Does strategic thinking give you that sinking feeling?

Posted by Mike O'Brien on June 27, 2025 in Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

Is marketing becoming less strategic?

Marketing strategy was once the linchpin of business growth. Today, it’s being pushed to the margins. Across the industry, there’s a growing consensus: marketing is losing its strategic heart – traded in for dashboards, data loops, and tactical churn.

But why is this happening? And what does it mean for the future of the profession?

The strategic fade

According to a 2025 CMO survey, 73% of marketing leaders feel strategy is undervalued in their organisations. Over half admit to a skills gap in strategic planning – especially in large corporates and the B2B sector. That’s a stark indictment of how far marketing has drifted from its true purpose: connecting business ambition with customer insight to shape the future.

Instead, marketers are trapped in a loop of short-termism. Budget cuts, boardroom pressure, and an obsession with immediate metrics have conspired to make tactical delivery the dominant focus. Execution now means campaign deployment, click-through rates, and quarterly KPIs – while brand equity, customer lifetime value, and long-term positioning fall by the wayside.

Consider this: a B2B software company recently spent six months refining their LinkedIn ad campaigns, achieving a 40% drop in cost-per-click. But when a competitor redefined the category with a bold new product launch, they had no strategic response. Their tactical excellence was irrelevant – because they’d stopped asking the bigger questions.

Machines, metrics, and the margin of error

Digital transformation has reshaped marketing – but not always for the better. Automation, performance platforms, and algorithm-led decision-making have made it easier to do marketing but harder to think strategically. Execution is now frictionless – but increasingly thoughtless. In many organisations, strategy has been reduced to a series of disconnected, high-speed tactics.

Tactics matter – but without strategy, they’re just scaffolding without architecture. You can build fast, but will it stand?

The skills gap spans generations. Marketers – whether fresh graduates or experienced hands – have been conditioned to prioritise what’s measurable over what’s meaningful. When your performance review hinges on this quarter’s pipeline contribution, it’s rational to focus on what’s immediate. But that doesn’t make it sustainable.

What’s really driving the decline

Several forces are converging to devalue marketing’s strategic role:

• Economic pressures have turned ROI into a survival metric. Strategy is seen as a luxury when budgets are tight and results must appear within 90 days.
• Technology enables rapid execution – but encourages a “set and forget” mindset. When you can launch a campaign in minutes, there’s little incentive to interrogate your assumptions.
• Organisational misunderstanding still positions marketing as a cost centre, not a growth engine. CFOs scrutinise marketing spend while greenlighting investments in sales headcount or product development.
• Skills and training gaps are widespread. Strategy requires cross-functional collaboration, commercial fluency, and critical thinking – none of which are developed through content calendars or ad dashboards alone.

What strategic marketing actually looks like

Before we can solve the problem, we need to define what we’re trying to restore. Strategic marketing isn’t about abstract brand pyramids or bloated decks. It’s about shaping business direction by answering foundational questions:

• Market intelligence: Where is our category heading in the next 2–3 years? What macro forces will reshape customer behaviour?
• Competitive advantage: What do we do that competitors can’t easily replicate? How do we double down on that?
• Customer evolution: What will our customers value tomorrow that they don’t prioritise today?
• Resource allocation: Where should we place our biggest bets for long-term return?

A strategic marketer at a fintech startup doesn’t just run acquisition campaigns. They spot that SME clients are becoming more concerned about data security – then influence the product roadmap, sales enablement, and investor messaging accordingly. They don’t just track CAC – they model how LTV shifts as customers scale and evolve.

What’s at stake

The consequences of marketing’s de-strategising are significant:

• Brand equity erodes in favour of short-term wins. Companies become indistinguishable, reduced to discounting or performance gimmicks.
• Teams become reactive, constantly chasing trends instead of setting them. They respond to competitors rather than forcing competitors to respond to them.
• Marketing loses leadership status, becoming a transactional service function – easily outsourced, underfunded, and misunderstood.

Worst of all, we get trapped in local optimisation – making incremental improvements to fundamentally flawed approaches, while missing transformative shifts.

The strategic comeback: A practical path forward

There is hope. And it doesn’t require burning everything down – it just means reintroducing what too many marketers have forgotten: a system for thinking clearly, acting deliberately, and aligning teams around meaningful decisions.

At Jam, we developed the ICONIC® Framework to help marketers do exactly that. It’s a six-stage process – Investigate, Customers, Opportunities, Numbers, Implementation, and Contribution – designed to reconnect insight with impact. ICONIC is more than a planning tool. It’s a strategic workflow that ensures thinking comes before doing, and that strategy isn’t left behind once execution begins.

Here’s how marketing leaders can reclaim strategic ground – supported by the ICONIC approach:

1. Change the conversation (Investigate)
Strategy starts with asking the right question. ICONIC begins with Investigate – a deep dive into context, market dynamics, competition, and performance patterns. This stage gives marketers the clarity to frame problems correctly before jumping to solutions.

2. Create strategic rituals (Opportunities + Customers)
ICONIC builds in strategic checkpoints – not just one-off planning sessions. Through the Opportunities and Customers stages, teams map evolving needs, emerging behaviours, and potential routes to value creation. These stages turn research into direction, and direction into differentiation.

3. Build strategic skills (Numbers)
Most marketers are taught how to execute – but not how to forecast, prioritise, or assess viability. ICONIC’s Numbers stage addresses this head-on, embedding financial thinking, KPI planning, and sustainability logic into strategic marketing.

4. Build cross-functional partnerships (Implementation)
Strategy only succeeds when it’s shared. ICONIC’s Implementation stage turns plans into action through collaboration, sequencing, and systems thinking. It ensures that marketing’s role in the business is proactive, not peripheral.

5. Measure what matters long-term (Contribution)
The final stage – Contribution – ensures that strategy doesn’t die in the dashboard. It prompts reflection on impact: what changed, what mattered, and how marketing contributed to business performance, purpose, and progress.

ICONIC: Strategy rewired for the real world

Too often, strategy is treated as a separate activity – an annual away day, a long slide deck, a brand pyramid. ICONIC brings strategy into the everyday. It makes thinking part of the doing. It offers marketers not just structure – but confidence, clarity, and a common language for decision-making.

If marketing is to reclaim its seat at the table, it needs more than ideas.
It needs a system.

Final word

Marketing is at a crossroads.

One path leads to automation without imagination. To tactics without purpose. To busy work without impact. The other demands a return to strategy – not as nostalgia, but as necessity.

The companies that will win in the next decade won’t just have the best execution.
They’ll be the ones whose marketing shapes business strategy – not just serves it.

Your next step?

Before planning your next campaign, ask: What strategic question am I trying to answer?

If you don’t have one, start there. And if you need a system to guide that process – 
That’s what ICONIC was built for.