Built to Adapt: The Marketing Teams That Will Thrive in 2026

Last week I shared six shifts shaping life science marketing in 2026 - the trends Forrester, McKinsey, Gartner, and IDC all agree on. Trust as a competitive moat. Buyer enablement as table stakes. AI reshaping discovery. The predictions are solid. The frameworks are sound.

But predictions are easy. Execution is where most teams fail.

What the analysts won't say: knowing these shifts doesn't mean your organisation will respond to them. The gap between strategic intent and operational reality is where 2026 will actually be decided - and most life science commercial teams are on the wrong side of it.

This is the uncomfortable part. The internal dynamics. The budget politics. The question of whether marketing survives as a function at all.

Your buyers already decided

Here's the shift underneath all the others: your buyer has already made their decision before they contact you.

Not consciously. Not officially. But by the time they reach your website, download your content, or take your call, the shortlist exists. The criteria are set. The budget holder has a narrative ready for procurement.

Your job is not to convince them. It is to help them justify what they have already concluded.

This reframes everything. It's not performance versus brand. Not AI versus human. It's persuasion versus alignment. The organisations that win in 2026 won't be those with the best pitch. They'll be those who make it easiest for buyers to defend choosing them.

For marketing leaders: Your content needs to be quotable in a procurement document, not just persuasive in a conversation. If a budget holder cannot copy your value proposition into a grant application or internal business case, you have not done your job.

For CEOs: If your marketing cannot arm the internal champion with defensible language, you are losing deals you never knew you were in. The conversation happened. You were not part of it.

Performance marketing as political cover

When seller sentiment is flat but targets stay aggressive, what gets optimised? Defensibility.

Performance metrics are easier to present in a board deck than brand investment. "We spent X on LinkedIn, generated Y leads" beats "we invested in positioning that will compound over 18 months." One fits a slide. The other requires patience and conviction.

This creates a doom loop. Performance tactics get funded because they are measurable, even as returns diminish. Investment in brand gets starved because it is hard to attribute, even as it is what actually differentiates. Customer acquisition cost rises. Deal velocity does not. Marketing gets blamed. The cycle continues.

Our ELRIG research found that 68% of life science companies are cautiously optimistic about AI. Only 7% are power users. The majority - 44% - are light users who have tried tools but not embedded them into workflows. McKinsey found similar gaps - only 6% of marketing organisations have mature GenAI implementation despite near-universal interest.

The pattern is identical for marketing strategy: widespread acknowledgment that something needs to change, but there is minimal evidence of action to change it.

The uncomfortable truth: the teams that win in 2026 are not those with the best performance playbook. They are those whose leadership has the patience and conviction to fund what cannot be immediately measured.

For marketing leaders: You need to reframe what you are measured on before budget season, not during it. If you are defending spend based purely on MQL volume, you have already lost the argument that matters.

For CEOs: Ask yourself honestly: are you funding marketing that works, or marketing that is easy to explain? They are not the same thing. And the difference compounds.

Survivability signalling

In constrained funding environments, buyers optimise for vendor survival, not vendor performance.

When budgets are tight and switching costs are high, the question shifts from "who is best?" to "who will still exist in three years?" Buyers are making risk-adjusted decisions. A slightly inferior product from a stable vendor beats a superior product from a company that might not make it to the next grant cycle.

This changes what marketing needs to signal. Reach matters less than resilience. Features matter less than financial stability. Innovation matters less than evidence of sustained customer relationships.

Some companies accidentally market fragility. Aggressive discounting signals desperation. Constant pivots signal uncertainty. Visible cost-cutting signals instability. High turnover in customer-facing roles signals chaos. These signals travel fast through tight-knit scientific communities.

At ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025, we observed exhibitors focused on acquisition but failing on differentiation and follow-through. In a survivability-focused market, that is not just ineffective. It actively signals weakness. The booth that looks like every other booth. The conversation that could have come from any competitor. The follow-up that never arrives or arrives generic. Each one whispers: we are not paying attention.

For marketing leaders: Audit your marketing for fragility signals. What are you communicating - intentionally or not - that makes buyers nervous rather than confident?

For CEOs: Your marketing is either building or eroding perceived stability. There is no neutral. Every touchpoint signals something about your company's trajectory.

The fragmentation risk

The question is not "what replaces marketing?" It is "what happens when marketing dissolves?"

In companies that do not adapt, the answer is fragmentation. Brand becomes the CEO's personal LinkedIn presence. Demand generation becomes RevOps automation with no strategic oversight. Content creation becomes AI-augmented workflows producing volume without direction. Customer intelligence migrates to customer success. Strategic positioning belongs to no one - or everyone, which is worse.

This is not absorption. It is dissolution. And it creates chaos: inconsistent messaging, competing priorities, no accountability for how buyers actually experience you.

Some will argue that fragmentation is fine - that distributed ownership is more agile. In theory, perhaps. In practice, it creates a vacuum where no one owns the buyer's perception of you. And in a market where buyers are already sceptical, risk-averse, and overwhelmed with options, that vacuum is fatal.

The teams that survive do something different. They redefine marketing's mandate from "generate demand" to "orchestrate how we are understood."

Most life science commercial teams will not make this shift. They will continue optimising for tactics while the strategic function erodes. The 68% who are AI-optimistic but not acting will still be optimistic at the end of 2026 - and still not acting. The gap between leaders and laggards will widen into a chasm.

For marketing leaders: Success in 2026 depends on redefining what marketing is for. If you are still positioned as "the team that generates leads," you are replaceable by tools. If you are positioned as "the function that orchestrates how we are understood," you are essential.

For CEOs: Decide now whether marketing is a cost centre you are defending or a strategic capability you are building. The answer shapes everything: who you hire, what you fund, and whether you have a coherent market presence in three years.

The shift is already here

Your buyers have already decided. The question is whether you are helping them justify choosing you - or making it easier for them to justify choosing someone else.

2026 will not punish companies for lacking the perfect performance playbook. It will punish companies that optimised for the wrong thing: persuasion in a market that rewards alignment, tactics in a market that rewards coherence, efficiency in a market that rewards resilience.

Most life science commercial teams will continue to lag. The patterns are already visible. The data is already clear. The gap is already widening.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on 2026 predictions for life science commercial teams. Part 1 covers the six tactical shifts Forrester, McKinsey, Gartner, and IDC agree on - and what they mean for teams running lean.

The ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025 research referenced in this article is available as a full report.

We're hosting a webinar January 21 at 3pm GMT with ELRIG to discuss the findings and their implications for life science commercial teams, we'd love you to join us.