You spent three weeks with your agency strategist building it. Allocated every line item. Got sign-off. Went into December feeling like you had a plan for the new year.

It’s now February. You’re about to start the new financial year. And your CEO has just told you to cut 25%.

Not the targets. Just the budget.

The strategy deck is still open on your second screen. The one with the bold positioning statement and the distinctive brand voice and the 12-month rollout plan. It was built for the budget you had in November.

Nobody is telling you to throw it out. They’re just telling you to deliver it with less.

You’re not alone in this. According to Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, 59% of marketing leaders say they don’t have sufficient budget to execute their strategy. Marketing budgets have dropped from 11% of company revenue before the pandemic to 7.7% today and haven’t recovered. The February budget cut has become so common it almost has its own season.

But here’s what nobody tells you when they hand back the red-penned spreadsheet: the problem isn’t the cut. The problem is that the strategy you’re holding was never designed to be executed on a reduced budget. It was designed for a completely different game.

2 strategies, 2 different games

Most brand strategies, the well-researched, beautifully designed kind, are built on big brand logic.

Big brands don’t research how customers already talk about their problems. They decide how customers should talk about their problems. Then they spend millions repeating that message until it becomes the default. They can afford to be distinctive, emotive, even a little weird. They create category language from scratch because they have the resources to make it stick over time.

A strategist’s job in that world isn’t to find what makes someone buy today. It’s to craft something that will land after you’ve repeated it enough times.

That’s a brilliant approach. With the right budget behind it.

But when 25% disappears overnight, that same strategy becomes almost impossible to execute. You can’t blast the message until it sticks. You can’t wait 18 months to see if the positioning takes hold. So it sits in a deck. Beautifully designed. Not executable. And you sit in the middle, being asked to close the gap between the two.

The execution model that actually fits your budget

A reduced budget doesn’t mean a reduced outcome. It means a different execution — one that, done right, can produce faster results than the original plan.

Instead of teaching the market a new language, you find the language the market is already using.

Say you’re marketing a new treatment for menstrual pain. You’ve got R15,000 left in your digital media campaign budget after the cuts. You could run with the strategy deck: “Revolutionary dysmenorrhea relief using advanced targeted therapy.”

Or you could spend an afternoon on Reddit, social media groups, support tickets, review sites, anywhere your customers are describing their own problem in their own words and find them saying: “It feels like my uterus is trying to climb out of my body.”

Which one do you use?

The second one. Every single time. Because when someone sees that phrase in your communication, they don’t think “interesting product.” They think “Holy shit, someone can help me. Here is my money.”

That’s immediate recognition. Instant relevance. And with a cut budget, that’s exactly what you need.

This isn’t a lesser strategy. It’s a smarter one for the reality you’re now in. You’re not creating a new road. You’re finding the road that already exists and putting up better signs.

What to do with the strategy deck

You still need the document. The positioning, the ICP, the messaging framework — none of that gets thrown out. What changes is where the language comes from and how quickly you move from strategy to result.

Instead of generating new language, you extract it. You mine the internet, review sites, community forums, sales call transcripts, support tickets, for the exact words your customers already use to describe their problem. Then you use those words as your entry point into the market.

The strategy document becomes a living, testable framework rather than a fixed positioning statement. You take three or four different message angles — different ways of describing the problem you solve — and you put them in front of real people. Not to polish them. To find out which one lands.

Your cut budget doesn’t care about brand elegance. It needs to know, really fast, which version of your story makes someone say “that’s exactly my problem.” The only way to know is to test, not theorize.

That’s the uncomfortable part: you can’t fall in love with any single version of your messaging yet. But it’s also where the opportunity is. Most of your competitors are still trying to execute the old strategy on the old budget. If you adopt this new approach you’re playing a faster, sharper game.

The conversation most agencies won’t have with you

The reason your strategy doesn’t come with a budget-cut contingency is that agency experience is built on new language creation. The playbook they know, bold positioning, distinctive brand voice, long-term category building, is genuinely excellent. For companies with the budget to execute it over time.

The problem is the same document gets handed to marketing teams whose budgets get cut in February, and nobody flags that it needs to change. So the strategy sits unused, the targets don’t move, and the marketing manager carries the gap.

Gartner found that 22% of CMOs say AI has already reduced their reliance on external agencies for strategy and creative. The shift is already happening, marketing teams are finding ways to build rigorous, executable strategies that match their actual budgets, not the ones that got approved in November.

What a budget-right execution actually looks like

A strategy built for your current reality should give you messaging pulled from real customer language rather than invented positioning, three to four testable angles on your core value proposition, a clear way of knowing what’s working within weeks rather than quarters, and the foundation to scale into the bigger brand strategy when budgets allow.

The goal isn’t to lower your standards. It’s to change the game you’re playing — from one that requires resources you no longer have, to one that rewards speed, relevance, and knowing exactly how your customers describe their own pain.

Your budget got cut in February. Your strategy needs to change with it.

That’s adapting. And right now, it’s the only way to hit the targets that didn’t get cut.