The power of the marketing department and its political control of the budgeting process relative to the power and political behaviour of other departments can be used to predict budget size. Previous literature on marketing budgeting has focused on technique rather than the task environment. Here an attempt has been made to place marketing resource allocation in its context of the “corporate environment for marketing management”. A model of the power and politics of marketing budgeting is given, and a small exploratory empirical study of medium‐sized UK manufacturing firms validates certain elements of the model. The results point to three areas for concern: the management of marketing in organisations; the construction of curricula for marketing education; and the lines of investigation to be pursued next.