Here is a question that splits a room of marketers faster than almost any other, and I want a real answer from you by the end of this.
When a marketing program fails, who owns it? The strategy, or everything that happened to it after the strategy was approved? Most people answer reflexively. If the program did not get results, the strategy was wrong. Full stop. The job is results, and results did not happen, so the plan must have been the problem. That is the clean, accountable answer, and a large part of the industry will defend it to the death.

I used to give that answer too. Then I spent 20 years watching sound strategy get approved in a conference room and then bleed out slowly on the way to the market, dying not from a single fatal flaw but from two structural forces that almost nobody names out loud. The first is degradation. Strategy loses coherence as it passes through dozens of execution touchpoints, each one a small place where the plan gets compromised, watered down, or quietly ignored. The second is impatience. Boards and stakeholders pull …