July
16
Marketing plans don’t fail. Organisations do.
Less than a third of strategy executions are judged successful by the organisations that ran them. McKinsey has found this consistently for fifteen years. Gartner’s research points to the same conclusion. The figure has not improved, and it has not moved, through a decade and a half of new platforms, new methodologies, new planning frameworks and an entire industry built around helping organisations plan better.
That stability is the detail worth sitting with. A number that refuses to shift for fifteen years, across two independent research organisations, is not describing a run of bad luck or a temporary skills gap. It is describing a structural condition.
The natural response is to look for a better planning process, and this is precisely where the search usually goes wrong. Gartner’s most recent CMO research offers a clue as to why. Only 40% of CMOs describe their planning as proactive and market-oriented. A separate 61% say their plans are driven primarily by operational needs such as prioritising work. The plan, in other words, is not usually where the failure begins. It is where an absence of strategic thinking becomes visible, formatted, and eventually blamed.
The interesting question is not why marketing plans fail. It is why organisations keep producing plans that were unlikely to succeed before they were written.
The plan is not the cause
The instinctive model most organisations hold is a simple chain: a poor plan produces poor results. The evidence points to a different chain entirely. Poor thinking produces poor decisions. Poor decisions produce poor execution. Poor execution produces poor results. And somewhere at the end of that sequence, the marketing plan gets blamed for a failure that was determined long before anyone opened a template.
The plan is not the cause. It is the evidence.
Think
Most failures begin here, and most begin invisibly, because the organisation rarely experiences this stage as thinking at all. A target arrives. Revenue growth of 15%. Market share gain of two points. A number derived from a board commitment, a prior year’s trajectory, or an incentive structure that needed a figure to measure itself against. The target is real. What is missing is the question of whether the target was ever derived from the market the organisation is trying to compete in.
This is the quiet corruption that most planning models never examine. Investigation, when it happens at all, is frequently retrofitted to justify a number that was fixed before any customer, competitor or capability analysis took place. The plan is then built backwards: given that we must reach this figure, what campaign, channel mix or messaging might get us there? That is not strategic thinking. It is arithmetic dressed as strategy, and the distinction matters because the two produce entirely different plans. Gartner’s research offers some corroboration for how common this ordering has become: 61% of CMOs say their plans are driven primarily by operational needs, such as prioritising work, rather than by proactive, market-oriented analysis. The target, in other words, is more often the starting point of the plan than its conclusion.
The target’s origin is rarely neutral. Commission structures, bonus thresholds and internal political commitments are all legitimate organisational mechanisms, but none of them are market research. A target that exists to satisfy an incentive scheme carries no information about what customers want, what competitors are doing, or what is actually achievable, and yet it is routinely treated as though it does. The result is a plan built to justify a number rather than a number built to reflect what the thinking has found. Weak customer understanding, assumptions accepted as fact, and the confusion of information with insight all follow naturally from this starting condition, not because the people involved lack rigour, but because the sequence itself has removed the space in which rigour could operate.
Decide
Once the target is fixed and the thinking around it is thin, decision-making inherits the distortion. The organisation cannot say the target is wrong, because the target is not really a marketing decision to unmake. What it can do is accumulate initiatives against it: another channel, another audience segment, another campaign, each one a hedge against the growing likelihood that the original number was never achievable. Nobody wants to be the person who says no to a board commitment, so the plan absorbs everything rather than choosing between anything. It stops being a strategy and becomes an inventory of activity, sized to look proportionate to the ambition it can never actually meet.
This is where too many priorities and too many audiences stop being a discipline failure and become a rational response to an impossible starting condition. If the number cannot be questioned, the only remaining lever is scope, and scope expands because it is the one variable still available to a team that has already lost control of the variable that actually mattered. The plan grows longer while getting weaker, and the people writing it know this even as they do it.
Act
Execution then fragments under the weight of a plan that was never resolved into a genuine set of choices. Ownership diffuses across too many initiatives to be accountable for any one of them. KPIs multiply, in part because a single honest measure would reveal the gap between the target and the reality too clearly, and a proliferation of secondary metrics offers something to point to when the primary one does not move. Budgets shift toward whatever is showing short-term movement, regardless of whether that movement serves the original objective. People begin optimising activity because outcomes were never a fair basis for judgement in the first place, not because anyone stopped caring about outcomes, but because the outcome being measured against was never a real one.
At the end of the cycle, someone concludes that the marketing plan failed. What actually failed was a target that was set to satisfy something other than the market, carried through a planning process with no genuine authority to challenge it, and executed by people managing the consequences of a decision they were never part of. The plan did not create this outcome. It recorded it.
What a different sequence requires
If poor thinking produces poor decisions, and poor decisions produce poor execution, then the correction has to happen at the first stage, not the last. This is a different problem from the one most marketing frameworks are built to solve. Most planning frameworks are designed to help marketers structure a plan once the objective has already been handed down. Very few are designed to test whether the thinking that produced the objective was sound before a single tactic gets chosen.
That is the specific gap that Jam Partnership’s ICONIC framework addresses. Its six stages, Investigate, Customers, Opportunities, Numbers, Implementation and Contribution, are sequenced deliberately so that investigation and customer understanding come before the numbers are fixed, not after. Investigate and Customers improve the quality of thinking. Opportunities and Numbers improve the quality of the decisions built on that thinking. Implementation and Contribution improve the quality of what actually gets done. Structured this way, ICONIC is not competing with existing planning frameworks such as SOSTAC or RACE on their own terms. It is answering a different, prior question: how does an organisation improve the quality of the thinking that produces the plan, before the plan itself is written.
Strategy and execution are not the same axis
A further reason marketing plans get unfairly blamed is that organisations routinely conflate two separate questions: was this the right strategic decision, and was it executed well. Treating these as one question obscures the most damaging failure mode of all.
| Strong execution | Weak execution | |
| Right strategic decisions | Sustainable success | Wasted opportunity |
| Wrong strategic decisions | Efficient failure | Organisational drift |
Efficient failure is the quadrant organisations are least equipped to see, because everything about the delivery looks competent. Campaigns launch on time. Budgets are spent as planned. Teams execute with discipline and skill against decisions that should never have been made in the first place. Organisations routinely reward this quadrant, because activity is visible and thinking is not, and a team that executed brilliantly against the wrong objective will often be praised for the execution while the underlying decision goes unexamined.
The real challenge
Marketing plans do not think. People do. Marketing plans do not make decisions. Leaders do. Marketing plans do not execute anything. Organisations do. If less than a third of strategy executions succeed, and that figure has not moved in fifteen years, the explanation is unlikely to be a persistent, industry-wide deficit in planning templates. The more credible explanation is that most organisations have not yet built the capability to think clearly, decide wisely and act consistently, upstream of the point where a plan gets written at all.
The real challenge was never writing better plans. It is building organisations capable of the thinking that a good plan can only ever reflect.
Discover more from jam partnership
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
