The study of 250 UK senior marketing and insight leaders at consumer goods businesses explored why organisations continue to rely on price promotions and how they assess their effectiveness.

According to the research, spending on price promotions now exceeds investment in paid media advertising, making promotions the biggest component of marketing spend.

While most ( 75%) participants were unable to estimate their percentage of profitable promotions across the previous year, 82% of participants believed their most recent promotion was profitable. Over 60% of those, however, based their judgements on personal judgement or partial analysis, not event-level profit-and-loss measurement.

The study also found that 76% of surveyed marketers repeat promotions even when they have not assessed them for profitability, while 81% evaluate promotions over periods of less than 13 weeks, which the research suggests may be too short to identify longer-term effects.

Additionally, 91% of marketers reported that it would be ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’ to move investment from price promotions into brand advertising if it were shown to be more profitable in the long term, and 68% said they would prefer to run fewer promotions.

The IPA announced the results of the research at its Effectiveness Conference on Wednesday 7th October.

Dom Boyd, global chief strategy officer, Kantar, said: "Brands are using promotions because they want to drive profit and revenue growth. But what we see is that when it comes to actually delivering that profit and revenue, most brands have a blind spot. Many are measuring promotions on gut feel or partial analysis, not really knowing what the impact on profit is, and then repeating the cycle."

Les Binet, visiting professor, Ravensbourne University, said: "Price promotions are like class A drugs: expensive, dangerous and addictive. Yes, they give you an immediate volume high. But the high wears off quickly. Sales slump as soon as the offer ends and soon you need another fix. The opportunity is to identify which promotions lose money, cut them out, and reinvest the money in brand advertising."

To address the issue of over-reliance on promotions, the research recommended: improving marketing training; learning promotional best practice; using econometrics; measuring both short and long-term effects; assessing pricing power; and reinvesting money from ineffective promotions into brand-building.

Laurence Green, director of effectiveness, IPA said the research "reinforces the importance of evaluating marketing activity through the lens of profitability and long-term effectiveness, rather than short-term sales uplift alone".

Methodology

Censuswide conducted the research between 18^th and 26^th August 2026 among 250 senior marketing ( 60%) and insight ( 40%) leaders working at UK consumer goods businesses.

Respondents included C-suite executives ( 71%), vice-presidents ( 18%), directors ( 9%) and heads of department ( 2%), spanning food and drink ( 55%), durables ( 25%) and other consumer goods categories ( 20%).

Respondents were selected because they play a significant role in promotional decision-making, with 97% influencing promotion type, timing or discount level and 94% having planned, approved, evaluated or reviewed the results of a significant promotion within the previous 12 months.