When The Data Environment Holds Marketing Back
There’s a moment many senior marketers will recognise. You’re in a planning meeting. Someone cites a number. Someone else has a different number. Half the meeting is spent debating data sources instead of making a decision. The decision, when it finally arrives, is built on a mix of compromise and gut feel rather than on clarity about what the business actually needs to do. It’s not your team, it’s your information environment, and you’re not alone. It’s something the Ipsos Marketing Anchors study, produced in partnership with Professor Mark Ritson, drawing on 1,226 practitioners across the UK, US, Canada and Australia, captures with unusual precision.
More than a training challenge
Marketing Anchors makes a compelling case for investment in marketing training, and the argument for raising the bar on capability is one the industry needs to hear.
What the data also reveals, when you look beyond the headline finding, is that the environment in which marketers operate is making it harder to apply what they know. Seven in ten marketers believe knowledge is well documented in their teams - a profession that takes its responsibilities seriously. Meanwhile, 60% report high levels of stress at work, nearly half anticipate budget pressures in the year ahead and 4 in 10 expect challenges related to AI transformation. The issue is not just capability. It is also the environment in which marketers are expected to perform.
Strong teams, constrained by their environment
Many marketers know how to read data. The harder problem is whether the environment gives them the conditions to use it. Three blockers appear consistently across the study:
1. Cross-functional misalignment
Siloed teams, competing priorities and disconnected objectives mean marketing evidence frequently fails to reach the decisions that need it. By the time the right information arrives, the choice has often already been shaped by personalities or instinct.
2. Measurement gaps
Justifying investment and proving ROI is a persistent struggle, particularly across omnichannel campaigns where attribution is genuinely complex. When measurement frameworks aren't built around the questions the business is actually asking, individual marketers carry the burden of constructing the case from scratch, each time, in a language other functions will accept.
3. Speed versus structure
Marketers describe a genuine desire for strategic clarity but find themselves navigating approval processes and sign-off layers that introduce delay without adding rigour.
These are system conditions, not individual shortcomings. And they point to a specific problem at the root of all three: the absence of a single, coherent source of truth that can be brought to the decisions that matter, quickly and with confidence. Not because the data doesn't exist. Because it isn't organised to serve decisions.
Building the Environment that Capable Teams Deserve
Closing that gap is the work of Ipsos Data Labs' Decision Clarity offer, a structured consulting engagement that starts with the decisions your organisation needs to make. By mapping where commercial choices are made, how issues are framed, and what information is genuinely required, Decision Clarity helps marketing teams build an environment where evidence reaches the right people at the right moment. The result is faster decisions, stronger influence, and a clearer line between marketing activity and commercial impact.
Find out more
The next piece goes further into where that environment typically falls short and what it takes to fix it. Or if you'd rather talk it through, Jeffrey Roberts at Ipsos Data Labs is the right person to contact.
