Nearly Half Of B2B Marketing Leaders Believe Marketing’s Purpose Is Viewed Incorrectly This graphic compares how 89 B2B marketing leaders and marketing budget decision-makers responding to Forrester’s B2B Marketing Online Community Q2 Marketing Sentiment Survey, April 2026 said they think nonmarketers in their organization view the marketing function and how they think it should be viewed.

Forrester’s B2B Marketing Online Community AI Marketing Personas Survey, July 2026 was fielded to 70 B2B marketing leaders and asked questions related to AI for three B2B marketing personas: portfolio and product marketing, demand marketing, and revenue operations. This survey was fielded in July, 2026. Forrester’s B2B Marketing Online Community is a mixed methodology research program of B2B marketing leaders.

We have identified the following use cases as extended: market awareness amplification, marketing and demand program enablement, marketing funds/incentives management, marketing management: to partners, marketing management: with partners, marketing management: for partners, opportunity lifecycle management, and services marketplace (see Figure 4).

Figure 1 B2B Marketers Prioritize Demand Programs Forrester defines six subfunctions for B2B marketing programs: brand and communications, customer experience, demand/frontline marketing, marketing operations, partner ecosystem/channel marketing, and portfolio and product marketing. Not all organizations will have every subfunction.

Field Marketing Must Have A Prominent Role In Marketing Program Planning

Base: 621 B2B marketing budget decision-makers. Source: Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2026. Figure 1 Technology Investment Is Both Fixed And Variable Forrester’s B2B Marketing Online Community Budgets Survey, April 2026 provides further context on marketing technology investment.

Figure 1 B2C Marketing Executives: Use Forrester To Power Your Growth Agenda There are three ways to maximize Forrester’s B2C Marketing Executives service to improve marketing: Assess your current state to identify priority needs. The first step is to take stock of your current marketing capabilities, identify gaps, and build a roadmap to prime your marketing organization to deliver growth; you can use The Forrester B2C Marketing Capabilities Assessment for this.

The first perspective divides the total marketing budget into marketing programs, marketing personnel, and marketing technology. The second perspective divides the total marketing budget into global/central marketing, regional marketing, and business unit marketing. Figure 1 Align B2B Marketing Program Investments With Three Different Views Forrester’s B2B marketing benchmark methodology recommends three views for the programs budget (see Figure 2).

The regional portfolio marketing manager acts as a subject matter expert on the needs of the region — often across multiple offerings — and a bridge between global marketing and regional marketing and sales. This role may report to regional leadership with a dotted line to the global portfolio marketing function, or vice versa.

MAP And ABM Convergence Is Redefining The Core B2B Marketing Platform