‘An 18-month plan is fiction’: What 2026 marketing looks like for General Mills, HSBC and Red Bull Racing

The plan is no plan

This time last year, Nicole German, global CMO for corporate and institutional banking at HSBC, had a formula she could rely on. 70% of marketing activity would be planned in advance, with the remaining 30% held back for reactive work. Then Donald Trump returned to the White House.

“Every day there was an announcement around tariffs or taxes,” German told the audience. “There was a need for the marketing organization to really help the business get out there on what is true to our value proposition – helping our clients with knowledge, expertise and advice when they’re going through change and need resiliency.”

With global trade and supply chains dominating the agenda, any semblance of a fixed plan quickly fell apart. “Whatever we had in the plan last year went out the door for the rest of the year,” she said.

That experience has fundamentally shifted how HSBC thinks about planning. The old 70:30 split has become closer to 60:40, supported by structural changes designed to make the organisation more responsive.

“We restructured our engine to be quite agile,” German explained. “Listening to the pulse of what’s happening in the data, working close to the business, and being able to go to market quickly – particularly with content marketing across integrated channels. It’s exciting. But it’s been a real change for our team structure.”

For a global organization like HSBC, agility doesn’t come easily. “It’s a big ship to turn,” German admitted. “But we’re well on the path.”

At General Mills, head of marketing Eileen Hanna is equally skeptical of long-range planning – though for her, that’s long been the case.

“I don’t think I’ve ever done a 10-year plan. Not even a five-year plan,” she said. “Three-year plans, we look at them a little bit and go, ‘maybe.’ Having a north star for a year is really important.”

Instead, Hanna has doubled down on frequent evaluation. While annual plans still exist, they’re now supported by monthly check-ins with regional leadership to reassess priorities, performance and investment.

“What do we need to change? What are we accelerating? What are we divesting from?” she said. “We’re making decisions monthly that in the past would have felt like once-a-year moments.”

That flexibility is particularly important across Europe, where General Mills operates in vastly different economic conditions. Hanna described managing the region through a live “grid” of red and green markets, allowing her team to focus energy where it will have the greatest impact while trusting other markets to operate autonomously unless performance slips.

“You can’t be deep in the detail everywhere,” she said. “Knowing your focus areas and priority markets is critical.”

For Caroline Buckland, group director of growth marketing at Oracle Red Bull Racing, uncertainty is simply part of the job description. In elite sport, performance, regulation and external factors sit largely outside marketing’s control and make rigid planning unrealistic.

“The idea that you can plan 12 to 18 months in advance is becoming ever more fictional,” she said. “You can plan your brand intent, your priorities and what you want to achieve. But the execution has to remain fluid.”

Rather than fixed roadmaps, Buckland has focused on building decision frameworks. “If X happens, then we’ll do Y,” she explained. “It’s less about fixed routes and more about being clear on your priorities, brand truths and growth ambitions.”

What uncertainty does to media investment

That shift away from long-term certainty has had a direct impact on how marketing leaders think about media, particularly the balance between long-term brand building and short-term performance.

For Hanna, the starting point is education. “We should never underestimate how much leadership understands brand problems,” she said. “But you have to bring them on the journey.”

At General Mills, that means grounding conversations in brand health and econometric modelling during turbulent times, so decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. “Marketing shouldn’t be the easiest thing to cut,” she says. “We can [show the C-suite] we can be part of the solution. 

“Econometric modeling enables us to say, ‘This is our ROI. If you’re cutting the spend on something that’s working extremely well, you’re not going to get the returns that you’re looking for in the long term.’” 

Rather than framing spend as purely long-term or short-term, Hanna argues the answer lies in balance and focus.

“We’re putting less and less of our media spend into long-term only. We’re really balancing that long and short. So being able to say, ‘OK, we’ve got this challenge. Instead of cutting all of our budgets, why don’t we focus on some of those short-term [investments]?’”

In Europe, where budgets are smaller than in General Mills’ core US market, that means being ruthless about channel selection.

“That safety of thinking you’re spending on big budgets, on traditional media, like TV, and calling it a day with reach and frequency… no, those days are gone. I don’t have enough money to do that, nor would I do it even if I did.” 

Retail media, once dismissed, now plays a key role in driving short-term impact thanks to improved data and sophistication. At the same time, Hanna remains committed to brand building but with a sharper lens.

She’s turning her focus to “one or two channels” where she can really ensure her brands are going to cut through. “Awareness is not connection,” she said. “For 2026, I’m thinking about reach and frequency, but also experience and relevance. How are we actually connecting with people?”

At HSBC, German described a parallel shift, one driven as much by operational change as media strategy. The bank is currently undergoing a major transformation across people, process and technology. 

“It’s easy to think in broad strokes,” she said. “But really getting specific about what you’re trying to solve for – and where you can actually make an impact – is where the value is.”

That specificity is increasingly shaping channel choices. German pointed to mobile video consumption as a clear signal of where attention – and investment – should follow.

“People in Shanghai are spending five hours a day on mobile devices, three of those in video,” she said. “Whether you’re B2B or B2C, you should be overly obsessed with how you’re winning in that channel.”

Rather than doing more, HSBC is focused on doing fewer things better – backing scalable opportunities over sheer volume. “There’s pressure from the business to do more and more all the time,” German admitted. “But clarity and focus matter more than ever.”

For Buckland, the challenge is proving the value of long-term brand investment in a world obsessed with immediate returns, particularly when the impact of marketing shows up in culture before it shows up on a balance sheet.

“A lot of what we do isn’t recognized immediately at the end of a campaign,” she said. “It’s in fandom, relevance and culture.”

The solution, she argues, isn’t to abandon long-term thinking, but to get better at translating it. “We have to connect those cultural signals to business outcomes: long-term growth, loyalty, partner value.”

Transparency is key. “CFOs and CEOs don’t expect marketing to change the world,” Buckland said. “But they do expect you to be upfront about what something will deliver. And what it won’t.”