Key takeaways
- Marketing strategies can fall short not because of the creative, the channels, or the budget, but because they’re built before the business strategy is finished.
- Marketing strategy is an output: it expresses decisions about vision, business strategy, and annual goals. It can’t make those decisions for you, or make up for it if they aren’t fully realized.
- Warning signs include leaders describing the customer differently, a vague answer to “why choose us?”, and briefs that ask marketing to do everything at once.
- The fix is to align leadership on vision and strategy first, often with an experienced advisor, and capture it in an annual strategic plan.
When a marketing strategy underperforms, the diagnosis tends to follow a familiar path. The creative wasn’t distinctive enough. The channel mix was wrong. The agency didn’t understand the business. The budget wasn’t sufficient to compete.
While these aren’t unreasonable conclusions, and even occasionally correct, in our experience — across organizations of different sizes, sectors, and levels of marketing maturity — they’re often not the real problem.
The most common reason marketing strategies fall short has nothing to do with the marketing itself.
It’s very often that the marketing strategy arrived too early: before the more fundamental questions about the business had been genuinely resolved. Before leadership had aligned on where the organization is actually going. Before the business had made honest decisions about who it serves, what it stands for, and what it’s willing not to be.
Marketing strategy, in these cases, is not failing on its own terms; it’s faithfully executing thinking that was never finished. And that’s a problem no amount of creative quality, media investment, or tactical refinement can solve.
Understanding why this happens and what to do about it requires a different way of thinking about what marketing strategy is, and what must precede it.
What we need to know first
The most persistent misconception in the industry is that marketing strategy functions as a point of origin; that it’s where a company’s story begins, and where its identity in the market is decided. In practice, it does none of those things.
Marketing strategy is an output. It takes a company’s answers to the foundational questions — who we are, what we stand for, where we’re going, who we serve and why — and translates those answers into how the organization should present itself to the world.
When those foundational questions have been answered well, marketing can be genuinely powerful. When they haven’t been, no amount of creative sophistication or campaign investment will compensate for the gap.
There’s an old adage that nothing kills a bad product as quickly as great marketing; and it’s not because marketing is destructive, but because marketing accelerates the truth. It puts the product in front of more people, more efficiently, and reality does the rest.
Nothing kills a bad product as quickly as great marketing — because marketing accelerates the truth.
Business strategy works the same way. If the thinking underneath is unclear or insufficient, well-executed marketing won’t hide that. It will simply make the confusion more visible, at greater scale, and at significant cost.
The hierarchy isn’t complicated, but it is frequently ignored.
- Vision determines what your business exists to do, and the inspirational (even aspirational) future you’re trying to bring about.
- Business strategy determines how you’ll get there; what markets you’ll compete in, what trade-offs you’re willing to make, and what you’re choosing not to pursue.
- Your annual strategic plan and goals define, even more immediately, how you’ll move toward that vision this year and how you’ll know you were successful.
- Marketing strategy expresses all of that outwardly: how the business will build its reputation, attract the right customers, and earn their trust over time.
- Tactics like channels, content, and campaigns all come last.
Organizations that invest in this sequence – that do the harder, earlier thinking before moving to execution – produce marketing that’s coherent, durable, and recognizably theirs. Not because they have access to better creative or larger budgets, but because everyone involved knows what they’re saying and why.
The signals are hard to miss
Experience makes the diagnosis fairly straightforward.
- When I ask a leadership team to describe their customer and receive three meaningfully different answers depending on who’s speaking, the business strategy hasn’t been finished.
- When the response to “why would someone choose you over your nearest competitor” produces a long pause, or an answer that could apply equally to any competitor in the category, the differentiation work hasn’t been done.
- When a brief asks marketing to accomplish everything simultaneously — build awareness, drive conversion, retain existing customers, enter a new market — it’s often because the business hasn’t made the prioritization decisions that would allow it to ask for something specific.
- And when I ask about the vision and the response lasts 20 minutes, I know the harder thinking about strategic identity hasn’t yet happened.
Just as importantly, within the organization, your people sense this issue even if they can’t name it.
If anyone has ever said they’re unsure how their work moves things forward, or how different activities fit together — or if there’s friction, especially finger-pointing, between departments — your people may be missing the clarity that a single, shared direction provides. (Your sales vs. marketing problems are often rooted in this same issue.) They’re left to figure it out for themselves, and rarely arrive at the same conclusions. Worse, that process usually goes unspoken, leaving the assumptions behind those conclusions invisible and untested.
The result? Everyone feels like they’re working really hard (and they probably are), but the company isn’t getting the outcomes it wants.
Clearly defining and socializing your vision and business strategy will surface and resolve these assumptions, while aligning your entire organization in an incredibly powerful way (not to mention saving you the significant time and money that’s otherwise wasted).
In other words, the value of this work isn’t just in the outcome, but equally in the journey.
And admittedly as your agency (if I can be self-serving for a moment), when we see evidence that you might be struggling with this very challenge, the red warning lights start flashing in our minds, because we’ve seen this show before.
We’re bracing the team for contradictory feedback, opposing metrics, and convoluted approval pathways. We know we’re going to be caught in a system of inefficiency, though we’ll navigate through like champs, all the while knowing it doesn’t have to be like this.
None of this is a criticism of the organizations that find themselves in this position. It’s an entirely natural place to be, particularly for businesses that have been moving quickly or operating in fast-changing markets. But it does determine what conversation needs to happen before any useful marketing thinking can begin.
So, let’s choose another way.
What to do about it
The good news is that the work isn’t as daunting as it might sound (and we’re here to help).
Usually these issues exist because you’re unsure of where to start, unsure of the right questions to ask, unaware you’re making assertions on the shoulders of assumptions, or missing the forest in the trees.
Or even more likely, you probably just can’t find the time. This process is about more than the hours necessary for meetings; it’s about the deep thinking that you really need to clear the decks to do. That’s hard, and can even feel impossible, when you have a business to run.
One huge help can be getting the support of an advisor (hear me out). Yes, they’ll lay out and facilitate the process, but sometimes the biggest catalyst is that they’ll get meetings in your leadership team’s calendars and keep everyone organized and accountable. You’ll need someone who is:
- Fluent in all functional areas of business relevant to your company
- Able to quickly digest much financial and performance data
- Great with people
- Able to fulfill a facilitator role
They should be able to quickly get up to speed with what’s happening in the company and greater market, build individual and collective relationships with the leadership team, and deeply understand the CEO’s (and/or Board’s, bank’s, etc.) priorities and goals.
And to be truthful, you just have to really like and trust them: this process requires honest, even difficult conversations, and great advisors make those easier if you let them.
At its core, the job is simple to describe and hard to do: listen to what everyone says, individually, and distill that into what they collectively mean – then synthesize it into an actual deliverable: your annual strategic plan.
Prepare for moments of messiness, because not everyone is going to agree on what needs to happen, and thank goodness for that. You have the wrong team if ideas are always met with nodding heads and no one is willing to whack at them (respectfully of course, but that’s another role of the advisor: to smooth the edges of different personalities and perspectives while ensuring all key voices are heard).
I often describe the process a bit like cleaning your garage: it’s going to (briefly) get worse before it gets better, but wow – the end result sure is incredible.
And why on earth is a marketing agency talking about this?
Our opportunity to help companies that have a solid business strategy and clarity in their direction is much larger (not unlike your own opportunity to succeed), and in the end, our purpose is to help you achieve your business goals.
Marketing strategy, at its best, is not a campaign framework or a channel plan: it’s the expression of a business that genuinely understands itself. And if you don’t get you, imagine how your customers feel.
In that pursuit, and thanks to being executives from a range of industries, with experience on leadership teams, through acquisitions, and through building and leading companies, we find ourselves in this strategic advisory role.
Sometimes for clients who came to us thinking they need marketing strategy, and increasingly for companies who came to us knowing they need business strategy.
Marketing is not where that story gets written, it’s where it gets told. It’s the trailer, not the movie.
But credentials aside, our link is still to your narrative: Streetwise has always helped businesses tell their story. Marketing is not where that story gets written, it’s where it gets told. It’s the trailer, not the movie. But no trailer, however well cut (and no one cuts it better than we do), can save a story that hasn’t found its shape yet.
And wherever you are in your story, we can help.
Frequently asked questions
Most often because they’re developed before the business has resolved its foundational questions: where it’s going, who it serves, what it stands for, and what it won’t do. Marketing then faithfully executes unfinished thinking, and no amount of creative quality or media spend can fix that.
Vision, business strategy, and an annual strategic plan with clear goals. Marketing strategy translates those decisions into how the business presents itself to the world; tactics like channels, content, and campaigns come last.
Common signals include leaders describing the customer in different ways, no clear answer to why customers should choose you over competitors, marketing briefs that ask for everything at once, and friction or finger-pointing between departments such as sales and marketing.
Because marketing can only express a strategy that already exists. Streetwise’s team includes executives who have sat on leadership teams, led companies, and been through acquisitions, so we often facilitate strategic planning before building the marketing that brings it to market.