If marketing, customer experience (CX), and digital leaders have learned anything in the past year, it’s mastering the art of finessing how to plan and execute — for growth! — under highly fluid conditions. Since we first published Forrester’s Leading Through Volatility series a year ago, consumer leaders have steered their organizations through rapid evolution across geopolitical events, technology (hello, agentic commerce and artificial general intelligence), role evolution (good to meet you, AI CMO), and consumer sentiment.

Our updated Consumer Marketing, CX, And Digital Leaders: How To Thrive Through Volatility In 2026 (US) report is filled with research and resources for leaders like you. That said, our bottom-line advice is steadfast: Equal doses of discipline and creativity will keep your resources and investments on course.

What does this look like? Start by gathering your counterparts to jointly reaffirm the commitment to:

  • Your brand. Marketing and CX are crucial to shaping decisions by bringing to the table current market knowledge (think consumers, customers, competitors, partners, regulation, trends, etc.). With those insights, clarify your brand’s value proposition: Which of the four dimensions of value (economic, functional, experiential, symbolic) are true to your brand in 2026? Rerun your analysis of the five levers of Forrester’s revenue growth framework for your organization. And analyze your place — and the drivers behind — Forrester’s Brand Experience Index for both customers and noncustomers.
  • Your customers. It’s your opportunity to do (far) better than so many brands globally that seem asleep at the CX wheel. In 2025, US and Canadian consumer perceptions of CX quality dropped to an all-time low, per Forrester’s Customer Experience Index. Use both structured and unstructured data, including zero-party data, to build your segments and personas. Tap emerging resources such as synthetic data and AI-moderated customer interviews to lend further depth. Use customer research to keep your finger on the pulse of what value your customers want, and from that, continually calibrate your value sweet spot.
  • Your priorities. Champion the customer — even if you don’t feel you have the right set of customer and marketing analytics tools to produce and execute insights (like roughly half of B2C marketing decision-makers tell us). Fill common gaps in CX fundamentals by using Forrester’s CX Prioritization Modeling Tool to assess CX projects based on criteria such as customer impact, business impact, feasibility, risk, and ROI. And keep that five-year plan as guidance but not an edict: Your organization must first and foremost become adaptive at its core with the employee experience in the center. Think in terms of dynamic roadmaps, decision making capabilities that let you adjust quickly, and a culture that promotes exploration, iteration, and effective measurement.

As a consumer business leader, you’ll step up to guide your organization to:

  • Recommit to disciplined, “always-on” scenario planning and decision-making. That continuous planning structure you set up a year ago with your finance, tech, and product counterparts: stay with it — but it’s likely time to revisit and refine based on your collective experience since. During scenario planning and revisions, continually go back to your brand, customers, and priorities. And look up and out: What can you learn from other organizations across the globe that have come up with practical, creative solutions during uncertainty?
  • Get creative with low-cost innovation and fast experimentation that move the needle. Shoestring CX and consumer research methods; AI for effective task improvement; always tapping internal creativity — these are just some of the ways that help organizations adapt, find new opportunities, and, yes, GROW.
  • Level up your communication game — internally and externally. Storytelling is crucial to success — and is also an art. Find the right storytellers (hint: It’s not just your CEO) to communicate with internal and external stakeholders about different topics and at different times. Revise your communication plan based on your experience over the past year, communicate clearly, layer in empathy — and listen to both customers and employees with a willingness to learn and take action.

There’s (much) more in this research to guide you in 2026. If you’re a Forrester client, book time with our analysts to talk through your specific situation and questions. Not yet a client? Let us know and we’ll be happy to talk further.