The battle between finance and marketing is a tale as old as time. The numbers usually win, because the savings from cutting marketing arrive this quarter and the cost of cutting it doesn't arrive for years. In 2026, with tariffs and slower deal cycles tightening the squeeze, marketing, as ever, is among the first to feel it. Heads go down and programmes stall. The conversation shifts from putting the spend to use to defending it.
And we get it. A large part of any B2B marketer's job is, on a good day, justifying the discipline to a sceptical CFO. In a bad year that fight gets exhausting, and the day-by-day attitude takes over. But the reality is that the companies that emerged from past downturns ahead of their rivals were not the ones playing defence.
The survivors did both
In 2010, Harvard Business Review's Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria, and Franz Wohlgezogen published their study of 4,700 public companies across three recessions: 1980 to 1982, 1990 to 1991, and 2000 to 2002. They found that roughly 9% of those companies emerged from the downturn outperforming their industry by 10% or more on sales and profit growth. The 9% were not the most ruthless cutters, and they were not the bravest spenders. They did both: trimmed costs hard on operations, and kept investing in the levers that drive recovery, with marketing chief among them. All-out defence and all-out offence both lost ground. The companies in between leaned forward and won.
For marketing teams, leaning forward is not about spending more just for the sake of it. It's about doing the work that pays dividends later, while competitors are too careful to bother or even try. It's not the most glamorous job but it's vital to a company's success. Reputation is harder to defend once it has slipped. The stories that carry a brand through recovery are written before the recovery arrives.
Figma didn't hunker down
The cleanest recent example is Figma. In December 2023, the company's $20bn acquisition by Adobe collapsed under regulatory pressure in the UK and EU. The obvious move was to retrench and let the noise die down, which is what a lot of B2B leaders did when the broader SaaS pullback hit. Figma did the opposite. With the $1bn termination fee in the bank, it pushed harder on product. By June 2024, 8,000 designers were filling the Moscone Center for Config, where Figma unveiled a new AI suite, a redesigned interface, and Figma Slides. The signal to customers was that the company was independent, and very much not for sale on anyone else's terms.
By July 2025, Figma had listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares priced at $33 opened at $85 and closed their first day at $115.50, valuing the company at around $47bn on debut. Adobe had been willing to pay $20bn. The SaaS sector has reset since, but the strategic outcome held: the company Adobe tried to absorb came back independent and in charge of its own story.
The moral of the story is that Figma's leadership treated a moment of acute uncertainty as the time to step forward, not back. The harder work, of deciding what the company stood for and how to tell that story, was done long before the deal collapsed. That's what made the bigger move possible, and it's the work that decides who comes out ahead.
Marketers are fundamental to recovery. Don't let anyone tell you different.