There’s No Real Strategy Here
I was an Associate Marketing Manager at Clorox, with a spring strategy deck for Clorox Disinfecting Wipes at the ready for my manager. A concept around spring cleaning, and a partnership with the American Heart Association that I'd built out across three slides, complete with activation timing and a co-branded display concept. I'd worked hard on it and quite pleased with myself, walking into her office.
She asked a simple question: “what does Wipes have to do with the American Heart Association?” Not hostile. Genuinely curious. And then “why would we do this?” Again, not combative, just pushing for understanding. I opened my mouth and nothing useful came out - maybe I pointed to an opportunity for merchandising at retail?
And then I heard the sentence that turns every ambitious young marketer cold: "There's no real strategy here."
When you hear feedback like "you need to be more strategic," it's hard to know what to do with it. It sounds like a personality trait, something you either have or you're missing, like charisma. You nod, you go back to your desk, and nothing changes, because nobody told you what the word actually means.
Part of the problem is that the term "strategy" gets used promiscuously. People say this when they mean roadmap. Or vision. Or positioning. All are real and necessary, and it's easy to conflate them with strategy because they're components of one. But none of them, on its own, is comprehensive enough to move a business forward. And mistaking a piece for the whole is exactly how you end up in a room with an idea and no answer when someone asks why it's there.
I've come to think of strategy as a small set of questions, answered together rather than in isolation:
Where are we now -> where are we headed?
Why does this matter?
How will we get there?
It sounds almost too simple to be the thing that separates people who get promoted into bigger rooms from people who stall out just before them. But answering those three questions honestly is harder than it looks. Skipping any one of them is usually exactly what goes wrong.
Sitting in her office, I had a "How," several in fact: a partnership, an activation, a display concept. What I didn't have was a "Why." And without it, what I'd built was an unanchored tactic, absent any strategic conviction to move it out of an idea and into something tangible.
Every time you ship something that doesn't connect, you're spending something — borrowing attention the brand hasn't earned yet, or worse, attention it already spent saying something else. Wipes wasn't going to become a heart-health brand because I'd booked a partnership. It was just going to be a brand that showed up in a slightly different place, meaning something slightly less specific than it did the day before. I'd already burned my own time and our agency's time roughing out a concept that had nowhere real to land.
I think about that meeting more than almost any other moment in my career, not because I was caught flat-footed, but because it's the cleanest example I have of the gap between having ideas and having a strategy. Once you've seen that gap once, you start seeing it everywhere.
It's also why I believe a strong strategic thinking muscle is foundational for brand. A brand is nothing more than the compounding result of thousands of small decisions sharing one thread, one answer to Where, Why, and How. The skill that would have saved me in that conference room is the same skill that separates a brand with a clear position from one that's everywhere and nowhere at once.
Strategic thinking is best taught in a room where someone's allowed to ask why. Frameworks like Where/Why/How help, but the framework alone isn't the answer. What matters is habitualizing the discipline — asking the question of yourself before someone else has to ask it for you, and building the kind of room where other people are invited to ask it too, early, before the deck is built rather than after it's already failed in front of an audience.
I don't think strategic thinking is a rare gift handed to a few people in a room. I think it's a habit of asking why, out loud, before you're far enough in that the answer is expensive to hear. Managers who build that habit into how their teams work, who 1) make room for the question early, and 2) who reward the people who ask it - end up with stronger thinkers and stronger brands, because it's the same muscle doing both jobs.
So here's the question I'd leave you with: how many of the ideas sitting on your desk right now have an answer for Where, Why, and How? And how many are simply tactics that are in search of a strong Why?
