Why Marketing Teams Are Growing Slower Than the Rest of the Enterprise
New data from 17 global Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs) companies reveals a growing disconnect between company growth and marketing headcount
For decades, marketing has been positioned as the growth driver: the team responsible for building brands, generating demand, and shaping the customer experience of a business.
But something’s shifting.
While global organisations continue to scale by adding new teams, new capabilities, and new markets, marketing is growing at a noticeably slower pace. Headcount is increasing, but not at a fast enough rate. Budgets are under pressure, and influence is getting spread thin across functions.
It’s a pattern we’ve noticed at REBORRN, working with Chief Marketing Officers and cross-functional leaders trying to do more with leaner teams. So, we decided to dig into the numbers.
Our Co-Founder Giorgos Vareloglou recently shared some of this research on LinkedIn. Below is a slightly extended version, providing more context for those who want to better understand what the data reveals and what it might mean for the future of marketing.
The data
We analysed 17 multinational CPGs, the kind with global footprints, complex operations, and mature marketing teams. Here’s what the data told us: While the overall company headcount increased by 11.5% over the past year, the marketing headcount increased by just 4.3%.
Simply put? Marketing is growing 2.7 times slower than the rest of the business.
And that’s not just a stat, it’s a signal. One that raises bigger questions about how the function is evolving inside large enterprises.
Marketing isn’t shrinking. But it is falling behind.
This isn’t a story of decline. Marketing remains a heavyweight and is one of the largest functions across most organisations, ranking right behind Sales and Operations. In the companies we studied, marketing accounted for 91,000 out of 1.3 million employees, roughly 7% of the total workforce.
So yes, marketing is still growing. That 4.3% increase is real. But when you zoom out, the pace is underwhelming. And in relative terms, it’s a clear slowdown, especially when compared to other functions that are gaining ground fast.
What’s behind the slowdown?
Our analysis pointed to a few interlinked factors that help explain the trend:
1. Automation is doing what it was designed to do: Marketing was one of the first functions to feel the impact of automation and AI. Tasks like campaign reporting, data analysis, and performance optimisation, things that once required whole teams, can now be handled by smarter tools, at speed and scale.
This doesn’t mean marketers are being replaced. But it does mean fewer people are needed to deliver the same outcomes.
2. The post-COVID hiring surge is settling: In the aftermath of the pandemic, many companies ramped up hiring across the board, and marketing rode that wave.
But now, the tide is shifting. According to the CMO Survey, marketing headcount growth dropped from 12% in 2021 to just 3.4% in 2022. The message? Companies are prioritising flexibility over scale and recalibrating their org charts accordingly.
3. Marketing is being restructured, not reduced: This is a structural shift, not just a numerical one.
Rather than expanding large, centralised departments, many organisations are embedding marketing into cross-functional squads, especially in areas where it overlaps with Product, Tech, and Customer Experience.
The function is still there. It’s just showing up differently.
Meanwhile, other functions are accelerating.
Interestingly, while marketing’s growth slows, other areas are speeding up, and they offer a glimpse into where companies are placing their bets:
Learning & Development is growing more than twice as fast as the enterprise average. With AI changing the nature of work, companies are investing heavily in upskilling and internal capability building.
Design, Media, and Comms functions are booming. The shift towards in-house creative and programmatic media buying is well underway.
Administrative Support is also on the rise, likely a response to the increased prevalence of hybrid teams and the coordination challenges that accompany them.
Taken together, these shifts reveal a broader reallocation of investment, away from sheer headcount and toward agility, adaptability, and internal expertise.
What does this mean for marketing leaders?
The takeaway isn’t that marketing is being sidelined. It’s that expectations have changed, and the rules of the game have moved on.
There’s now a higher premium on integration, speed, and sharp decision-making. Marketing leaders are being asked to deliver more with leaner teams, smarter systems, and a tighter focus.
That places pressure, but also opportunity, on where and how to deploy your resources. It’s about choosing high-leverage areas: brand, customer insight, experimentation, and performance. The work that drives compounding value.
So maybe the real question isn’t: How do we grow the team?
Maybe it’s: How do we grow the impact of the team we’ve already got?