In the early days at Outmark, we saw so many fancy three-ring marketing plan binders that we lost count. They were all neatly organized, color-coded, and on a shelf, literally collecting dust. Today, marketing plans are easier to lose because they’re now buried on a shared drive somewhere.
We’ve had companies tell us they have a marketing plan and then struggle to put their hands on it. Someone finds a version, but nobody is sure whether it’s final. Another person has a brand style guide. There are old campaign plans, budgets, research, and presentations scattered around. The person who did some of the planning work may not even be with the company anymore.
And plenty of companies we talk with don’t have a marketing plan to lose. They have pieces. They have marketing activity, sometimes quite a bit of it. But the thinking that connects the work—who matters most, what the company wants to accomplish, what it believes about the market, where it intends to concentrate its time and money, and what it has decided not to do—either never made it into a plan, or it has simply disappeared.
That’s why we think the old “marketing plan gathering dust on a shelf” cliché, while true, misses something bigger. The problem isn’t the shelf. It’s treating strategy as something that can be completed and stored. Strategy is more deliberate than that: a discipline for making choices, acting on them, paying attention to what happens, and using what we learn to make the next choices better. The document has an important role in all of that. It just isn’t the strategy.
Writing it down gives us something to learn from
One argument against having a plan is that the market moves too fast: the plan will be out of date as soon as we finish it. Respectfully, that’s hogwash. A useful plan isn’t an obstacle to responding to the market. It gives us a way to respond with some context. “We want more leads” is an aspiration. Deciding which customers we want more of, why they should choose us, what we’re prepared to spend to reach them, what we’re going to try, who owns the work, what we’re not going to fund, and then following through requires considerably more thought.
A useful plan captures those choices and some of the underlying assumptions. This is what we believe about our customers. This is the opportunity we see. This is where we think we have an advantage. This is what we’re going to invest in. This is what we expect to happen. Writing it down gives us a baseline but also a tool for dealing with what the real world throws at us. When something changes, we can ask whether it changes an assumption, a priority, or simply the way we execute the plan.
MIT Sloan Management Review made a similar argument in its article Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution. It challenges the traditional linear idea of strategy as “plan, then execute” and describes strategy as a loop: make sense of the situation, make choices, make things happen, and revise based on new information. The full article currently costs $7.95, so we’ll save you the eight bucks: strategy is indeed a loop, not a line.
The plan gives us a reference point for deciding what new information actually means. Without the reference, the campaign performs poorly, so we end it. Sales asks for something, so we make it. A competitor launches something interesting, so we respond. An executive comes back from a conference excited about a new idea, so it becomes a priority. Maybe those are smart adjustments. Maybe they’re reactions. Without knowing what we believed and intended to do in the first place, it’s tough to tell the difference.
Good strategy gets better by being wrong
We once worked with a second-generation business whose founder had built a highly respected company and had also been a recognizable part of its brand. People knew him, trusted him, and associated his personality with the business. The next generation continued with the owner at the center of their ads. The company was spending real money on media, but it wasn’t getting the response it wanted.
Someone within the organization had advocated doing more strategic work before investing more in advertising, but initially the company decided to invest more in ads rather than planning. But after a disappointing stretch, we got the opportunity to do the research and planning work first.
The owner agreed to customer research, and we suggested he observe the focus groups. So he sat behind the glass while actual decision-makers in his market looked at the company’s existing advertising and talked about it. It was uncomfortable because the advertising wasn’t creating the impression leadership thought it was creating. Putting the owner at the center of the message wasn’t carrying forward the founder’s old brand magic. Some of the messages the company believed were reassuring weren’t landing that way at all.
Meanwhile, the people in the room were much more interested in their own problems and what they needed from a company like this than they were in hearing more about the company itself. To the owner’s credit, he didn’t like what he heard, but he liked what we learned.
We supplemented what we heard qualitatively with broader research, worked through the positioning and messaging, and developed advertising around what mattered to the people making the buying decisions. The important part of that story isn’t that research is good or that we were right. It’s that the company allowed reality to challenge long-standing assumptions it had been investing in.
Good strategy requires being willing to hear bad news
The focus-group story is an extreme example, but the underlying problem is common: strategy gets harder when new information challenges something people inside the company already believe. We’ve worked with companies that didn’t know their own strengths. In one case, the people inside the organization were remarkably humble about how they stacked up against longstanding competitors. Customer input told a different story: the market valued them more highly than they valued themselves.
We’ve seen the reverse, too. Companies can be intensely proud of parts of their marketing that are actually liabilities. Sometimes the person who hired us created the work we’re recommending they change. Sometimes an executive loves writing copy or has a real affection for design, and part of our job is helping separate personal preference from what the company and its customers actually need. That can be uncomfortable, especially when someone has invested years in the thing customers are now questioning.
Strategy that only collects evidence supporting what leadership already believes has little value. Sometimes the market validates us. Sometimes it tells us we’re better than we thought. Sometimes it tells us the favorite headline, campaign, service, assumption, or sacred cow isn’t doing what we think it is.
The best strategy happens when we’re able to learn not just from the things we like, but also from the things we don’t.
Some of the best marketing intelligence doesn’t come from the marketing department
Customer research is one way to learn, but not the only one. Sales hears objections every day. Account managers know what customers keep asking for. Customer service sees the trouble tickets. Operations knows where delivery gets messy. Website behavior tells us what people are looking for. Email responses from happy or frustrated customers can tell us things that an email open rate report seldom will.
Those are marketing inputs, whether or not they live in the marketing department. We’ve seen companies discover meaningful patterns in customer problems they had been treating as individual service issues. If trouble tickets are rising around something the company considers a strength, that’s worth paying attention to. If complaints cluster around an area connected to the brand promise, that’s more than an operations problem.
The same is true in the other direction. Customers may repeatedly praise something marketing barely mentions. Sales may discover that buyers consistently care about an issue that received two sentences in the plan. A web page we considered secondary may attract disproportionate interest.
We say “strategy should have ears” throughout the organization, because the people closest to customers are constantly collecting info, whether we call it research or not.
That doesn’t mean every anecdote deserves a strategy meeting. One salesperson hearing something once isn’t market research, and one bad campaign doesn’t prove the strategy is wrong. We need ways for useful signals to travel rather than die with the person who heard them, along with enough judgment to distinguish a meaningful pattern from an interesting afternoon anecdote.
You can borrow an idea, but you can’t borrow a strategy
We’ve had companies bring us marketing plans from organizations where someone used to work and essentially say, “We’d like something like this.” Our own website was once copied nearly word for word. And we’ve seen companies look at a successful competitor and conclude that whatever that company is doing must be the smart thing to do.
They may be copying something that really is strategic—just not for them. The other company made its choices based on its customers, capabilities, market position, competitors, reputation, resources, and ambitions. Remove that context, and we’re left with the visible output of somebody else’s thinking.
Inspiration is useful. We see ideas all the time that make us think differently about a client’s business or our own. A planning framework can keep us from forgetting a useful question. Examples can help people see possibilities they wouldn’t have considered otherwise. But planning isn’t paint-by-number, and a template can’t make choices for us.
Strategy has to start with our reality, not somebody else’s answer. Sometimes that means preserving good strategic work that’s already been done. Sometimes we look around and discover that the foundational work simply isn’t there and needs to be built. Either way, copying the finished product skips the part that made it strategic.
Strategy has to show up in the budget
Strategy becomes very real when it’s time to build the budget. The leader of one area wants more advertising. Another wants greater support for events. Sales has requests. Leadership has ideas. Everyone can make a reasonable case for why their thing matters. And that real estate above the fold on the website can become a real battleground.
But equal enthusiasm doesn’t mean equal opportunity. A lower-margin part of the business, for example, may be asking for a disproportionate share of the marketing budget. Without clear priorities and leadership willing to make trade-offs, the money can end up following the strongest internal advocate rather than the strongest business case. The problem isn’t that people advocate for their part of the business. They should. The problem is expecting the budget to sort out priorities that leadership never did.
This is one reason the 2025 McKinsey article How Strategy Champions win from insight to strategy execution caught our attention. Its researchers studied strategy practices and capabilities at more than 400 companies and found that the biggest gap between the stronger and weaker groups was not strategy design. It was what McKinsey calls mobilization: translating strategic choices into organizational readiness. The stronger group was better at turning strategy into concrete initiatives, reallocating resources around it, and embedding it into plans and budgets.
In other words, the strategy had something to do. A plan can say almost anything; the harder evidence comes later. What gets funded? Who owns it? What gets people’s time? What gets protected when money gets tight? What has to be cut so something more important can happen?
Learning isn’t the same as changing our minds every Tuesday
If strategy is supposed to adapt, we need to be careful what we mean by adapting. Marketing throws off so much information. Some of it matters. Some of it is noise. And we’ve learned that almost any shiny new idea can be dressed up as “what we’re learning.”
This is another place where documenting our assumptions helps. Instead of simply asking whether something worked, we can ask what we thought would happen and why. Did the evidence challenge the assumption? Did execution fail? Did we learn something about the audience? Is there enough evidence to change direction, or do we need to give the work more time?
The McKinsey research mentioned above gets unusually specific about this. The stronger-performing companies in its study were better at testing, learning, and adapting during execution, and the researchers connect that ability to clearly documenting the assumptions and rationale behind strategic choices. If we know why we made a choice, we have a much better chance of recognizing when that reason no longer holds.
That’s a more useful version of flexibility than simply being willing to change. Sometimes the right response to new information is a major shift. Sometimes it’s a tactical adjustment. And sometimes the most strategic thing we can do is leave the plan alone and let it keep working.
“Give it a try” may be the most strategic thing you can do
Not every decision deserves months of analysis. We’ve had a small example of this in our own marketing recently with a couple of golf tournaments. They weren’t something we would automatically have put near the top of our marketing list, but the investment was manageable, and there was enough reason to give them a shot.
Early indications were productive enough to get our attention, but the jury is still out on exactly what role they should play for us. That’s part of why we like the example. We didn’t need to declare golf tournaments a brilliant new strategy. We tried something, watched what happened, and learned enough to keep paying attention.
Marketing needs room for experiments like that because if we require certainty before we act, we don’t get much new information. At Outmark, we try to bring a growth mindset to our work: results we like are useful, and results we don’t like can be useful too, as long as we learn from them. Some things will work better than expected. Some won’t work at all. We don’t expect 1,000 batting average; it’s to keep getting smarter about what deserves the next swing. A plan should create enough focus to keep us from chasing everything without becoming so precious that we’re afraid to try anything.
The plan should keep the thinking alive
One of the simplest ways we describe this at Outmark is Plan. Do. Review. It isn’t a project-management technique so much as a habit we think good marketing requires all the time. We plan because deliberate choices matter. We do because choices face the real world. We review because the real world gets a vote.
Review can come from performance data, customer research, sales conversations, trouble tickets, financial results, something we tried, or something we didn’t expect. It can confirm what we believed or expose something we missed. Either result is useful if we’re paying attention, and either result can feed the next round of planning and doing.
MIT Sloan described strategy as an iterative loop rather than a linear march from planning to execution. McKinsey’s newer research arrives at related territory from a different direction: stronger strategy practices connect choices to resources and action, then keep testing assumptions and adapting as execution unfolds. That’s pretty close to what we’ve seen over the years.
The marketing plan is the point-in-time strategic record of what we’ve decided and why. We need it, and we should be able to find it. People doing the work should understand the parts that matter to them, and the commitments inside it should show up in budgets, responsibilities, and actual work. Then the plan has to keep coming back into the conversation as the work teaches us something.
Strategy isn’t the document. It’s what happens when those decisions meet the real world, and are built to learn from what happens next. Because the world always pushes back.
