Stop Calling Everything a Strategy
Strategy is a funny word.
It reminds me of Forrest Gump and shrimp. Shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes. Except swap shrimp for strategy and you've got the average business plan: positioning strategy, product strategy, channel strategy, shopper marketing strategy, growth strategy, promotional strategy, co-manufacturing strategy, innovation strategy.
You get the idea. Strategy gets bolted onto almost everything, which is exactly where the trouble starts.
Stop Calling It a Strategy
Webster defines strategy as a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal, usually over a long period of time. Good enough. I prefer a more actionable version inspired by AG Lafley’s Playing to Win — the Who, What, How, and Where that will achieve your goal. Same idea, but simpler. And here's the thing about both definitions: there's only one. Singular. Not a family of them living in different departments.
So when I meet with companies and see a corporate strategy sitting next to a brand strategy sitting next to a go-to-market strategy, all coexisting peacefully in separate decks, I know we have a problem. Not because any one of those documents is wrong. Because the fact that they're separate tells me the business doesn't actually have a strategy. It has a collection of plans.
The Confusion Is Understandable. It's Also Expensive.
Here's how it usually happens. A founder builds something that works. The product is good, the mission is real, the early customers find them almost by instinct. Then the business starts to scale, and with scale comes pressure — to professionalize, to bring in functional expertise, to build out departments. Marketing hires a CMO who wants a brand strategy. Sales hires a VP who wants a channel strategy. Finance wants a growth strategy. Everyone is executing against something. Nobody is executing against the same thing.
I've spent twenty years in and around this problem — as a marketer, as an operator, as someone who has sat in enough of those rooms to know that the strategies multiplying across the org chart are usually symptoms of something missing at the center. Not a lack of ambition. Not a lack of talent. A lack of a singular, clearly defined answer to the only question that actually matters: What are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to get there? That's it.
One question. One answer. Everything else flows from it or it doesn't belong.
Brand Strategy Is Not a Marketing Problem
This is the part that tends to make marketers uncomfortable, coming from someone who spent a long time being one.
Brand strategy is not a deliverable that lives in the marketing department. It is not a positioning document or a messaging framework or a creative brief, though it should inform all of those things. Brand strategy, done right, is business strategy. It is the articulation of who you are, what you offer, how you deliver it, and who you serve — and it should be embedded in every function of the business, not handed off once the deck is approved.
The companies I've seen get this right tend to start from the same place: the inherent strengths of the founder, the product, or the mission. Usually not all three. One or two of those become the connective tissue around which everything else is built. What we offer. How we deliver it. Who we serve. Where we connect with them. Those four choices are not a marketing exercise. They're the operating system. And when they're clear, every other decision in the business — hiring, pricing, channel, innovation — gets easier, because you have something real to run them against.
When they're not clear, or when they're defined differently in different departments, you get drift.
And drift in a founder-led brand that's moving fast is particularly dangerous, because the pace can make it look like momentum when it's actually just motion.
If It Doesn't Cascade, It Isn't Strategy
Here's the test I use. If you have a new strategy — brand, channel, growth, whatever noun is in front of it — and it is not visibly changing how almost every department operates, it isn't a strategy. It's a marketing campaign. I love a good campaign. I've built a lot of them. But a campaign is not a strategy, and confusing the two is one of the most common and costly mistakes I see fast-growing brands make.
Real strategy cascades. It shows up in how you hire and who you keep. It shows up in what you build and what you stop building. It shows up in which customers you say yes to and which ones you walk away from. It changes the shape of the business, not just the messaging around it.
The allure of the noun strategy — the XYZ strategy, the standalone plan for a particular problem — is that it feels like progress. It is organized, it is actionable, it is presentable in a board meeting. But if it doesn't connect back to a singular goal, a clear picture of where you're going and why, it is just a plan. Plans are fine. Businesses need them. But don't confuse them for the thing that holds everything together.
The question worth sitting with isn't whether your business has a strategy. It's whether all the strategies you think you have are actually the same one.
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