Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is the set of choices about who you sell to, what you say to them, where you say it, and what you charge, made so that each choice supports the others and the whole connects to profit. Many documents called a strategy are something else: a list of planned activities, a budget split across channels, a calendar. Those describe what the team will do. A strategy explains why doing those things, in that order, should move the P&L, and what was deliberately set aside in order to do them.
How it actually works
The standard artifact is a deck: market overview, brand pillars, channel mix, quarterly calendar, budget. Approval usually turns on completeness. The test of a strategy is different: whether it commits to choices that could have gone another way, and whether each choice traces to a revenue or profit outcome someone will be accountable for.
A common failure is a collection of initiatives with the right intent that were not designed to work together. Each function proposes work that makes sense on its own terms, and leadership approves the set. No one checks whether the pricing supports the channel plan, whether the creative matches the buyer the media reaches, or whether two teams are building the same thing. The resulting document lists activities without the choices that would connect them.
A strategy that connects to the P&L starts from a prior question: before anything gets built, what impact will it have on profit, or on the team's ability to generate more revenue? That question sets the sequence. The quickest path to the next proven ROI comes first, the result funds the next step, and each stage is evaluated before the one after it is funded. Naming a hurdle rate turns that question into capital allocation finance can recognize: the minimum risk-adjusted return an initiative must clear to be funded. Rank candidates by risk-adjusted IRR against the hurdle, sequence by speed of proof, and break ties on payback period. A strategy that cannot state the bar its initiatives cleared loses the budget argument to the functions that can.
In practice
MrCool grew from $3 million to $100 million across our engagement. The growth followed a consistent sequence: evaluate each initiative for its impact on profit before building it, prove it at small scale, then fund the next initiative with the result. The cost of choices made without that evaluation is in the record. A brand that held the number one pre-workout on the market expanded into a biography, a women's supplement line, spicy supplements, and a mobile game while the proven product went underfunded; all their customers wanted was more flavors of the same tried-and-true product. Their competitor doubled down on its own competing pre-workout and took it into GNC, where it did $36 million the following year, while the diversifying brand dropped 25%. Each expansion had a business case on its own; they were not all equally grounded in customer research. The comparison is documented in [reading the curves](/insights/s-curve-of-growth#reading-the-curves).
Where we come in
Before anything gets built, we evaluate its expected impact on profit, or on your team's ability to generate more revenue, and we sequence engagements by the quickest path to the next proven ROI. That sequencing has run through engagements from new startups to work at the scale of Digital Realty and Equinix.
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Related terms
- Strategy vs. plan
- A strategy is a set of choices and their rationale. A plan is the schedule for executing them.
- Sequencing
- The order in which initiatives are funded and built. Sequencing by quickest proven ROI lets early results fund later work.
- Resource allocation
- Where budget and people go. The allocation shows which choices were made in practice, whatever the document states.
- Objective hierarchy
- The chain from a company profit target down to what each function must produce for it. When the chain is missing, functions optimize their own metrics and no metric describes the whole.
- Trade-off
- What was given up to pursue what was chosen. A strategy that names what it gave up shows real choices were made.