“It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead.”
That famous line (uttered by Miracle Max in The Princess Bride) might be the perfect metaphor for strategic planning in marketing today.
Because while many marketing teams (especially in midsized and growth-oriented companies) talk as if long-term planning is over, they’re wrong. It’s still alive — barely breathing, perhaps, but revivable.
Why bother? Well, not to belabor the example (you know I’m going to), but it’s for the same reason Westley gave for wanting to return to life: true love. In this case, it’s not love for Buttercup, it’s for a well-aligned, customer-centric marketing strategy. (Honestly, I’m not sure Westley — had he been a marketer — wouldn’t have chosen a clean attribution model over Buttercup.)
This may sound old-fashioned to some younger marketers, but once upon a time (not so long ago), teams would gather annually to map out long-term marketing plans.
They’d debate business objectives, analyze customer needs, sharpen positioning, and map campaigns. They made plans. Real ones.
Today, those meetings still happen. But the process has lost its teeth.
Welcome to the planning theater
In place of deep strategic debate, we often get strategic planning theater: offsites featuring a former sports star speaker, a visit to an impressive brewpub, and great decks accompanied by vague “north star” statements.
These planning rituals are more closely associated with budget cuts, headcount revisions, and technology shifts than with the realities of an optimal plan. Business leaders now obsess over channels, martech stacks, and automation tools at the expense of core strategic fundamentals.
And here’s an irony worth calling out: Many of these modern planning rituals still rest on the assumption that internal capabilities — especially people — are the source of competitive advantage.
But now, on the main stage of Strategic Playhouse Theater, the very leaders who claim people are their differentiator are casting generative AI and automation to replace those same capabilities, including strategic planning itself.
It’s as if producers built the stage around human taste and judgment and then handed the lead role to the scenery-chewing algorithm.
But that’s a topic for another post (and possibly a different set of beverages).
From planning to performance: The operational vacuum
Academic researchers have noted that in the age of Agile marketing and growth hacking, traditional planning is sometimes seen as anachronistic.
Roger Martin, one of the world’s leading business strategists, puts it even more starkly: "Strategy is becoming a lost art."
What’s lost isn’t just the documentation (a plan). It’s the operational value of planning.
Strategic planning isn’t a ceremonial kickoff. It’s a way to align actions to objectives, manage trade-offs, and build coherence across complex marketing systems. It’s the operating system that enables marketing teams to work, prioritize, and deliver value.
Few marketing teams today are equipped with a proper planning infrastructure. Instead, they build faster intake systems, work on speeding the production of creative assets, and set up agile workflows.
But, too often, they skip the critical thinking layer that connects activity to impact.
Even big marketing teams don’t know how to act big
Here’s the pattern I see: A marketing team forms around a new corporate restructuring aimed at supporting new growth.
Then the channels multiply. So do the requests.
The team grows — sometimes with freelancers, sometimes with agencies, sometimes with new hires.
But, as the team expands, the mindset stays small.
Most marketing teams keep operating like an internal agency: highly responsive, fast-moving, and mostly reactive to something (or someone) else.
Every request gets equal weight. Every project and campaign is a priority. Every asset is critical.
Then comes the tipping point. About two quarters in, leadership starts asking questions:
“Why are we producing so much content that nobody sees?”
“Why is it so hard to get visibility into what’s being worked on?”
“Why does our brand story feel fragmented?”
Strategic planning isn’t red tape — it’s a blueprint for bigness
A few months ago, I worked with a midsized B2B marketing team that had doubled content output, launched multiple thought leadership platforms, and directly contributed to pipeline growth.
By all external metrics, they were winning. But internally? Not so much.
Content quality was slipping.
Departmental trust was fraying.
Teams operated in silos so distinct that the sales team used Google to search the company website for content (whatever turned up first was assumed to be approved).
Executives had started questioning the strategic value of marketing.
They had rolled out a new intake form and request portal. They’d set service-level agreements for creative requests (a trend that still baffles me). In short, they’d built faster drive-thru windows.
But they never got the kitchen in order.
When I asked what their strategic planning workflow looked like (i.e., how they aligned their proactive roadmap with reactive demand), the answer was clear: They didn’t have one.
What does acting big look like?
Strategic planning creates the connective tissue between marketing strategy and daily operations. It allows teams to orchestrate, not just fulfill.
Strategic planning unlocks:
Intentional content choices (not just reactive volume). A content and marketing calendar shouldn’t be a repository of deadlines for assets (they’re probably already late). It’s a decision framework created months before the assets are due. Strategic planning helps teams say yes to the work that matters and no to the noise. It aligns content creation with business impact, not just internal demand.
Defined capabilities and accountabilities. Years ago, a friend at a large B2B company offered the most accurate take I’ve heard on marketing success: “It’s not what you do — it’s what they think you do.”
In other words, your actual activities matter far less than how the rest of the business perceives your value. That’s not a good thing. You want people to understand the value of the work marketing teams do.
Yet, whether they mean to or not, most marketing teams end up optimizing for perception rather than performance.
Strategic planning clarifies what the various marketing teams actually own, how they really support the business, and how they should prioritize their work. It transforms the team from a black box where marketing stuff happens into a strategic capability with clear, visible value.
A seat at the change table. When marketing is planned, not just produced, it becomes adaptive. Leaders gain the visibility and credibility to shift priorities as business goals evolve rather than reacting from behind. Planning embeds marketing activities in strategic conversations before the decisions are made.
One of my favorite questions to ask a CEO or CMO is this: “When was the last time you made a non-marketing business decision — new R&D, a new product, a market expansion, a key hire — based on an insight from marketing?”
If the answer is “I’m not sure” or “not recently,” then I know strategic planning isn’t happening (at least, not the kind that connects marketing to the future of the business).
Scaling marketing without planning is expensive guesswork
Here’s the paradox: The moment a marketing team becomes successful enough to warrant more investment is the moment it starts to suffer without strategic planning.
You don’t outgrow the need for planning — you outgrow the ability to operate without it.
Big doesn’t mean bureaucratic. It means accountable. It means resourceful. It means built for impact. You’re not adding red tape. You’re adding structure.
Structure gives you governance.
Governance gives you clarity.
Clarity gives you time to create things that matter.
Act like your marketing team is big enough
When does a once-small marketing team become strategic about planning? Usually, long after it should have.
Teams delay because they worry it will introduce bureaucracy to what was once an agile and responsive group.
But don’t resist the change.
Big means you can afford things. Big means you’re ahead of the game and able to take smart risks. Big means using words like process, ownership, governance, and standards not as burdens but as instruments of scale.
Big means meetings that focus not on the work itself but on how teams work together. Big means taking responsibility for not acting big and for everything that comes with being big.
Getting big changes the nature of your work. Strategic planning may remove you from some of the things you love doing. But it also opens the door to new, more meaningful work that shapes, steers, and sustains. It may force you to leave behind the comfort of collaboration for the clarity of direction.
But clinging to the familiar (flatness, flexibility, fire drills) can keep your marketing team from ever growing into its next chapter.
Marketing teams that deny their bigness end up retrofitting strategy onto chaos. It’s not graceful. It’s not effective. And it’s why marketing reorgs happen so often.
Reorgs happen not because a team failed but because it never realized it had outgrown its old way of working.
Get ready for bigness
Don’t fear strategic planning. Don’t dress it up as something else. Slowing down to plan is how you go faster — and further.
Your strategic planning process may not be dead. But if it’s only partly alive, you’re in dangerous territory.
That’s where bad decisions creep in, where priorities get murky, and where your once-nimble team starts running in circles, powered by nothing but coffee and cortisol.
That’s when you need your Miracle Max moment.
You need a strategic plan — not a magic bean, not a fancy dashboard, not the latest AI plugin. The kind of plan that cuts through the fog, aligns your teams, and says, “Here’s what matters. And here’s what we’re not doing.”
It’s your chocolate-coated revival pill. (Just don’t go swimming for a good half hour.)
It’s your story. Take the time to plan it. Then tell it well.
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