Marketing activities are executed without documented goals, priorities, or strategic alignment.
Running marketing without a documented strategy means every campaign exists in isolation — with no shared goals, no learning accumulation, and no way to hold channels accountable to business outcomes.
Hopkins opened his Strategy chapter with "Advertising is much like war, minus the venom. Or much, if you prefer, like a game of chess." When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he cut the product line to a four-box grid: consumer or pro, desktop or portable. A strategy is what you've decided not to do.
• Random campaigns
• We're trying a lot of things
• No quarterly objectives
• Teams cannot explain priorities
Owned — Blog, email, and landing pages exist but are not tied to quarterly goals.
Earned — PR hits and backlinks are opportunistic, not aligned to a narrative.
Paid — Campaigns launched reactively without defined success criteria.
Analytics — No documented KPIs per channel or per quarter.
AI — AI used to generate ideas without strategic constraints.
• Define a single primary objective per quarter
• Align channels to that objective
• Write down what you're not doing this quarter, not just what you are
