Why Kaya 959 backs the case for continued marketing investment
Every recession produces the same instinct: when budgets tighten, marketing is the first line cut. According to Harvard Business Review’s analysis of recession-era marketing data, the evidence proves otherwise: businesses that held or grew their marketing spend through recent downturns came out of them growing 17% faster than the ones that pulled back.
For an industry that still fights the perception of being a discretionary spend, the pressure to justify a marketing budget hasn’t eased, even as the numbers make an increasingly hard case for it. Deloitte, Duke University and the American Marketing Association’s 2026 CMO Survey puts marketing budgets at roughly 9% of company revenue, in the same range businesses reserve for R&D or capital equipment.
Tumi Rabanye, Head of Marketing at Kaya 959, says: “It is oxygen to business. It is a big and important business function, not a discretionary spend to be trimmed when the numbers get tight.”
The old theory that a good product sells itself and marketing is what happens afterwards does not survive the data. SA’s banked population grew from 64% of adults in 2014 to almost 86% in 2023. That growth tracked awareness campaigns and digital-account marketing as closely as it tracked product design, and the category has only grown more crowded since: a third of consumers, according to Accenture’s South Africa Banking Consumer Study, regularly lose track of which financial products they even hold.
A study in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science found that transaction-based Net Promoter Scores alone are a weak predictor of sales growth. What predicts growth is a broader brand health measure that surveys potential customers, not just existing ones.
AI has sharpened this pressure. PwC’s 2025 Africa Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey found 64% of African workers already using AI at work, ahead of the global average. The same survey found only 35% believe more than half their current skills will still be relevant within three years. AI can gather and package data faster than any human team ever could. But it cannot turn a data point into a story a customer actually believes.
“It’s data points that give you information, and that information must be turned into usable stories and storytelling. That is the part of the job AI depends on marketers to do, not the part it replaces,” Rabanye says.
This is precisely the argument Kaya 959 has put its name behind this year, as the exclusive radio partner of the Nedbank IMC 2026, Africa’s Biggest Marketing Conference™. The conference brings together thousands of marketers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, agencies and innovators to confront exactly the pressure CMOs are under: proving the commercial case for marketing inside businesses that are still tempted to treat it as a cost line.
As exclusive radio partner, Kaya 959 is carrying that conversation beyond the conference stage through live broadcasts, presenter-led interviews and digital content, giving its 1.62 million regular listeners direct access to the CMOs and industry leaders shaping how South African brands compete, innovate and grow.
The fit is a deliberate one. The Nedbank IMC’s positioning platform, Marketing is Business®, aligns with Kaya’s belief that entertainment is serious business. Both start from the same premise that the work of holding an audience’s attention, earning its trust and converting that into commercial outcomes is not a soft skill sitting alongside the “real” business. It is the business.
Rabanye’s point about customer lock-in makes the underlying commercial logic explicit: according to Bain & Company, a five-percentage-point improvement in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%, while the probability of selling to an existing customer is approximately 60% to 70%, compared with 5% to 20% for a new prospect.
Businesses that underinvest in marketing in favour of aggressive lock-in are therefore not protecting their margins; they risk turning their offering into a “grudge purchase” that customers tolerate rather than actively choose.