How to work out if you’re a strategic marketer

It has been a rough couple of decades for marketing. The millennium began with high hopes that digital channels were putting within reach the long-promised nirvana of one-to-one marketing, and increased measurability would finally make the business value of marketing incontestable.

It is a tragic irony that the pursuit of marketing ROI – with its emphasis on maximising short-term performance – has accelerated the decline in the perception of the strategic contribution of marketing.

“Strategic” is an overused adjective that is often used in a way that means no more than the described activity is important. But what makes something strategic, as opposed to merely important?

The strategy literature suggests there are four hallmarks of strategy:

1. It focuses on the drivers of long-term competitive advantage;
2. It addresses things at the systems level, and therefore dealing with complex interactions between multiple factors or actors;
3. It involves making decisions under conditions of imperfect information;
4. it requires making commitments that, once made, are hard to reverse.

In an earlier article, I described the challenge of marketing as being the identification of potential revenue and its transformation into possible revenue, then probable revenue and, finally, into predictable revenue.

In another column about financial fluency, I described how marketers should not become accountants by abandoning the customer-centric definition of value in favour of finance’s cost-centric definition of value. Yet this is exactly what we have done by accepting ROI (a short-term financial ratio) as the measure of effective marketing.

So how do we reclaim the high ground and demonstrate the strategic contribution of marketing. How we contribute to long-term competitive advantage; business coherence; wise decision-making; and distinctive positioning?

This article puts forward three tests by which marketers can evaluate whether the work they are doing is truly strategic.

Test 1: Value creation – integrating marketing with finance

The definition of value depends on whether you are consuming it or producing it.

To a consumer, value is the anticipated benefits relative to the price (marketers understand this well); to a producer, it is the price relative to the full costs of production (finance people understand this well).

Sustainable business success depends on the integration of these two perspectives into a strategy that optimises the ratio between your internal capabilities/costs and the customer benefits you deliver.

Marketers provide the insight about market demand – what benefits customers are seeking, and at what price. Finance understands the costs involved in producing the products and services that will deliver the desired benefits. Neither discipline has the complete picture.

This means marketers need to understand enough about the cost and margin structure of their businesses to be able to identify how to deliver profitable growth. And it means finance needs to understand there is such a thing as “good” costs – ones that deliver a benefit for which the customer is happy to pay a premium.

Implication: Your marketing is strategic when you can articulate how you are creating a distinctive value proposition (a compelling promise of the benefits that a customer can only gain for doing business with you) that leverages the distinctive resources and capabilities of your business in a way that generates pricing power among target customers.

Test 2: Alignment – integrating the internal with the external

When Darwin wrote about the survival of the fittest, he was not speaking about algorithmic optimisation within a stable market environment. ‘Fittest’ meant being the “best fitted” for to the dual task of flourishing in the current environment while also responding to signals about how the conditions are changing.

Marketing strategy is not a dispassionate analysis of how the market is changing through the interplay of technology, competition, economics, and culture. It is a deeply engaged effort to understand how the “dancing landscape” of the market is evolving in ways that either threaten or benefit your own business given its unique profile, capabilities, and footprint. Your marketing strategy is a deliberate effort to identify, harness and shape the forces that will result in greater prosperity for you.

Strategy is often described in terms of the dynamic between three Cs – your company, your customers, and your competitors (for a great discussion of this idea, read ‘The Mind of the Strategist’ by Kenichi Ohmae). There is a tendency among people to focus on the apexes of the triangle and consider the motivations of each of the three actors in isolation, but the real source of insight is to look at the sides of the triangle and how the points interact, as seen below.

Doing so reveals that strategy involves solving for three requirements:

1. Fit-to-purpose: This is about the quality of the alignment between the capabilities of the business and the customer’ desired outcomes
2. Competitive uniqueness: This is about ensuring that the customer perceives that there is distinctive value that can only be achieved through partnership with you, rather than any of your competitors
3. Resource fitness: This is about ensuring that your company has the skills, culture and leadership to deliver efficiently against the current needs of the customers, while anticipating the changes that will inevitably occur as a result of new technology, competitor moves, and other factors

Implication: Your marketing is strategic when you can describe how the combination of your actions is explicitly designed to balance your fit to purpose, competitive uniqueness, and resource fitness, both with regard to current market conditions and anticipated market conditions.

Test 3: Legitimacy – integrating stakeholders and shareholders

The third test for strategy is whether it is socially sustainable.  Does it deliver on the twin objectives of prosperity (financial value creation) and progress (societal wellbeing)?  From a short-term perspective, corporate reputation may seem to be a “nice to have” but, ultimately, all businesses rely on a social “license to operate” that defines the guard rails within which the pursuit of profit can occur.

Implication: Your marketing is strategic when you have created a business model that incorporates the needs of the broader range of stakeholders – whether employees, partners, suppliers, communities – upon whose support the long-term success of the business depends.

Strategy can set you apart

Strategy is a fundamentally creative discipline – one that involves architecting the best fit between the capabilities of your business and the “dancing landscape” in which it competes.

This is not a task for algorithms or LLMs. It requires pattern recognition, meaning making, system thinking, imagination, synthesis, and the capacity to adapt while preserving a coherent identity. There is a bright future for marketers who are ready to contribute to strategy development and articulate the nature of their contribution.