How do you market ‘strategy’? With a marketing strategy

If, say, 10% of the CMOs responding to Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey had reported that their businesses undervalue marketing strategy, it would have been troubling but not surprising. There are always companies that lag behind in their appreciation of what marketing can bring to the table.

It wasn’t 10% though. It was a staggering 73%. Think about that for a moment. Nigh on three out of four of our most senior marketers have concluded that the businesses they work for do not rate the skill that is seminal to the discipline.

That’s not a few unenlightened companies lagging the norm. It is the norm. And it’s one that marketers can hardly take lying down. Because to do so will compromise arguments for budget, blunt the co-operation of other disciplines when marketing endeavour depends on them, and make the career path to the top table more rocky: who wants senior leaders who are not perceived to ‘get’ strategy?

So, marketers have to do some work to change internal perceptions and earn respect for the strategic contribution they bring to the business. How should they go about it? It won’t be the work of a moment. Entrenched views won’t be shifted by sulky protestations. No. In the quest for respect and recognition, marketers need to do something a good deal more serious and appropriate. They need to take a strategic approach to the problem.

What is strategy?

Let’s start here – if only because, in their bandying, discussions and documents, marketers can get way too casual with the semantics. I have heard ‘strategy’ deputising as a synonym for ‘objectives’, and seen it deployed in PowerPoint presentations to beef up what are no more than routine tactical manoeuvres. We won’t earn the respect of the rest of the organisation if we can’t even get corporate terminology right.

The sanest and most applicable definition of strategy is the one set down by UCLA’s Professor Richard Rumelt: how you overcome the obstacles between where you are and what you want to achieve. Helpfully, Rumelt broadens out from there to break down the process into three phases: ‘diagnosis’, ‘guiding policy’ and ‘coherent actions’. Let’s look at the problem marketers face with their internal colleagues through those lenses.

Diagnosis

When marketers experience a pain point on one of the brands they manage, they don’t just register it and hazard guesses as to its cause. They work with their research colleagues to talk with consumers to get a deeper understanding of the reasons behind it.

How odd that marketers don’t attempt the same kind of diagnosis with their internal audience, for the nagging pain point they feel there.

Learning why the heads of operations, finance, HR, legal and technology might have a jaundiced or dismissively slight interpretation of marketing strategy is the first step to setting the record straight.

So, marketers need to make dates in their diaries, and those conversations should start – as research groups do among consumers – with a general exploration of what is critical on their side of the table, in their disciplines and daily commercial lives.

From there, it should explore what they think of the way marketing currently operates, and what they would ideally like to see modified. And then on to the blunt questions: what is their view of the contribution of marketing strategy to the overall business – and why?

Marketers will emerge with more clarity than they have right now just sitting there feeling hurt – and many will find that the dialogue itself will have gone some way to closing the perceptual gap, even before moving on to the next step.

Guiding policy

Think of this as an overall approach – one that should be neither too vague nor too granulated. As Rumelt phrases it, guiding policy channels actions in certain directions without defining exactly what will be done.

What gets set down will depend on what’s been learned in the diagnosis phase, and that will vary by company. But let’s run a few scenarios here.

If your colleagues tend to see marketing only in terms of communications, then a guiding policy might be to build cross-functional alliances to gain closer collaboration in marketing’s upstream opportunities, like service delivery, pricing and innovation.

Entrenched views won’t be shifted by sulky protestations.

If they struggle to connect the abstract conceptual work of strategy to positive effect on the bottom line, then you might elect to ensure that all marketing activity is built from an ROI foundation. And if, as a good marketer, you’re doing that already, then your guiding policy might be simply to make that more evident to your cross-disciplinary peers.

And what if they feel that marketers don’t really operate from strategy because agencies do it all and the CMO merely orchestrates? Well, first take a reality check and see if they might have a point. From there, the guiding policy might be to lean on agencies less, do more with the team in-house, and communicate more effectively internally about how marketing’s deep strategic decisions influence everything downstream.

Setting out a guiding policy isn’t complex. What’s hard is sticking with it, and taking the concrete steps every day to ensure that it is manifested. Which brings us to:

Coherent actions

The operative word is ‘coherent’. Marketers understand the importance of that concept in their approach to consumers and the seething, shifting market – ensuring that the disparate elements of innovation, distribution, packaging, pricing, brand meaning, advertising and influencer tactics pull together to make an intuitively grabbable whole.

Internally, with an audience that is every bit as crucial and capricious, marketers are far less tidy. Presentations, meetings, performance reviews, requests for resources, will be drafted to reflect the need in hand without any sense of a joined-up, consistent narrative.

So, make one. If your guiding policy is one of building from ROI – to pluck a straightforward example – then ensure that each lever of marketing is subject to performance metrics that you are willing to share openly, whether good or bad. Build coherence into every interaction with your peers, be prepared to frequently repeat the effectiveness principles that guide your marketing approach, and you are another step closer to collegiate understanding and respect.

An intractable problem

This is the third year running that the Career & Salary Survey has reported marketing strategy as the skill CMOs feel is most undervalued by their peers. So, it’s not a one-off aberration.

And since this year’s survey was completed by 3,500 respondents, nor can it be dismissed as a quirk of sampling. It is an indictment. And one that marketers are going to have to face head-on.

Inaction is no longer an option – unless we are content to perpetuate the caricature of marketers as the corporate lightweights who like to hang out with agencies, court influencers and share anecdotes about brand celebs.

So, marketers, start the fightback now, and take care to tackle it strategically. It can only have a positive effect on your businesses and brands. To say nothing of your careers and salaries.