Marketing in the United Kingdom - statistics & facts

While brands turn to marketing to promote their products and services in an ever-increasingly competitive world, in the United Kingdom, marketing itself struggles to maintain relevance in companies' business plans. Data shows that marketing budgets of companies based in the United Kingdom will not be significantly higher in 2023 than a year earlier. The mean growth rate was estimated at roughly five percent, lower than UK's inflation rate. If anything, they will drop as the marketing share in budgets decreased in 2023. Instead, companies will move money to channels they see as generating higher return on investment or worth experimenting with. The highest increases are projected in advanced TV and connected TV, as well as social, search, and digital out-of-home. On the other hand, the highest decreases will affect print and out-of-home media, as well as digital display.

What keeps UK marketers on their toes

Marketing has become progressively more complex as consumers become increasingly demanding. Marketers struggle to understand their new core target group – the so-called Generation Z (mainly people born between 1997 and 2013), which puts steep demands on brands. They need to make a good product at a reasonable price and have an ethical or political stance that aligns with that of the Gen Z consumer. The brand and its products must also be aesthetically pleasing and excel in individuality and uniqueness. Additionally, the industry faces such challenges as the permanent process of adopting new digital technologies, tools, and platforms, marketing products outside of the UK in the post-Brexit regulatory environment, or employment-related issues.

Employment in the UK marketing sector

The number of employees in the advertising and marketing industry in the UK has not been impacted by the pandemic. In 2020, it was six percent higher than a year earlier and in 2021, it increased by another 12 percent, employing 225 thousand people. The salaries of marketing professionals in the UK vary between 28 thousand British pounds per year for a marketing executive in a medium enterprise and 143.6 pounds for a CMO at a large enterprise. The industry has quite a road ahead fighting pay gaps, the largest of which is the socioeconomic pay gap, which stood at 18.2 percent in early 2023. This signifies that marketers coming from working-class backgrounds earned 18.2 percent less than marketers from an upper-class background.

This text provides general information. Statista assumes no liability for the information given being complete or correct. Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date data than referenced in the text.
Published by Statista Research Department, Dec 19, 2023

Key insights

Top marketing challenge in the UK
Deploying brand as an enterprise-wide strategy
Mean growth of marketing budgets in the UK in 2023
5%
Mean share of marketing in company budgets in the UK in 2023
13%
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