What Is Marketing Strategy? Why the Hard Part Is Making Choices
I've seen a product nearly get killed because the business was solving the wrong problem.
Sales were flat, and the assumption seemed straightforward: the product wasn't right for the market.
It was.
The problem was something else entirely.
I'll come back to what the real problem was.
It's surprisingly easy to answer the wrong question well.
Marketing strategy seems to be having a moment. Look at senior marketing roles and the language appears again and again: shape the strategy, set the strategic direction, build the marketing strategy. At the same time, marketers have more data, tools and executional capability than ever. AI can research, analyse, create, personalise and optimise at extraordinary speed.
So why does strategy still seem so difficult?
Perhaps because we make it sound more complicated than it needs to be.
Marketing strategy is the set of choices about how marketing will help a business get from where it is to where it wants to be. Those choices determine where growth will come from, which customers to prioritise, how the business intends to win, where resources should be focused and, importantly, what not to do.
Those choices aren't made in a vacuum. They are grounded in an understanding of the market, customer, competition, company and commercial reality. And because resources are finite, choosing also means deciding what not to do.
Simple to describe. Much harder to do well.
Think of strategy as the structure of a building
A house, skyscraper, warehouse and museum can look completely different. They serve different purposes and require different designs.
But underneath them are common structural principles.
You need to know what you're trying to build. You need to understand the ground you're building on. Then you design a structure capable of supporting the ambition.
Marketing isn't so different.
A B2B software company and a D2C consumer brand may look nothing alike from the outside. Their buying journeys, channels, sales cycles and customer relationships can be radically different.
But underneath the execution sits a remarkably similar strategic structure.
Start with the ambition
Before deciding what marketing should do, we need to know what the business is trying to achieve.
“Grow” isn't enough.
Are we trying to penetrate an existing market, enter a new one, increase customer value or build a category? How much growth? Over what period? With what commercial constraints?
The answers matter because two companies looking at the same market could rationally choose different strategies if their ambitions are different.
Strategy needs a destination before it can determine a route.
Understand the ground you're building on
Then comes diagnosis: understanding the fundamentals.
The market: Where is growth? What's changing?
The customer: Who buys, why, what do they value and what gets in their way?
The competition: What alternatives exist, how are they perceived and where might there be opportunity?
The company: What are we genuinely good at? What capabilities, assets or credibility give us a right to win?
The commercial reality: How does the business make money? Where does growth come from today and what are the constraints?
This isn't the strategy. It is what allows us to build one.
Good diagnosis often changes the question.
Perhaps awareness isn't the problem; customers know the brand but don't understand why it's different.
Perhaps acquisition is healthy but retention is limiting growth.
Perhaps everyone is looking towards a new market while substantial headroom remains in the existing one.
That’s what was really going on with the product I mentioned earlier. Sales were flat, and the assumption was that the product simply wasn’t right for the market. But the actual buyers were technical teams weighing up a ready-made solution against building their own, and nobody had made the case for buying over building. Repositioning around that single idea was what turned the product around.
Before finding the answer, we need to be sure we're solving the right problem.
The Marketing Strategy Choices That Matter
Imagine a growing company with a differentiated product, strong customer advocacy, international potential and an established ecommerce business.
There is no shortage of things its marketing team could do: more paid acquisition, content, partnerships, new markets, creators, events, CRM, a brand campaign.
All might be sensible.
But a collection of sensible activities isn't a strategy.
The strategic questions sit above them.
Do we deepen penetration among existing customers or pursue an adjacent audience?
Do we protect a specialist position or broaden what the brand stands for?
Do we prioritise acquisition or retention?
Do we concentrate investment in our strongest market or accelerate international expansion?
What do we want customers to associate with us above everything else?
Where will growth come from, and how do we intend to win?
Those are the choices that matter.
How to Make Better Marketing Strategy Choices
This is where the fundamentals come back in.
They don't just help diagnose the situation. They provide the evidence against which we evaluate our options.
If we're considering an adjacent market, for example, we can ask: Is the market attractive? Is there a meaningful customer need? What does the competitive environment look like? Do we have the credibility and capabilities to win? Do the economics make sense? And does the opportunity move us towards our ambition?
The fundamentals don't make the choice for us.
They make the choice informed.
Because evidence rarely points neatly to one indisputably correct answer.
One path may have a high probability of success but limited upside. Another may offer a much bigger opportunity but require greater investment and carry considerably more risk.
That's where judgement comes in.
Strategy requires judgement because the future hasn't happened yet
Data can tell us a great deal about what is happening and what has happened.
Strategy requires a view about what could happen next.
That means balancing evidence with experience, pattern recognition, context, organisational capability, assumptions about the future and appetite for risk.
Experience can improve judgement. Seeing more situations - including decisions that failed - can make us better at recognising patterns and separating signal from noise.
But experience can also deceive us.
We notice evidence that supports what we already believe. We anchor on what worked before. And the more deeply we know our product or industry, the harder it can become to see it as a customer does.
Good judgement isn't intuition instead of evidence. Nor is it blindly following the data.
It is the ability to interpret evidence in context, challenge assumptions, recognise what we don't know and make a reasoned choice despite uncertainty.
In practice, that means developing habits that force us to test our thinking before we commit:
Pre-mortem the decision. Imagine the strategy has failed twelve months from now. Why? It surfaces risks that optimism can hide.
Steelman the alternative. Build the strongest possible case for the option you're not choosing. If you can't, you probably haven't stress-tested the one you prefer.
Separate facts from assumptions. What do we know? What are we assuming? And what evidence would change our minds?
None of this replaces judgement. It disciplines it.
Choosing means giving something up
This is the part organisations often find uncomfortable.
Most businesses don't lack opportunities. They have too many.
But money, time and attention are finite.
If we prioritise one customer segment, another receives less attention. If retention is the biggest opportunity, the next pound may not go into acquisition. If we want to own one distinctive idea in the customer's mind, we can't give ten other messages equal prominence.
A strategic priority without a corresponding deprioritisation is probably just an ambition.
Trade-offs turn choices into strategy.
Then build
Only now do tactics enter the picture.
Campaigns, content, media, events, partnerships, creators, ABM, sales enablement, ecommerce, CRM, PR; different strategies will require different combinations.
Tactics aren't less important. Brilliant strategy badly executed still fails.
But execution needs something to organise around.
Strategy determines where we will focus and how we intend to win. The marketing plan determines what we're going to do about it.
Without that distinction, a marketing strategy easily becomes a marketing activity plan: lots of perfectly reasonable things, without a clear explanation of why these things deserve the organisation's finite money, time and attention.
Different buildings, similar foundations
This is particularly interesting to me because much of my career has been in complex B2B technology.
A business selling enterprise technology through a long buying process involving multiple stakeholders clearly doesn't market in the same way as a consumer company selling directly through ecommerce.
Nor should it.
One may rely heavily on account-based marketing, partners, sales enablement and thought leadership. The other may lean towards retail, creators, community, performance media and CRM.
But underneath those differences, both need to answer the same fundamental questions.
Who are we trying to win with? Where will growth come from? What customer problem matters? What do we want to be known for? Why should customers choose us? Where can we win? What is constraining growth? Where should we allocate resources? What are we deliberately not prioritising?
Different buildings. Similar foundations.
So where does AI fit?
Everywhere, but not always in the same role.
In diagnosis, AI can accelerate research, synthesise customer feedback, interrogate data and surface patterns.
When developing options, it can act as a sparring partner: generating alternatives, exposing assumptions and identifying possibilities we may have missed.
When evaluating choices, it can help us apply the same discipline described above, at speed:
What evidence contradicts my preferred option?
Which assumptions am I treating as facts?
Make the strongest case for the alternative.
What would need to be true for this strategy to fail?
Used this way, AI isn't simply an efficiency tool. It can help us interrogate our judgement before we commit resources to it.
In execution and learning, its ability to create, personalise, analyse, test and optimise can dramatically increase both speed and capability.
But that creates a paradox.
We can become extraordinarily good at answering the wrong question
Ask AI how to improve paid acquisition and it can analyse performance, generate creative variants and identify optimisation opportunities.
But what if acquisition isn't the problem?
What if it's retention? Positioning? Awareness? The proposition itself?
We may become dramatically more efficient at solving something that shouldn't have been our priority.
The same applies in B2B. AI can help generate more leads and personalise content, but if opportunities aren't converting because customers don't see meaningful differentiation, putting more prospects into the funnel doesn't fix the underlying problem.
It simply feeds more customers into it.
AI gives marketing teams an unprecedented ability to do more. Strategy is the discipline that tells us what is worth doing, and what isn't.
Learn, then go around again
No strategic choice is permanently correct.
Every strategy contains assumptions about customers, competitors, markets and the future. So we need to know what evidence will tell us whether those assumptions are holding.
Measure. Learn. Challenge. Adapt.
AI can make that feedback loop faster. The principle hasn't changed.
The skeleton hasn't changed
AI is changing marketing profoundly.
But perhaps that makes the fundamentals more important, not less.
As our ability to do things expands, our ability to decide which things matter becomes more valuable.
Marketing strategy doesn't need to be mysterious:
Define the ambition.
Understand the fundamentals.
Diagnose the real problem or opportunity.
Identify the choices that matter.
Use evidence and judgement to choose.
Accept the trade-offs.
Build coherently around those choices.
Measure, learn and adapt.
The tools available to us are changing dramatically. The finished building will look different every time. The principles holding it up don't have to.
Comments