Back-to-School 2025: Marketing Through Chaos in a World That Won’t Slow Down

If you're in marketing right now, you're likely exhausted.

You’re not just running campaigns, but also fighting economic headwinds and answering to competing voices. You’re reforecasting weekly and your media plan is now on its fifth iteration. You finally earned more shelf space or a cleaner digital shelf, but velocity still slipped. It feels like you’re playing a game that keeps changing the rules just when you learn them.

This isn’t just turbulence; this is the new climate.

As back-to-school approaches, brands face an especially difficult choice: stick to plans and hope for the best or acknowledge that this is a fundamentally different world and make hard changes? Tariffs are tightening margins. Consumer demand is softening. Discounts are draining profit. The illusion of normalcy has lifted.

You’re not underperforming; the world has shifted. So now what?

Understand the Shift

In many cases, marketing is working. There’s better targeting and cleaner insight, along with more intentional media and smarter creative. Yet, revenue still falls short. That’s not a failure of your team. Rather, it’s a failure to account for the headwinds.

To stay ahead, you can use incremental lift models and causal impact tools to isolate the real effect of your marketing, separated from external variables like tariffs or inflation. Additionally, you can build scenario-based forecasts that allow for volatility so you don’t get stuck with a single, fragile plan. Lastly, present leadership with the truth. Marketing can be improving even if topline results are down. This clarity might be the only thing that protects your team.

Meet Consumers Where They Are

Consumers aren’t abandoning your brand because they hate it; they’re trading down because they have to. But that doesn’t mean you lose; it means you pivot.

If your brand stands for anything beyond price, this is your time to speak up. If you have lower-priced brands in your portfolio, they may now be your most important storytellers.

This means revisiting your value proposition, ensuring that you communicate clearly why your brand is worth it when money is tight. Consider reallocation spend to under-supported brands that serve value-conscious customers. Additionally, test modest price increases that improve margins without scaring shoppers, especially if the perceived value justifies it.

Avoid Discounts

You promised retailers and Wall Street you would hit a number, but now you're behind. The instinct is to discount more to move units, but you run the risk of shrinking margins.

You teach consumers to wait for deals and your profitability erodes, setting yourself up for more pressure and an unsustainable cycle every quarter.

To break the cycle, consider running a post-event margin analysis looking at incremental growth. Don’t apply blunt-force tactics across channels, but instead segment discount strategies by customer behavior and elasticity. Finally, stop measuring success by units alone and instead focus on profitable units.

Rebuild Your Operating System

The way we plan, fund and evaluate marketing was built for stability, but that world is gone.

You need a new playbook. Not just new tech, but new processes and new goals. You need fewer silos and faster decisions. Most of all, you need a mindset shift. Performance won’t come from precision alone. It will come from adaptability.

To adjust, align around dynamic key performance indicators that accept a range of outcomes. Perfection is less valuable than agility right now. Next, flatten decision-making so your team can respond quickly without waiting for top-down direction. Lastly, invest in systems that let you fail fast and learn faster. Stop measuring performance weeks after the fact.

You can still win this year. Back-to-school isn’t gone, and holiday still matters. Annual planning season can be different, but only if you start shifting now.

You cannot budget for certainty in a world that's fundamentally uncertain. Stop asking for the plan to be right. Instead, build a set of options and a system that lets you pivot. Define success as your ability to adjust, not your ability to guess right the first time.

Therefore, create contingency-backed plans instead of binary ones. Define success as resilience and adaptability, not just growth. Additionally, reclaim stability by leaning into probabilistic thinking and strategic flexibility.

You're not alone in this. The pressure and chaos are real, but it’s not unwinnable. It's simply unwinnable with the old rules. If the game has changed, change how you play.

Bradley Keefer is chief revenue officer of Keen Decision Systems, a marketing mix modeling platform powered by AI.