’t happen in neat functional lanes. 

Brand marketing creates demand. Retail, shopper, and commerce capture it. Sales and trade help convert it. Insights and analytics help us understand what happened, what we learned, and what we should do next. 

The goal isn’t to erase the lines between these disciplines. It’s to connect them around a shared growth objective.

That means looking across investments together and continually asking: What happened? What did we learn? What should we change? And where should we invest next? 

It also doesn’t mean every dollar can, or should, be perfectly attributed. Brand building and near-term conversion play different roles, and short-term ROI shouldn’t dictate every decision. The goal isn’t one metric. It’s one definition of growth. 

So as FY27 planning begins, I’d encourage leadership teams to try a simple exercise. Imagine the company found one additional dollar to invest tomorrow. Who decides where it goes? 

If the answer depends primarily on whose budget the dollar belongs to, there’s probably an opportunity hiding in plain sight. Because the next competitive advantage may not come from finding another pool of money. It may come from getting much better at deciding where the next dollar goes.