The Uncomfortable Truth Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Here’s a question that should keep every CMO awake at night: When was the last time you could explain, with genuine confidence, why your marketing actually works?
Not which tactics drove clicks. Not which campaign generated leads. But why your fundamental approach, the strategic architecture underlying everything you do, creates a sustainable competitive advantage for your brand.
If you hesitated, you’re not alone. Marketers spent the last two decades optimizing ourselves into strategic irrelevance.
The Great Inversion: How Tactics Became Strategy
In 1960, Theodore Levitt wrote “Marketing Myopia” for Harvard Business Review, warning that companies fail when they define themselves by their products rather than the customer needs they serve. Railroads died because they thought they were in the train business, not the transportation business.
Today, we’re committing an even more fundamental error: we think we’re in the tactics business when we should be in the value creation business.
Consider this uncomfortable reality: Most marketing departments today are organized around channels like social media managers, SEO specialists, email marketers, content creators. We’ve built entire careers around platform proficiency. But platforms are tools, not strategies. As marketing professor Mark Ritson bluntly noted in a 2023 Marketing Week column, “You can’t be ‘good at Instagram.’ You can only be good at marketing, and use Instagram to do it.”
Yet walk into most marketing team meetings, and what do you hear? Discussions about algorithm changes, ad platform updates, content calendars, and engagement metrics. Strategic questions like “Who are we targeting and why? What distinctive value do we offer? How does this build long-term brand equity?”, get relegated to annual planning sessions, if they’re addressed at all.
The Metrics That Made Us Stupid
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable: digital marketing’s greatest strength became its fatal flaw.
For the first time in history, we could measure everything. Click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. Finally, we could prove our value! Except we proved the wrong things.
Byron Sharp’s research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has consistently demonstrated that brands grow primarily through mental and physical availability, being thought of and being easy to buy. His book How Brands Grow fundamentally challenged the performance marketing orthodoxy, yet from what we see, most marketers still optimize for immediate conversion rather than long-term salience.
The data is damning: According to work by Les Binet and Peter Field, documented in The Long and the Short of It, the ideal marketing budget split is roughly 60% brand building and 40% activation. Today, most companies have at least inverted this ratio, driven by short-term pressure and the seductive measurability of direct response tactics.
The result? We’re harvesting demand rather than creating it. We’re efficient at converting the bottom 5% of the funnel while ignoring the 95% who aren’t ready to buy today but will be ready tomorrow, and won’t remember we exist. This is what we refer to as the Holy Grail of marketing. Will we ever be able too predict the moment of purchase, and cut out all the rest? Will we realize that consumers need to trust the brand they buy, in order to “cash in” on that ability to get the timing right?
The Digital Native Delusion
In 2025, many marketing departments are led by professionals whose entire careers have been digital-first. They’ve never bought a print ad, never planned a television campaign, never thought about distribution beyond Google’s algorithm. This isn’t a criticism of these individuals, they’re responding rationally to the world they entered. But has it created a dangerous blind spot?
Traditional marketers understood something fundamental: you must create a distinctive position in the customer’s mind before you can activate demand.
David Ogilvy didn’t just write clever copy; he built brands on foundational strategic principles. Rosser Reeves’s “Unique Selling Proposition” wasn’t about SEO keywords; it was about owning a meaningful differentiation, about understanding what makes a brand stand out in a crowded, noisy marketplace.
Digital natives often skip this foundation entirely, moving straight to growth hacking, viral tactics, and performance optimization. They confuse awareness (impressions) with salience (being thought of in buying situations). They mistake engagement metrics for emotional connection.
The problem compounds because success metrics reward this approach, in the short term. You can build a million-follower Instagram presence without a coherent brand strategy. You can drive impressive ROAS on Facebook ads without understanding why customers actually choose you. Until suddenly, you can’t.
Customer acquisition costs rise, platform algorithms change, competitors copy your tactics, and you realize you’ve built a house on sand, or even quicksand.
The Questions You’re Probably Not Asking
If this critique stings, good. Here’s how to diagnose whether your marketing strategy is actually strategic:
The Substitution Test: If a competitor could execute your marketing plan by simply swapping logos, you don’t have a strategy. You have tactics. Real strategy emerges from distinctive choices about where to compete and how to win.
The Channel Independence Test: Remove your top marketing channel entirely. Does your core value proposition still make sense? If your “strategy” evaporates without Instagram or Google Ads, you’re platform-dependent, not strategically grounded.
The Time Horizon Test: What percentage of your marketing investment won’t show measurable returns for 6-12 months? If the answer is less than 50%, you’re likely under-investing in brand building. Sharp’s research shows category penetration, not loyalty, drives growth, and penetration requires sustained mental availability. Brands who are no longer seen disappear at the moment of purchase. (95% of the time)
The Distinctive Asset Test: Created by Jenni Romaniuk at Ehrenberg-Bass, this challenges whether you’ve built recognizable brand assets. Can customers identify your brand without seeing your logo? Do you own distinctive colours, sounds, characters, or taglines? If everything you create is “on brand” but nothing is distinctively yours, you have a consistency problem masquerading as brand building.
The Segmentation Reality Test: Do your customer segments drive meaningfully different strategies, or are they PowerPoint fiction? Most segmentation models gather dust after the consulting project ends. If you’re not actually making different choices for different segments, you’re wasting time on false precision.
What Thinking Strategically Actually Looks Like
Real marketing strategy starts with uncomfortable honesty about three questions:
1. Who are we choosing NOT to serve?
Strategy is about choice, and choice requires sacrifice. Yet most marketers define their target audience so broadly it’s meaningless. “Millennials interested in wellness” isn’t a strategy; it’s a demographic checkbox.
Compare this to how Dollar Shave Club entered the market. They explicitly weren’t for men who viewed shaving as a luxury ritual. They weren’t for people who believed the latest five-blade technology mattered. They chose a specific customer with a specific frustration and built everything around that choice. The viral video was brilliant, but it worked because it was rooted in strategic clarity.
2. What customer job are we actually hired to do?
Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to Be Done” framework forces clarity about functional, emotional, and social dimensions of customer needs. People don’t buy drill bits; they buy quarter-inch holes. More precisely, they buy the feeling of being competent enough to hang their daughter’s artwork on the wall.
Most marketers can describe their product features in exhausting detail but struggle to articulate the progress customers are trying to make in their lives. This is backwards. The features are your answer; the job is the question. If you don’t understand the question, your answer is irrelevant no matter how well you promote it.
3. What will we do consistently over time that competitors can’t or won’t copy?
This is where most strategies collapse. Real competitive advantage comes from capabilities, culture, or structural position, things that compound over time and are difficult to replicate.
Trader Joe’s doesn’t win because of superior social media tactics. They win because their entire operating model, limited SKUs, private label focus, unique store experience, treasure hunt merchandising, is internally consistent and mutually reinforcing. Competitors can’t copy one element without copying the whole system.
What’s your equivalent? If your answer involves being “more innovative” or “more customer-focused,” you don’t have an answer. Those are aspirations, not strategies.
The Synthesis: Integrating Timeless Principles With Modern Capabilities
Here’s the paradox: digital marketing tools are revolutionary, but the strategic questions they answer haven’t changed since the 1950s.
Google Analytics can tell you which pages people visit, but it can’t tell you what problem they were trying to solve when they searched.
Marketing automation can nurture leads through a funnel, but it can’t create the distinctive positioning that makes people choose you in the first place.
Social listening tools can track brand mentions, but they can’t build the emotional meaning that makes a brand worth mentioning.
The most sophisticated marketers today use modern tools to answer timeless questions:
From: “How do we get more Instagram followers?”
To: “What mental associations do we need to build for long-term category growth, and how can Instagram contribute to that?”
From: “What’s our email open rate?”
To: “Are we providing genuine value that deepens customer relationships, and is email the right medium for that value?”
From: “How do we rank higher in search?”
To: “What questions are customers asking at different stages of their journey, and how do we become the authoritative answer?”
Notice the shift? Modern tactics in service of strategic clarity, not tactics as strategy.
The Uncomfortable Prescription
If you’ve read this far and feel defensive, consider that feeling carefully. Defensiveness often signals proximity to truth.
Here’s what needs to happen, and it won’t be comfortable:
Audit your actual time allocation. For one month, track how much time your marketing team spends on strategic thinking versus tactical execution versus operational firefighting. If less than 20% of time goes to strategy, you’re in crisis mode pretending to be in growth mode.
Kill your vanity metrics. Stop reporting follower counts, impressions, and engagement rates in leadership meetings unless you can draw a clear line to business outcomes. These metrics seduce us into confusing activity with progress.
Resurrect the creative brief. Before any campaign, any content series, any initiative, write a one-page document answering: What’s the strategic objective? Who’s the audience? What’s the single-minded proposition? What do we want them to think, feel, or do? What’s the reason to believe? If you can’t complete this exercise, you’re not ready to execute.
Institute a “why” requirement. Every tactical request must answer: Why this channel? Why this message? Why this audience? Why now? If the answer is “because we’ve always done it” or “because the platform rep recommended it,” kill the initiative.
Create a strategy council. Bring together your most senior practitioners, regardless of age or channel expertise, and give them a mandate to challenge tactical plans against strategic principles. Their job is to be the organizational conscience asking, “Does this actually build long-term competitive advantage?” “Are we doing this FOR our customer or TO them?
Invest in strategic education. Not another platform certification. Not another growth hacking workshop. Real marketing strategy: positioning theory, behavioural economics, brand building, competitive strategy. Make this mandatory, not optional.
The Path Forward: It’s Not Either/Or
Here’s what this critique is not: It’s not a rejection of digital marketing. It’s not a nostalgic call to return to 1980s mass media. It’s not a claim that measurement doesn’t matter.
It’s a wake-up call that we’ve let the pendulum swing too far. We’ve become so enamoured with what we can measure that we’ve forgotten what we’re trying to build and who we are trying to touch.
The marketers who will win the next decade are those who synthesize both worlds: the strategic rigour and long-term thinking of traditional marketing combined with the precision, agility, and measurability of digital capabilities.
They’ll use programmatic advertising to build distinctive brand assets, not just retarget cart abandoners. They’ll leverage social media to deepen emotional brand meaning, not just generate viral moments. They’ll employ marketing automation to deliver personalized value, not just scale generic messaging. They will recognize fraudulent online activities and take measures to eliminate them.
Most importantly, they’ll be able to answer a simple question with absolute clarity: “What is our marketing strategy, and why will it create a sustainable competitive advantage?”
If you can’t answer that question right now, not with a list of tactics, but with a coherent theory of how you’ll win, then it’s time to stop optimizing and start thinking.
The emperor has no clothes. The question is: will you be the one brave enough to say it out loud in your organization?
Your Move
Schedule a meeting with your team this week. Put away the dashboard. Turn off the Slack notifications. And ask yourselves these questions:
What are we actually trying to build over the next five years?
What customer truth are we uniquely positioned to serve?
What would have to be true for our current approach to deliver that outcome?
What evidence do we have that those things are actually true?
The answers might be uncomfortable. But discomfort is where growth begins, for brands, and for the marketers who build them.
The digital revolution gave us unprecedented tools. Now it’s time to remember what we’re supposed to be building with them.
