Where Does Your Marketing Strategy Actually Live?

When a CEO wants to know whether marketing is on track, the question usually asked is some version of “do we have a strategy?” The answer is nearly always yes. There’s a document somewhere, it was probably approved, and it may well be good. But that question only checks that the paper exists.

A colleague put a different challenge to me last week. If you could open a conversation with a leadership team with one question, what would it be? The one I keep landing on is where the marketing strategy actually lives. Is it in the document, the work the team does each week, or is it in someone’s head?

Duolingo is a useful example of how far apart those can be. During the pandemic the company hired a recent graduate, Zaria Parvez, as a social media coordinator. TikTok wasn’t part of the job. After her first year she took the brand’s mostly dormant account on as an extra project, partly because she’d walked past the big Duo owl costume lying on the floor and thought there was something in it. By her own account the CEO wasn’t sure it would make any difference. The videos took off. In a little over four years the account went from around 50,000 followers to 16 million, and the “unhinged” tone that began as one junior person’s experiment is now central to how the brand presents itself.

Nobody wrote that strategy first. It showed up in the work and the plan caught up later. Henry Mintzberg described this decades ago as emergent strategy - the pattern you can see in what an organisation actually does, as distinct from what it set out to do. Most organisations have some of each.

I should say the Duolingo approach has plenty of critics, and I don’t disagree with many of them. One size doesn’t fit all, and in my view a lot of the brands that rushed to copy the “unhinged” tone found it didn’t suit them. It also proved fragile. When the CEO announced in April 2025 that Duolingo was going “AI-first”, the audience the owl had won over turned on the brand, and it reportedly lost more than 400,000 TikTok followers. Mark Ritson has since argued that moving away from the owl towards paid creators has made things worse.

What I take from it has less to do with the owl. The first lesson is about who gets to shape strategy. The most valuable idea Duolingo had in years came from someone who, in most organisations, would never be in the room when strategy is set - the person closest to the audience, doing the work every day. Good planning should go looking for those people and give them a real say, rather than waiting for them to ask permission.

The second is about what happens to a strategy once it’s written. If Duolingo’s marketing plan had been written once, approved and put in a drawer, it would have been no help when TikTok took off, and no help when the audience turned in 2025. A strategy that can’t keep up with what’s happening in the market stops being relevant very quickly, however well it reads.

In my experience the gap between the two runs in both directions. Some businesses have a well-made strategy that sits in a folder. It went to the board and it reads well, but the briefs, budgets and campaigns of the last six months bear little relationship to it. Boards tend to see the document, so from the top it looks fine.

The other direction gets less attention, and I think it’s more common. The team is working to a clear strategy. You can see it in who they target, what they say and where the money goes, but it has never been written down, or the written version is two years old and nobody opens it. I’ve run marketing this way myself. The direction was well understood and it showed up in nearly everything we did, but it lived with me and a few others rather than on paper. It took me some time to appreciate why that matters.

A strategy that only exists in practice holds up well while the same people are in the room. It gets shaky when one of them leaves, when a new agency needs a brief, or when the CFO asks why the budget is split the way it is and the honest answer is “because that’s how we’ve always done it, and it works”. It’s also hard to improve, because the assumptions underneath it were never written down for anyone to test. Duolingo’s experiment worked partly because the person doing the work was trusted to keep going and the results were visible quickly. Most marketing teams don’t have that short line between the work and the people who set direction.

If you’re a CEO, I’d suggest asking your marketing lead where the strategy lives, then looking at a handful of recent briefs and campaigns alongside the document. If they tell the same story, good. If they don’t, the conversation worth having is about which of them is right.

If you lead marketing, it’s worth asking yourself the same question before anyone else does. If your real strategy is ahead of your paperwork, writing it down is how the rest of the business gets to see your thinking and not only your output. Just don’t write it once and file it.

If you’re not sure where your strategy lives, that could be the place to start.