There’s no single formula that works for every brand. Allocations depend on business model, team structure, lifecycle stage, and strategic priorities. As a general rule, marketing budgets average around 10–20% of revenue across industries, with beauty, wellness, and personal care brands typically spending toward the higher end of that range.
As you plan for the year ahead, here are a few guiding principles to help shape a budget that reflects both best practice and your brand’s unique growth goals.
The D2C vs. FMCG Split
For brands operating in retail, the classic model is the 55/35/10 split:
* 55% working media
* 35% shopper activation and trade partner spend
* 10% non-working costs like creative production and agency fees.
That 35% chunk covers co-op spend with retailers, in-store displays, and promotional programs that major stockists demand, to support sell-through.
But if you're a D2C brand, that model doesn't apply. Instead, D2C brands typically allocate
* 70-85% to working media
* 10-20% to content and creative production
* 5-10% to overheads like analytics tools and agency support.
The advantage for D2C brands is that more of your budget goes directly toward customer acquisition. But with that in mind, you need high-quality content and creative to convert efficiently, which means that 10 or even up to 20% invested in the production bucket can't be neglected.
The reality is that budget allocation involves many "it depends" situations, and agency fees are a good example of that. Sometimes agency costs effectively replace operational headcount, whether that's because the agency brings specialized skills your internal team doesn't have, or because hiring a full-time person just doesn't make sense for the workload. In those cases, agency fees might sit outside the percentage splits above, since they're functioning more like staffing costs than traditional marketing spend.
Brand Building vs. Performance
It’s easy to track where the money goes, but the harder question is, what is it meant to achieve? That’s where the 60/40 rule comes in. Developed by Les Binet and Peter Field, it suggests that roughly 60% of marketing efforts should go toward long-term brand building and 40% toward short-term sales activation.
In practice, that means your media budget should work on two levels. Some campaigns build awareness and emotional connection, the 60%. Where as others drive immediate action, the 40%. The same applies to trade spend. Some retailer programs build brand presence, others push quick sell-through.
What This Means for the Year Ahead
As brands head into a new planning cycle, the question isn’t just how much to spend, but how to spend it wisely. Many are rethinking the balance between driving immediate sales and building lasting brand strength.
The challenge is that most budgets lean too far one way. Early-stage brands often chase quick wins to keep cash flowing. Established brands, under pressure to meet targets, trim brand investment to protect margins. In both cases, short-term thinking erodes long-term equity, and that’s what makes future marketing less efficient and more expensive.
After the pandemic, this short-term bias only deepened as brands shifted spend toward performance channels because they’re easier to measure. But the data tells a different story. Only 5% of your category is ready to buy right now. The other 95% aren’t in-market yet. Brand building is what ensures they’ll think of you first when they are.
When your brand foundations are sharp, you know what to say, who to say it to, and where it will actually move the needle.
Without that clarity, you’re just reacting to metrics instead of shaping momentum.
As you plan for 2026, don't forget to focus on brand clarity, rather than just channels. Because the brands that stay top of mind are the ones that know exactly what they stand for and communicate it with consistency. If you'd like to focus on bringing more clarity to your brand click here to to book a call.
Author: Effie Asafu-Adjaye
Effie Asafu-Adjaye is the Founder of Beautiful Sparks. Beautiful Sparks helps beauty and fashion businesses get more fanatics in love with their brands, by refining their brand strategy, messaging, branding, content storytelling, and community-building strategy. Read more about Effie here. Linkedin.
