Everyone Thinks They Have a Strategy. Most Don’t.
Strategy isn’t a deck. It isn’t a channel plan. And it definitely isn’t “doing more.”
If you’ve worked in marketing for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard this sentence: “We need a new strategy.”
Sometimes it’s said with excitement. Sometimes with panic. Often after a campaign hasn’t worked.
But most businesses that say they have a strategy… don’t.
They have plans. They have activity. They have a calendar full of campaigns, posts, emails, launches, and “urgent” requests. What they don’t have is a clear set of choices that guide all of that activity.
In this episode of Canned the Marketing Podcast, hosts Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill dig into what strategy actually is, what it absolutely is not, and why so many marketers end up stuck in tactical chaos instead of strategic clarity.
This is not a theoretical conversation. It’s grounded in lived experience, hard earned lessons, and real examples of brands getting strategy right (and very wrong).
The core misunderstanding: strategy is not a document
One of the biggest traps marketers fall into is treating strategy as a thing you produce rather than a set of decisions you make.
Strategy is not:
A 60 page PowerPoint deck
A media plan
A list of campaigns
A social content calendar
A vision statement
A set of KPIs or targets
Those are all outputs. Strategy comes before them.
At its simplest, strategy is a set of choices made in advance that determine:
Where you will play
How you will win
And, just as importantly, where you will not play
That last part is the one most organisations struggle with.
Because strategy creates focus, but focus requires trade offs.
And trade offs mean saying no.
Why “doing more” feels good but achieves less
There’s a false sense of achievement that comes with activity.
Sending the email.
Launching the campaign.
Posting the content.
Turning on another channel.
It feels productive. It looks busy. And in many businesses, busyness is rewarded more than clarity.
But as Ben points out in the episode, if you don’t decide your direction deliberately, it will be decided for you by your inbox.
Without strategy, marketers end up reacting to:
The loudest stakeholder
The newest channel
The latest trend
The most recent failure
This is how brands end up jumping from Meta to TikTok to search to influencers with no unifying idea, no consistency, and no compounding effect.
Strategy creates simplicity, not complexity
A good strategy does one thing exceptionally well.
It makes everything else easier.
If your strategy is clear, it should simplify:
Decision making
Prioritisation
Channel choices
Messaging
Campaign planning
If your “strategy” makes marketing feel more complicated, more chaotic, or more fragmented, it’s probably not a strategy at all.
As Steph puts it, strategy should act as a north star. The destination doesn’t change every year. The tactics might, but the direction stays consistent.
Marketing strategy cannot exist without business strategy
One of the most common mistakes marketers make is building a marketing strategy in isolation.
Marketing strategy is not separate from business strategy. It sits inside it.
Before you can answer marketing questions like:
Who are we targeting
What are we saying
Where are we showing up
You need clarity on business fundamentals:
Who does the business serve
How does it make money
Where does it compete
Where does it choose not to compete
What does winning actually look like
When marketers are excluded from business strategy conversations, they’re forced to guess. That’s when you see random campaigns, constant repositioning, and reactive channel hopping.
Being “at the table” matters, but so does asking better questions when you’re not.
The cascade of choices: strategy on a page
One of the most practical frameworks discussed in the episode is the cascade of choices.
At its core, it answers five questions:
What is our ambition?
Why do we exist and what does winning mean?Where will we play?
Which markets, categories, customers, and geographies?How will we win?
What makes us different? Why should customers choose us?What capabilities do we need?
Skills, systems, and resources required to deliver.What management systems support this?
Measurement, incentives, and processes.
Marketing plays most heavily in the middle of the cascade, shaping:
Customer insight
Target segments
Positioning
Value propositions
The entire strategy should be explainable on a single page. The detail can live elsewhere, but clarity has to come first.
Diagnosis before action: the step most teams skip
Both Ben and Steph stress the importance of spending more time diagnosing before acting.
Good strategy starts with deep understanding:
The customer
The category
The competitive landscape
Your own product
If you’re marketing a consumer product, you should have used it. Tasted it. Bought it. Seen where it sits on the shelf. Understood why someone chooses it over alternatives.
Too many marketers know less about their product than their customers do.
Consistency beats cleverness every time
Great brands are not built by constant reinvention. They’re built by consistency over time.
The episode highlights brands like:
Bunnings, with a decade plus commitment to DIY, value, and helpfulness
Chemist Warehouse, unapologetically chaotic but ruthlessly clear on price and range
American Express, positioned as a membership brand focused on high value customers, benefits, and experiences rather than discounts
These brands evolve tactically but remain strategically consistent.
Strategy is not about being clever.
It’s about being clear, then staying the course long enough for it to work.
When strategy is missing, everything feels urgent
One of the most telling signs a business lacks strategy is constant urgency.
“We need to reach a million people”
“Let’s just try TikTok”
“Meta didn’t work, pull it”
Without a clear strategy, every idea feels equally important. Every channel feels like a silver bullet. Every campaign is judged in isolation.
Strategy gives you the confidence to ask better questions instead of reacting to noise.
Practical takeaways for marketers at any level
If you’re early in your career:
Read good strategy
Study brands with long term consistency
Ask “why” more often than “how”
If you’re mid career:
Push for clarity on business objectives
Understand how your role ladders into business strategy
Spend more time on diagnosis, less on output
If you’re senior:
Fewer campaigns, better executed
Protect consistency
Say no more often than yes
And at every level, remember this litmus test:
If your strategy doesn’t make marketing simpler, it probably isn’t a strategy.
Strategy is for everyone
Strategy isn’t reserved for CEOs, CMOs, or people with MBAs.
Anyone can engage with strategy. Anyone can question it. Anyone can use it to do their job better.
And when strategy is done well, it doesn’t feel flashy.
It feels calm.
Clear.
Focused.
Which is exactly how good marketing should feel.
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If you enjoyed this, share it with a colleague who says they “just want to do strategy” 😉