The Confidence Gap

In Q1 2026, we partnered with RivoLabs to run a quantitative survey across the UK, US, Australia, and Croatia. The goal was simple: understand the most important and least satisfied challenges marketers face when planning, creating, and scaling content. We surveyed active marketing professionals - from CMOs and Digital Directors to Brand Managers and Creative Leads - working across agencies (51%) and in-house brand teams (41%).

The findings challenge a lot of the conventional thinking about what marketers need next.

When we mapped importance against satisfaction across every area of the content workflow, two gaps stood out above everything else.

Quality-supporting production workflows had the largest unmet need in the entire study, with a gap of +0.36. Creating high-quality visuals and messaging scored 4.31 out of 5 on importance - nearly 90% of respondents rated it "very" or "extremely" important. But satisfaction with the workflows that support quality lagged meaningfully behind.

Collaboration and approval efficiency came in second at +0.35. Teams rated it as highly important (4.02), yet satisfaction with speed of execution sat at just 3.67.

What's notable is what didn't show up as a major gap. AI in workflows actually had a negative gap (-0.21) - meaning satisfaction slightly exceeded importance. Marketers aren't crying out for more AI. They're struggling with something more fundamental.

The data shows something counterintuitive: quality doesn't break down because teams lack creative skill. It breaks down because they're forced to operate with incomplete context, fragmented tools, and compressed timelines.

Respondents described compromising on quality when approvals are delayed, when insights arrive late, or when production must be rushed to meet deadlines. As one respondent put it: quality is non-negotiable, but the way teams work makes it hard to maintain consistently.

The implication is significant. Quality is a workflow and decision-support problem, not simply a creative execution problem. Teams know what good looks like — they just can't reliably produce it under the conditions they work in.

Approval friction emerged as the second-largest pain point, but the qualitative responses revealed something important about why.

The friction isn't about too many stakeholders or too many steps. It's about misaligned expectations, unclear success criteria, and lost context between teams. When people aren't aligned on what success looks like at the start, feedback loops multiply. Context gets lost between handoffs. Speed suffers not because the process is slow, but because the foundation is weak.

This was especially pronounced in agency contexts and in the UK market, where client-facing approval dynamics add additional layers of complexity.

Here's where the data gets particularly interesting for anyone building strategy or planning content.

Staying on top of insights scored 4.12 on importance - 85% of respondents rated it as important to their role. But ease of staying ahead of market trends scored just 3.01, and confidence in the accuracy and timeliness of trend insights was only 3.51.

That combination - high importance, low ease, moderate confidence - creates what the research identifies as a structural tension. Marketers care deeply about market insights, but don't feel fully in control of them. The result is hesitation, risk aversion, and downstream inefficiency.

Respondents frequently framed market insights as a source of uncertainty rather than inspiration. The fear of investing time and resources into something that turns out to be noise is real, and it shapes behaviour all the way through the workflow — from cautious ideation to conservative creative choices to slower approvals.

And it varies meaningfully by role. Strategy and insight roles place the highest importance on market insights but report lower ease, creating cognitive burden. Brand and content roles report lower confidence in trend-based decisions, which surfaces during ideation and execution. Leadership roles report higher confidence but may be insulated from day-to-day trend ambiguity.

Trend ownership matters too. When trend discovery was owned by a specific role, respondents reported faster insight gathering, higher ease, and higher confidence. When it was informally shared or owned by no one, every metric declined.

When asked about their biggest frustrations and what they'd improve, respondents consistently pointed toward structural solutions rather than new capabilities.

They want simpler, integrated workflows that preserve context. They want alignment tools that reduce approval cycles. They want confidence in the direction they're heading before they commit resources to execution.

The research identified five core Jobs To Be Done that capture what marketers are trying to achieve:

1. Confident insight-to-content decisions. When planning content, marketers want to identify trends they can trust, so they can commit to a direction without fear of wasting time or resources.

2. Faster alignment with fewer approval loops. When content requires stakeholder or client review, marketers want to align on direction quickly, so they can ship faster without sacrificing quality.

3. Quality at scale without chaos. When producing high volumes of content, marketers want to maintain consistent, high-quality outputs, so scale doesn't come at the expense of brand integrity.

4. Insight-grounded ideation. When generating content ideas, marketers want ideas that are clearly grounded in insight, brand context, and channel realities, so they can move from ideation to execution with confidence.

5. A connected workflow from insight to execution. When executing campaigns, marketers want insights, plans, assets, and approvals to remain connected, so context is not lost and rework is minimised.

The core finding across this entire study is that the most meaningful friction in marketing workflows doesn't sit in any single step. It sits in the gaps between steps — where context is lost, confidence erodes, and alignment breaks down.

Tool fragmentation amplifies every other problem. Respondents describe manually stitching together insights, briefs, assets, and feedback across multiple tools, losing time and clarity along the way. The implication is that integration and continuity are foundational requirements, not secondary enhancements.

The core opportunity is to better connect insight, direction, execution, and approval — rather than optimising any single step in isolation.

This research was conducted by RivoLabs on behalf of Recommend in Q1 2026. The study surveyed 118 active marketing professionals across four markets: UK (n=35), US (n=35), Australia (n=33), and Croatia (n=15).

Respondents spanned agencies (51%), in-house brands (41%), and other organisation types (8%), across leadership, strategy, brand, content, and creative roles.

The analysis combined descriptive quantitative statistics, importance-satisfaction gap analysis, directional segmentation by country, role, and industry, and qualitative open-text responses. All market-level insights should be interpreted as directional rather than statistically representative, particularly for Croatia due to its smaller base size.

Recommend is an AI company working to build specialised predictive AI systems. We analyze data from the open web to help organizations predict market demand and build better products, automations, and outcomes.