Exclusive data from Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey reveals a generation of marketers on the edge of burnout.
Over half of the more than 3,500 marketers surveyed have felt overwhelmed (58.1%) and undervalued (56.1%) over the past 12 months. Half of respondents (50.8%) have experienced emotional exhaustion during the past year, while 48.2% admit to a lack of enjoyment in work that used to engage them.
A further 47.6% report feeling a detached or negative attitude and 40.3% have experienced a sense of ineffectiveness – key symptoms of burnout.
Digging into the data, almost two-thirds (63%) of female marketers report feeling overwhelmed, while over half have felt undervalued (57.7%) and emotionally exhausted (55.6%) during the past 12 months. More than half of their male peers (52.9%) have also felt undervalued, while 49.5% report feeling overwhelmed and 42.5% emotionally exhausted.
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These feelings of exhaustion and being unappreciated are consistent regardless of seniority. Concerningly, more than half of senior managers and managers have felt overwhelmed (61.2%), undervalued (57.7%) and emotionally exhausted (52.9%) over the past year.
A similar picture emerges for the most senior of marketers. Most CMOs, marketing directors and vice-presidents surveyed report feeling overwhelmed (54.3%) and undervalued (53%), while 49.2% have experienced emotional exhaustion in the past 12 months.
Junior managers, marketing executives and assistants are also experiencing worryingly high levels of exhaustion and unhappiness. Over half (58.6%) feel undervalued and overwhelmed (53.5%), with 49.5% reporting the symptoms of emotional exhaustion.
Marketers working within smaller businesses (250 employees and under) are marginally more likely to feel overwhelmed (59.8%) than their peers within larger organisations (57.1%).
Over half of SME marketers also feel undervalued (55.5%), as do 56.3% of their counterparts in large businesses, with both reporting worryingly high levels of emotional exhaustion during the past year – 49.3% at SMEs, 52.2% at large organisation 52.2%.
Some 56.5% of B2B marketers have felt overwhelmed over the past 12 months, rising to 59% of their B2C peers.
A further 54.3% of B2B marketers and 58% of their B2C counterparts report feeling undervalued, while 49.9% of B2B marketers and 53.2% of those working within consumer facing businesses have suffered from emotional exhaustion over the past year.
Feelings of detachment
The figures point to a burnout crisis, as marketers grapple with the persistent pressure to deliver more with fewer resources.
The 2025 Career & Salary Survey data points to a worrying trend across the industry of marketers taking increasingly lower levels of satisfaction from their work.
Almost half (49%) of the female marketers surveyed feel a lack of enjoyment in work that used to engage them, a feeling shared by 46.9% of their male peers. There is also a consistent pattern when it comes to reporting a detached/negative attitude (female 47.6%, male 47.4%) and a general sense of ineffectiveness (female 40.3%, male 40.2%).
A similar picture emerges when cutting the data by seniority. Over half (51.4%) of managers say work that used to engage them has been less enjoyable over the past year, with 42.6% of senior leaders and 48.1% of their junior colleagues saying the same.
Managers are also most likely to report feelings of ineffectiveness (44.1%), compared to over a third of junior employees (38%) and CMOs (34.5%).
Middle management (51.5%) and junior staff (51.6%) are more likely to report a detached/negative attitude than marketing leaders (39.1%).
Over the past year, almost half of marketers within large organisations have had a detached/negative attitude (48.7%) or felt a lack of enjoyment in work that used to engage them (48.2%), while almost two-fifths (39.9%) report a sense of ineffectiveness.
Within SMEs, the number feeling generally ineffective rises to 41.4%, while close to half (48.8%) lost enjoyment in work that previously engaged them and felt detached or negative (46.8%) over the past year.
It is also concerning that more than half (51.4%) of B2C marketers and 48.5% of their B2B peers lost enjoyment in their work during the past 12 months. A detached/negative attitude has been experienced by almost half of B2B (47.3%) and B2C (49.4%) marketers, while two-fifths have felt a general sense of ineffectiveness (B2B 40.8%, B2C 40.6%)
The scale of imposter syndrome
It’s fair to assume one of the contributing factors forcing marketers to the brink of burnout is imposter syndrome. The British Medical Association (BMA) defines imposter syndrome as a “sensation of chronic self-doubt” that can be both “undermining and isolating”, which over a prolonged period is a “significant contributor to burnout.”
According to the 2025 Career & Salary Survey data, 80.1% of the total sample have experienced imposter syndrome during their career.
This figure rises to 84.9% of female marketers, but is still worryingly high among their male peers (72.2%).
Reaching senior leadership level is no guard against imposter syndrome. Some 77.8% of CMOs and marketing directors have experienced imposter syndrome in their career, rising to 82% of managers. These feelings are shared by 78.7% of junior managers, executives and assistants, indicating chronic self-doubt is being felt by marketers at every level.
Some 80.4% of B2B marketers have experienced imposter syndrome during their career, as have 78.5% of their B2C peers and 81.1% of those working within businesses mixing B2B and B2C divisions.
Again, these feelings are consistent regardless of company size. Most marketers working within SMEs (78.9%) and large organisations (81.6%) have experienced imposter syndrome in their career to date.
The sheer scale of marketers reporting the symptoms of burnout over the past 12 months, coupled with extremely worrying levels of imposter syndrome, is a wake-up call for the industry at large.
Marketing Week will be reporting on exclusive data from the 2025 Career & Salary Survey over the coming weeks, including detailed analysis of marketing’s burnout crisis and the industry’s problem with imposter syndrome, as well as exploring pay gaps, in-demand skills and the changing face of recruitment.
