Earned & PaidKimberly-Clark
Kimberly-Clark spent $1.02B on advertising and marketing in fiscal 2025, down 9.1% on the year before and +35% since 2019. That's 6.2% of revenue, more than in 2019: leaning in.
Marketing spend by year
Bars: advertising and marketing expense, $B (10-K). Line: spend as a share of revenue.
What they told investors
“And so it's all those things together, Javier, with brand building activation and innovation.”Russell Torres · 2026 Q2 · transcript
“And so you look for that promo activity for us to normalize over the balance of the year, and we're going to continue focusing on winning with innovation and brand building.”Russell Torres · 2026 Q2 · transcript
“I think we mainly see promotion as a tactic to drive trial for innovation.”Russell Torres · 2025 Q3 · transcript
What the 10-K says about marketing
- investing in brand “Birth Rate Trends - Sales of our baby and child care products are highly correlated with birth rate trends. In recent years, birth rate declines in key countries, including China, South Korea and the U.S., have pressured category volume growth rates. To help mitigate the effects…” 10-K, Feb 12, 2026
Say vs do
We found no statement about the size of Kimberly-Clark's marketing budget on its earnings calls or in its 10-Ks, so here is its record against its peers.
What they said
No statement about the size of its marketing budget.
What they did
| Year | Marketing spend | Change | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | $1.02B | -9.1% | 6.2% |
| FY2024 | $1.12B | +9.4% | 6.7% |
| FY2023 | $1.03B | +13.9% | 6.0% |
| FY2022 | $901M | +0.9% | 4.5% |
| FY2021 | $893M | -6.6% | 4.6% |
| FY2020 | $956M | +26.3% | 5.0% |
Against its peers. Compared with the 11 other CPG advertisers we track (Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, Church & Dwight and 6 more): since 2019 its marketing spend went +35% (peer median +36%); its share of revenue moved +2.1 pts (median +0.5); last year -9.1% (median +1.6%).
In interviews, its leaders made 15 statements about marketing: 1 argued for investing in brand and 0 for cutting.
How we check: a statement gets a verdict only when it's clearly about the size of the whole company's marketing budget over a full fiscal year; we compare it with the advertising and marketing expense in that year's 10-K. Statements about one quarter, one brand or channel, or the mix between brand and performance can't be checked against annual filings.
What they say about media
The marketing channels it talks about using for itself on earnings calls and in its 10-Ks and 10-Qs, since 2019; counts are statements, not spending.
- Experiential & events “And then lastly, as we chatted back in April, we had a heightened activation programming across several channels, particularly club, which started early in Q1.” Nelson Urdaneta on the earnings call · Aug 11, 2026 · source
- Creative campaigns · AI in marketing “For example, in China, we're making a lot -- many, many, many, maybe hundreds of ads a day that are AI fueled, but those are in-house generated, right, and then in-house deployed to media.” Michael Hsu on the earnings call · Jan 26, 2026 · source
- Measurement “And right now, our returns on investment on our advertising, particularly on digital -- and we've migrated from not having a whole lot of digital maybe five or 10 years ago to almost being entirely digital, and those returns are significantly higher that we're driving now.” Mike Hsu on the earnings call · Apr 23, 2024 · source
- Paid search “And so some of the stuff that we're seeing and the reasons why we're growing faster perhaps in non-measured channels is the strong digital investments that we're making in search and that's paying strong returns from us -- for us and doing very well.” Michael D. Hsu on the earnings call · Apr 22, 2019 · source