Most companies have a goal. Fewer have a strategy. And fewer still have a documented, multi-year marketing strategy that guides choices, priorities, and budget. At Clavem, we use a simple test: show us the plan. Not a deck of promotion recaps or a patchwork of Slack threads. A strategy.
And we’re not alone in that framing. There was a guy I worked with at Jarden, Tanios Viviani. Tanios framed strategy with three deceptively simple questions:
Those are the questions that define a multi-year brand strategy. If you don’t have clear answers—and a shared, documented roadmap to back them up—you’re navigating with instincts, not instruments.
Let’s break it down through the six core elements of strategic marketing planning:
These are the what. The growth numbers. The revenue goals. Most organizations have these. They’re necessary, but not sufficient.
This is where the real work begins. Strategy is about making explicit, often difficult choices. The long-term plan is not just what you'll go after—it's what you'll leave behind. If your roadmap doesn’t define your market focus and positioning over a 2–3 year horizon, you don’t have a strategy. You have a wish.
Here’s where many teams stumble. They mistake executional calendars for strategy. A true marketing plan links objectives to tactics through a strategic bridge: initiatives chosen for their business impact, not just feasibility.
And here's the filter: Can you hand me the document?
If the only thing you can show is a Q1 recap deck, that’s not a plan. That’s a post-mortem.
Alignment isn’t a heads-up. It’s shared commitment to an agreed plan. Without the strategic documentation to point to, “alignment” meetings turn into show-and-tells. The plan should enable marketing, sales, product, and finance to row in sync. No plan, no alignment—just updates.
Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) should be standard. It starts from zero and builds up investment based on what’s needed to execute the plan—not based on legacy spend or entitlements.
Budget is not a rollover. It’s a resource allocation strategy.
And yet, most companies simply carry over last year’s numbers.
We benchmark SG&A allocations using available public data to calculate relative spend levels. We don’t get too precious about exact percentages—but if you’re not even in the 25th percentile of category spend, it’s worth asking:
Do you have a marketing strategy, or just marketing activity?
Strategy isn’t just an executive offsite output. It’s the system that connects ambition to execution. It’s documented. It’s referenced. And it shapes how dollars are spent and how teams align.
If you can’t show the document, you don’t have the strategy.