Are your team confused about why they’re being asked to work on something? Are team members unable to prioritise work themselves? Is your marketing team trying to juggle lots of things at once?
These are all telltale signs of requiring a more developed strategy.
You need a strategy before a plan. Here’s why the distinction matters. For a comprehensive review of your current marketing efforts, you might also want to consider conducting a marketing audit to uncover opportunities for improvement.
What isn’t a marketing strategy?
When speaking with teams about marketing strategy we often get back responses that are not strategic. Here are some typical examples.
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What is a marketing strategy?
Strategy is often misunderstood, even by leaders. Here’s how some of the best strategic thinkers define it.
Strategy is simply resource allocation. When you strip away all the noise, that’s what it comes down to. Strategy means making clear cut choices about how to compete.
Jack Welch - CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.
Michael Porter - Award-winning economist, author and Harvard professor
Strategy is a pattern of activities that seek to achieve the objectives of the organisation and adapt its scope, resources and operations to environmental changes in the long term.
Peter Drucker - Educator, author, consultant and considered “the founder of modern management”
You should think of your marketing strategy as a description of where you’re choosing to play and how you’re choosing to win.
Typically you will see strategy broken down into 2 core components:
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A diagnosis of the current situation and the challenge
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A guiding policy for how to overcome the obstacles in the challenge
The diagnosis clearly defines the challenge and sets out the current situation.
A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. If the challenge is not defined, it is difficult or impossible to assess the quality of the strategy. And if you cannot assess a strategy’s quality, you cannot reject a bad strategy or improve a good one.
Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy
The guiding policy sets out your decisions around where to play, without defining exactly what should be done. Furthermore, it sets guardrails that direct and constrain action to keep your team focused. Strategy is about choice and deciding where to play, and so your team should be able to clearly articulate the reasoning behind these choices and trade-offs.
We are yet to find a marketing team with a shortage of ideas. Your marketing strategy tells your team what to work on and why. At any point in time, your team should be able to explain why they’re working on what they’re working on, and why they’re spending time on that as opposed to anything else.
Every marketing team has to make these tradeoffs. If you’re not talking about trade-offs, it’s not a marketing strategy discussion.
Why most strategy documents fail
If your strategy document reads like a list of aspirations nobody would argue with — “customer-first”, “quality over shortcuts”, “great design” — it’s not a strategy. As Jason Cohen puts it:
“Most ‘strategy’ documents fail because they repeat platitudes instead of making decisions that require trade-offs and sacrifice.”
Real strategic choices have three properties:
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Both options must be genuinely smart. A choice between “good design” and “bad design” isn’t strategic — nobody chooses poorly on purpose. Real choices pit two desirable alternatives against each other, like choosing between “all-in-one platform” and “infinitely extensible ecosystem.”
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Choices carry real consequences. Every advantage comes with disadvantages. Premium pricing enables bigger marketing investment but shrinks your addressable market. Choosing speed-to-market means accepting rougher edges. The advantages and disadvantages come as a package deal.
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Choices should reinforce each other. A cohesive strategy has internal logic where one choice makes the others stronger. Choosing “small team” naturally reinforces “focused product” and “narrow target market.”
Strategy means saying no
“A strategy that never says ‘no’ is not a strategy. It should say ‘no’ most of the time; that’s a signal that you are actually focusing.”
This is where most marketing teams struggle. When both options sound good — and they will, because that’s what makes it a real choice — the temptation is to try and have both. But straddling two strategies means you execute neither well. Your unique combination of trade-offs is what positions you as the best option for your target market, not for everyone.
“The weaknesses of your choices are painful to accept. The advantages of the opposite choices sound wonderful. Welcome to strategy, where you make hard choices. If the choice wasn’t hard to make, it wasn’t actually a choice.”
The opposite test
A simple way to test whether you’ve made a real strategic choice: ask yourself what successful companies have chosen the opposite. If you can’t think of any, you haven’t identified a genuine trade-off — you’ve just written down a platitude.
For example, “we focus on enterprise customers” is a real choice because plenty of successful companies focus exclusively on SMBs. But “we believe in delivering value to customers” fails the test — no successful company has chosen the opposite.
What is a marketing plan?
The video below from Roger Dean, one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy, provides an excellent overview of the differences between planning and strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/iuYlGRnC7J8
Most of the marketing strategies we see are really marketing plans, a long to-do list or wish list of items, with little or no strategy behind them. As Roger explains in the video above, whilst the planning process creates comfort given all the outcomes are within your control, this comfort typically results in poor outcomes for the business. We have talked about the outputs over outcomes trap before on this blog.
Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy refers to this long list of “things to do” as “Dog’s dinner objectives”.
“A long list of “things to do”, often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives”, is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do. Such lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which a wide variety of stakeholders make suggestions as to things they would like to see done. Rather than focus on a few important items, the group sweeps the whole day’s collection into a “strategic plan”. Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long term” is added so that none of them need be done today.“
Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy
Marketing strategy & marketing plan compared
Below we compare some of the typical characteristics of a marketing plan versus a marketing strategy.
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Marketing strategy: Focused on achieving a company goal
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Marketing plan: Little to no focus on a company goal
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Marketing strategy: Creates angst/nervousness
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Marketing plan: Comforting
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Marketing strategy: Outcomes your customer decides, outside of your control
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Marketing plan: Outcomes you decide, work within your control
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Marketing strategy: No guarantees of success
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Marketing plan: Can guarantee in advance
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Marketing strategy: Harder
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Marketing plan: Simple
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Marketing strategy: Subjective (“we believe”)
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Marketing plan: Concrete
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Marketing strategy: A journey which is refined over time
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Marketing plan: Rarely changed, revisited once a year
Problems with marketing planning
Long-term waterfall planning without a clear strategy creates real problems:
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The longer the gap between planning and implementation, the higher the chances the assumptions on which your plan is built have changed.
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To plan accurately, you assume to know how long each of the items on your plan is going to take.
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A rigid plan and structure leave little to no room for new opportunities or changing course.
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Most marketing work is uncharted territory.
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Under-scoped work incentivises trade-offs to meet deadlines.
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Marketing projects often require continual improvement.
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Planning estimates include buffers, slowing down delivery.
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Prioritisation is often more effective than rigid planning.
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Long-term estimates are often inaccurate.
“Reality is that your business needs change over time, and what was a good plan at the beginning of the year turns out to be short-sighted as new information unfolds over time.”
To conclude
Long-term planning makes some stakeholders and executives feel secure. In reality, a marketing plan often sets your team up for failure.
A plan is a way to guarantee losing. A strategy is the best possible chance of winning.