It’s 2026. Why Does Procurement Still Have a Branding Problem?

Research from Proxima and the Centre for Economics and Business Research found that external supplier costs account for approximately 70% of total outgoings and 60% of revenue across FTSE 350 companies. It is difficult to think of many areas with greater potential to affect margin, resilience, innovation and growth.

So why, in 2026, is the function responsible for influencing so much organisational value still frequently described as “back office”?

When I began recruiting into the profession, many briefs were relatively straightforward. Businesses wanted strong negotiators, category specialists and commercially minded individuals who could consolidate suppliers, challenge costs and deliver measurable savings.

Those capabilities remain important. Procurement must still protect the bottom line and demonstrate commercial value. But its remit has expanded far beyond cost reduction – and the roles we recruit today bear little resemblance to many of those we worked on 15 years ago.

Procurement now influences resilience, transformation, sustainability, innovation, technology adoption, regulatory compliance, risk and growth. In the right organisation, it can shape decisions at the highest level.

Yet despite that evolution, the perception of procurement has not always kept pace.

In too many businesses, it is still viewed as the team that runs tenders, negotiates prices, manages contracts and becomes involved once somebody has already decided what they want to buy.

Why does procurement’s external and internal brand still undersell its true contribution?

Procurement has evolved – but has its reputation?

The modern procurement function operates in a dramatically different environment from the one I knew 15 years ago.

Supply chains have become more global, interconnected and vulnerable. Businesses have faced a pandemic, geopolitical instability, inflation, trade disruption, material shortages, rapidly evolving regulation and growing pressure around environmental and social impact.

At the same time, organisations have become increasingly dependent on third parties. Technology platforms, professional services firms, outsourcing providers, logistics partners and strategic suppliers now play a significant role in how companies operate and grow.

That has fundamentally changed procurement’s value proposition.

Of course, savings still matter. In difficult markets, every organisation needs to manage expenditure intelligently. But reducing procurement to cost cutting misses a much bigger picture.

Today’s best procurement functions are helping their organisations to:

• Build more resilient supply chains
• Identify and mitigate supplier risk
• Support acquisitions and business integration
• Improve cash flow and working capital
• Deliver sustainability and ESG commitments
• Introduce new technology and digital capability
• Access supplier-led innovation
• Navigate regulatory and compliance requirements
• Improve speed to market
• Create competitive advantage
• Strengthen relationships with strategically important suppliers

These are not transactional activities. They are strategic business priorities.

Deloitte’s 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey reinforces this shift. When more than 250 CPOs across 40 countries were asked about their most effective risk-mitigation strategies, 74% identified maintaining alternative sources, 64% highlighted greater supply-chain visibility and 61% cited enhanced supplier information-sharing and collaboration.

None of those is simply about buying something more cheaply. They are about protecting the organisation’s ability to operate.

Procurement is also one of the few functions with visibility across almost every part of a business. It sees how money is spent, where supplier dependencies sit, where demand is fragmented and where commercial decisions are being made in isolation.

That perspective can be enormously valuable – but only if the business recognises it and procurement knows how to use it.

The difference between controlling cost and creating value

One reason the old perception persists is that procurement’s contribution is still frequently communicated through savings alone.

Savings are tangible. They are easy to put into a spreadsheet, present to a CFO and compare against a target. The wider value created by procurement can be more difficult to measure.

How do you quantify the value of avoiding a critical supplier failure? What is the financial impact of bringing a new product to market faster? How should a business measure improved access to supplier innovation, reduced carbon exposure or better contractual protection?

Those outcomes may not sit neatly within a traditional savings dashboard, but they can be significantly more valuable than securing another percentage point in a negotiation.

The most mature functions have moved from asking, “How can we buy this for less?” to asking broader questions:

“Should we be buying this at all?”
“Could we solve this problem differently?”
“Which suppliers can help us grow?”
“Where are we overexposed?”
“What will this decision mean for the business in three years?”

That is the difference between controlling cost and creating value.

It does not mean abandoning savings or commercial discipline. It means recognising that the lowest-cost option is not necessarily the option that creates the greatest overall value for the organisation.

Is the wider business failing to understand procurement?

Part of the problem undoubtedly sits outside the function.

Procurement is often invited into a process too late. A stakeholder has chosen a supplier, agreed the likely scope and mentally committed the budget before procurement becomes involved. At that point, its ability to influence the outcome is limited – and it can easily be perceived as an additional layer of governance rather than a commercial partner.

This creates a self-perpetuating cycle.

Procurement is engaged late, so it is forced to focus on negotiation, process and contractual protection. The business then sees procurement performing those activities and concludes that this is all the function does.

Some leadership teams also continue to view procurement primarily as a lever to pull when savings are required. They invest in capability during a cost-reduction programme but give the function less visibility when the organisation returns to growth.

That approach overlooks procurement’s potential contribution to investment decisions, supplier-enabled innovation, acquisition integration and operational scalability.

There is also evidence that procurement’s challenges are often structural rather than purely functional. In Deloitte’s 2025 survey, 57% of CPOs identified siloed ways of working as a barrier preventing procurement from delivering value. Competing priorities were cited by 46%, limitations in organisational or technological capability by 40%, and talent gaps by 34%.

This matters because businesses cannot expect strategic outcomes while procurement remains separated from strategic decisions.

If an organisation wants procurement to behave strategically, it must give the function the access, information and executive sponsorship required to do so.

You cannot ask procurement to create strategic value while only inviting it to the table after the strategic decisions have been made.

Or has procurement failed to brand itself?

However, it would be too easy to place all the responsibility on the wider business.

Procurement must also ask itself some uncomfortable questions.

Has the function always explained its value in language the business understands? Has it spent too much time discussing process, compliance and procurement methodology rather than commercial outcomes? Does it understand its internal stakeholders as well as it expects suppliers to understand their customers?

Procurement professionals may talk about category strategies, sourcing pipelines, spend under management and negotiated savings. A business leader may care more about growth, margin, speed, risk and customer experience.

The activities may be connected, but procurement must make that connection clear.

Branding is not simply about producing a new mission statement or changing the function’s name from “Purchasing” to “Commercial.” It is created through every interaction the business has with the team.

Is procurement easy to engage with? Does it bring insight or simply ask stakeholders to complete another form? Does it challenge constructively? Does it understand the organisation’s commercial priorities? Can it move at the speed the business requires?

A strategic reputation cannot simply be claimed. It has to be earned through consistent behaviour and visible outcomes.

The strongest procurement leaders I meet are not only technically credible. They are influential communicators, commercially curious and comfortable operating across functions. They can move between a detailed supplier negotiation and a board-level conversation about risk, transformation or growth.

Crucially, they do not wait for the business to discover procurement’s value. They actively demonstrate it.

Technology is changing the function again

Technology represents another significant stage in procurement’s evolution.

Digital procurement is no longer limited to implementing a new sourcing platform or automating purchase orders. The conversation now includes advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, predictive risk monitoring, automated supplier discovery and far better visibility across organisational spend.

Deloitte categorised the top-performing organisations in its 2025 research as “Digital Masters.” These businesses were allocating as much as 24% of their procurement budgets to technology – almost twice the level reported in 2023 – and achieved an average 3.2-times return on investment from generative AI. Less digitally mature organisations reported returns of just over 1.5 times.

This is not the profile of an administrative purchasing department. It is a function increasingly expected to combine commercial judgement with data, automation and digital transformation.

Technology should not replace the relationship-building, judgement and influence at the heart of good procurement. But it can release teams from transactional activity and give them the insight required to operate more strategically.

The opportunity is significant. So is the risk of a two-tier profession emerging between functions equipped to embrace this change and those still fighting for basic spend visibility.

We can see the change in the roles businesses are hiring

From a recruitment perspective, the evolution is impossible to miss.

The briefs we receive today are increasingly broader and more ambitious. Businesses are no longer simply asking for somebody who can run a sourcing process or deliver a savings target.

They want procurement leaders who can build functions, influence executive teams, integrate acquisitions, redesign operating models and introduce new technology. They want category leaders who understand complex markets, manage risk and develop strategic supplier relationships. They want professionals who can combine commercial rigour with data, sustainability, transformation and stakeholder influence.

We are also seeing greater demand for capabilities that might once have been considered peripheral to procurement: change management, digital transformation, analytics, responsible sourcing, supplier innovation and third-party risk.

Even job titles tell part of the story. Chief Procurement Officers increasingly hold wider mandates covering supply chain, sustainability, property, operations or broader commercial functions.

The searches we run reflect a profession that has become more complex, more influential and more closely connected to business strategy.

The contradiction is that many organisations recognise this evolution when hiring, yet revert to an outdated perception once the individual is in post.

They ask for a strategic leader but measure them predominantly on savings. They want someone influential but position the role too far from senior decision-making. They talk about transformation but expect immediate results from limited data, fragmented systems and an under-resourced team.

If the recruitment brief has evolved, the environment around the role must evolve too.

Recruitment can reinforce – or challenge – the old narrative

Recruiters also have a part to play.

If we present procurement talent purely in terms of savings delivered, we reinforce the idea that savings are the profession’s primary source of value.

A strong procurement CV should still contain evidence and measurable outcomes. But the conversation should go further. What did the individual enable? What risk did they remove? How did they influence the organisation? What changed because they were there?

Likewise, when taking a brief, we should challenge businesses to define what they genuinely need.

Are they seeking a cost-reduction specialist, a transformation leader, a function builder or a strategic commercial partner? Is the role positioned to succeed? Does the reporting line reflect the mandate? Will the individual have the sponsorship, systems and resources required to deliver what is expected?

The more accurately we define procurement’s contribution, the better chance we have of appointing the right people – and retaining them.

After 15 years recruiting in this market, I believe this is where a genuinely specialist recruiter should add value. Our role is not simply to match a job title with a CV. It is to understand how the profession is changing, challenge outdated assumptions and help organisations build teams capable of delivering against a much broader agenda.

If those of us working closely with procurement can see how significantly the function has evolved, why has the wider market been so slow to catch up?

Procurement’s brand must be built from the inside out

There is no single solution to procurement’s branding problem.

The wider business needs a more sophisticated understanding of what a high-performing procurement function can deliver. Procurement leaders, meanwhile, need to communicate their impact in business language and ensure the stakeholder experience supports the brand they want to create.

This means moving beyond savings as the dominant measure of success. It means telling better stories about value, risk, growth and innovation. It means bringing stakeholders into the function’s journey and making procurement easier to engage with.

It also means being honest about capability. A strategic brand must be supported by the right talent, operating model, technology and behaviours. Repositioning procurement is not a communications exercise alone; the function must be equipped to fulfil the promise.

Procurement has changed enormously over the past 15 years. The roles have evolved, the capabilities have expanded and the potential value has never been greater.

Now its reputation needs to catch up.

If your business is considering how to improve procurement’s internal brand – or how to hire the people capable of changing it – I have several examples of what I’ve seen work well and would be very happy to discuss them. Get in touch here.

Sources

Proxima and the Centre for Economics and Business Research, The State of Spend; Deloitte, 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey.