How Does Your Marketing Strategy Actually Work?

I started this series by asking where your marketing strategy lives - in the document, in the work, or in someone’s head. This question follows on from that one. Once you know where it lives, how does it actually work? I don’t mean what the strategy says. I mean how it turns into the work a team does on an ordinary Tuesday, and whether that is still true.

Picture a marketing function that looks in good shape. The process is refined, the team is capable and not just busy, and the briefs are tight enough that a planner and a creative could pick one up cold and know what has to be true for the work to succeed. Despite this, the CFO keeps asking why - why this direction, why this channel mix, why now. It’s not asked once as a sense-check, but as a standing feature of how every recommendation is received.

It’s tempting to read that as the same old problem of opinion dressed up as diligence, and sometimes it is. Look at Australian marketing right now, though, and the scrutiny starts to look fair. In Mi3 and the AMI’s most recent benchmark of Australian marketing leaders, a third (34%) were cutting their budgets, and revenue sat among the top KPIs they were measured against (Mi3 / AMI Marketing and Customer Benchmarks, 2024). I suspect that’s shifted since, and if anything the standard of proof has only gone up, so “trust me” no longer meets it.

Whether the CFO is right to keep asking depends on something most businesses rarely check, which is whether “refined”, “capable” and “tight” are still true, or whether they were true once and nobody has gone back to look.

In my experience a marketing strategy works through three things: the process the team follows, the people doing the work, and the partners they rely on. Any of them can drift without anyone deciding it should.

Recent research points the same way. A Gartner study found 84% of marketers experience high “collaboration drag” when working with other functions - too many meetings, too much feedback and unclear decision rights. Organisations with high drag were 37% less likely to hit their revenue goals, and investing in marketing talent cut that drag by 23%. How the process runs and how the people are developed show up directly in performance.

Take the process.

A process refined eighteen months ago was built around the platforms and tools of eighteen months ago. The global martech landscape has grown from roughly 150 products in 2011 to more than 15,000 now, so a process designed around last cycle’s stack dates faster than most people expect.

Then the people.

A team that was good when they were hired hasn’t necessarily been developed since, against what the role demands now. That gap tends to widen. In the same 2024 benchmark, only 35% of Australian marketing leaders said their teams were equipped for what was coming, and what the role requires has kept moving since.

Finally, the partners.

A brief that’s tight on paper still depends on the relationship behind it - whether the planner, the creative and the agency share the same idea of what good looks like, or are quietly running on habit and goodwill because nobody wants to be the one who rocks the boat. That relationship is changing too. Research for the In-House Agency Council found 78% of Australian marketers now work with in-house and external agency talent side by side, and agency relationships are being reshaped around it. IHAC has an interest in that finding, but even allowing for that, a description of a partnership that was accurate two years ago may not be accurate now.

Most business leaders I’ve spoken with put real effort into one of the three and leave the other two wherever they landed.

They retrain the people but never revisit the process.

They fix the process but don’t invest in the partnership with the agency executing it.

They tighten the brief but leave the team’s capability where it was.

From the outside the function looks strong, and scrutiny finds the gap anyway.

So a strategy can’t be checked once and defended. It needs some kind of regular rhythm in which someone looks at the process, the people and the partners against what the strategy needs, and makes changes when they no longer line up.

That rhythm is where a strategy actually works, or quietly stops working.

Last week’s essay made the point that some of the best strategic thinking comes from people who are rarely in the room when strategy is set. The same is true here. The people closest to the process and the partners usually notice the drift first. If the rhythm only involves the people who wrote the plan, it tends to confirm the plan.

There’s a simple question I’d put to any leadership team. When were the process, the team’s capability and each partner relationship last deliberately checked against the strategy, and who checked them? If the answers are “at the last planning cycle” and “the same people who wrote it”, the strategy may be working less well than the document suggests.

That leaves the hardest of the three questions, and the one I’ll come to next: how do you know your strategy is working?