More marketing

After a soft quarter, it is one of the easiest things for a company to say.

We just need to do more marketing.

Sometimes it is frustration. Pipeline is soft, competitors seem louder, the website is underperforming, social has gone quiet, sales wants collateral, paid search needs attention, and someone has just suggested a podcast. Sometimes it is optimism: more LinkedIn, webinars, newsletter, SEO, paid social, PR, a report, nurture, video, sponsorship, ABM, publish more.

It can sound energetic. Ambitious, even. It is also often the moment a business starts confusing movement with strategy.

The assumption changes shape

This is a different kind of bad assumption from the earlier chapters.

Once performance drives revenue has split brand and performance into separate camps, each camp tends to acquire its own activity list. Strategy starts to dissolve into channels. The next sentence that sounds practical is often about volume: we just need to do more marketing.

The earlier mistakes were mostly misunderstandings of how markets work. Here, the mistake moves inside the company. The business stops asking the harder unifying question: what is our marketing actually trying to make more likely?

Without that organising decision, activity expands to fill the vacuum. A calendar appears. A channel list appears. A content plan appears. New tasks keep arriving, each with a rationale. Very little is connected tightly enough to count as strategy.

Addition replaces choice

The mechanism is simple, and easy to miss. When the company cannot say what marketing is meant to make more likely, addition replaces choice.

Most of the activities are plausible. A webinar can be useful. So can a customer story, a paid campaign, a founder post, a search programme, an event, a better nurture flow, a stronger deck, or a good report. The plausibility is what makes the assumption hard to challenge. When everything can be justified individually, the company never has to decide whether the pieces add up to one commercial argument.

It never has to choose what marketing is mainly for right now, which buying situations matter most, what must become easier to remember or to buy, which message must stay consistent, or what can be stopped.

Strategy begins where addition stops. Michael Porter’s argument about strategic trade-offs is still useful because it makes strategy depend on what a company chooses not to do, not only what it adds.

The plan that is really an inventory

You can usually hear the difference in how companies talk. One version sounds like a commercial argument: we need more of the category to know us in relation to these buying situations, and we need it to become easier for buyers in those situations to find us, understand us, and choose us.

Another version sounds like an inventory: LinkedIn, SEO, paid search, email, content, website conversion, events, retargeting, sales enablement, and brand.

That inventory can keep a team busy for years without ever forcing the underlying choice. The activity list starts to feel like the strategy because it is the thing the team can see. That is a strategy problem first. Only when the list keeps growing without a growth theory does the same pattern start to look like the week-eating load described in marketing ops overload.

A company after a mediocre quarter

Imagine a scale-up software firm after a mediocre quarter. Nothing is catastrophic, but nothing feels strong enough. The founder asks what marketing’s plan is.

The team presents twelve workstreams: more case studies, more founder content, a webinar series, a new paid campaign, a site refresh, a sales deck update, a newsletter relaunch, event sponsorship, better reporting, improved nurture flows, a thought-leadership piece, and tighter retargeting. All of those might be good ideas. That is why the list is so difficult to push back on.

Each activity is defended by its own local logic. The webinar is for leads. The report is for authority. The event is for relationships. The site refresh is for conversion. The founder content is for visibility. The nurture flow is for leakage. The retargeting is for efficiency. Every choice has a reason. The reasons do not accumulate into a strategy, so the business has lots to discuss and very little to decide.

What strategy has to do

For this book, strategy is a set of choices about where growth is most likely to come from, what must become true for that growth to happen, and what marketing will therefore prioritise, reinforce, and decline.

That last word matters. A real strategy should make some apparently sensible work easier to refuse. If the team cannot explain why it is leaving certain plausible things alone, the workload is probably carrying more weight than the strategy.

Weak strategy often feels busy because it has no mechanism for saying no except capacity. The team stops doing something when there is no time, no headcount, or no budget. The business then mistakes practical constraint for strategic choice.

The founder’s part in the problem

Founders often make this worse without meaning to. They sit above the detail but still influence it constantly. They hear about channels and outputs because that is what meetings tend to surface.

So when they ask what marketing is doing, the answer comes back as a list of channels and outputs, while the harder question stays untouched: how is marketing supposed to help the business grow?

When growth is slower than hoped, marketing becomes the place where unresolved commercial anxiety gets sent to look productive. Sales wants support, so marketing creates assets. The company wants authority, so marketing publishes more. The team wants proof of momentum, so marketing makes more noise.

Marketing can do many of those things. The problem starts when every commercial discomfort gets sent there to look productive. That is not a fair burden to place on the team, and it rarely produces better work.

The operating test

A useful marketing strategy should be able to answer four questions without hiding in channel language.

First: what kind of growth are we trying to create? More future buyers who know us? Better conversion from existing demand? Entry into adjacent buying situations? More confidence in a risky purchase? Less friction in the buying process?

Second: what stands in the way? Is the company unknown, hard to remember, hard to understand, too easy to confuse, too dependent on hand-raisers, poor at converting active buyers, or inconsistent in the market?

Third: what are we going to prioritise because of that? Which messages, assets, channels, and behaviours deserve protection because they serve the strategy directly?

Fourth: what will we do less of, stop doing, or refuse?

That fourth question is where most fake strategies break down. They do not remove anything.

A company that can answer those questions has at least the beginnings of a strategy. A company that cannot will almost certainly fall back into activity accumulation.

The next weakness

This fall-back is seductive because it makes everybody feel useful. Sales gets assets. Founders get visibility. Marketing gets motion. Agencies get briefs.

Nobody has to sit with the discomfort of saying: this may be a good idea, but it does not fit what we are trying to make happen.

That discomfort is often exactly where strategy begins.

Once a company begins to answer that, another weakness usually comes into view.

The work may still be busy and the channels may still be active. If the company has not chosen the right context in which buyers should understand it, clearer activity alone will not solve much.

That is usually when the business starts saying it needs to sort out positioning.