A Marketing Plan Isn’t a Strategy Until It Names the Problem

A small physiotherapy practice sits down to write its marketing plan for the year. Within an hour, the whiteboard is full: post three times a week on Instagram, start a newsletter, refresh the website, run Google ads, sponsor the local running club, try TikTok, ask for more reviews, offer a new-patient discount.

It looks busy and ambitious. But nobody in the room can say which of these matters most, or why. When money and time run short in March, the plan quietly falls apart, because there’s nothing to tell them which activities to protect and which to drop.

Many marketing plans are really lists of activities. They describe what a business will do, but not the problem it’s trying to solve. One of the world’s most respected strategy thinkers argues that this is one of the most common reasons strategies fail, and offers a simple way to fix it.

One Like insight: A list of tactics isn’t a strategy. A strategy starts by saying what’s actually in the way.

The kernel of good strategy

Richard Rumelt, a strategy professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management whom McKinsey Quarterly has called “strategy’s strategist”, set out his argument in the 2011 book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy. He observed that much of what organisations call strategy is really a mixture of ambitions, slogans, financial targets and to-do lists. It lacks the clear thinking about the specific challenge that real strategy requires.

In its place, Rumelt proposed what he called the kernel of good strategy, made of three parts in a particular order:

1. A diagnosis: an honest explanation of the nature of the challenge, simplifying a complex situation by identifying what really matters.
2. A guiding policy: an overall approach for dealing with that challenge, which directs effort and rules out many alternatives.
3. Coherent actions: specific steps that support each other and carry out the guiding policy.

Rumelt illustrated the idea with a friend’s small corner grocery. Its diagnosis was competition from a large 24-hour supermarket. The guiding policy was to serve busy professionals with little time to cook. The coherent actions followed from that, focusing what the shop stocked and how it operated on what those time-pressed customers needed, rather than trying to match the supermarket on range or price.

The framework is a way of thinking drawn from decades of consulting and teaching rather than a statistical study. But its central point is hard to argue with: if you haven’t clearly named the problem, you can’t judge whether any activity on your list is the right one.

A one-page marketing strategy

Rumelt’s kernel translates neatly into a one-page marketing strategy for a small business.

Diagnosis: what’s really holding growth back? Be specific and honest. “We need more customers” is a goal, not a diagnosis. Better: “People who would benefit from physiotherapy after sports injuries don’t think of us, because we’re seen as a general practice for older patients.” A good diagnosis often comes from talking to customers, looking at where enquiries come from and noticing where you lose people.

Guiding policy: what’s our approach? One or two sentences that set a direction and rule things out. For example: “Become the first practice active people in our suburb think of for sports injuries.” That immediately makes some activities more important than others.

Coherent actions: what will we do, and how do the pieces fit? Choose a handful of actions that support each other and the policy: perhaps sponsoring the running club, writing practical injury guides, partnering with two local gyms and collecting reviews from active patients. Each one reinforces the others. Activities that don’t serve the policy, however fashionable, can be dropped.

This connects closely to ideas explored elsewhere in this series: choosing what not to do, keeping priorities few and clear, and understanding the job customers hire you for.

Testing your plan

Take your current marketing plan, or the list of things you’re doing, and ask three questions in order. First, what specific challenge is this plan trying to solve? If you can’t write it in one clear sentence, start there. Second, what’s our overall approach to that challenge, and what does it rule out? Third, does each activity on the list support that approach, and do the activities reinforce each other? Anything that fails the third test is a candidate for dropping.

Revisit the diagnosis at least once a year, or whenever results surprise you. Markets change, and a diagnosis that was right last year may not be right now.

A few questions can help:

• What is the single biggest obstacle to our growth right now?
• What approach have we chosen to overcome it, and what are we choosing not to do?
• Do our marketing activities support that approach, or are some just habits?
• Do our activities reinforce each other, or pull in different directions?

Which brings us back to the physiotherapy practice and its crowded whiteboard. Once they named the real problem, that active people didn’t see them as a sports-injury practice, half the list became unnecessary and the other half started working together. When March brought the usual squeeze on time and money, they knew exactly which activities to protect.

Sources

1. Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (Crown Business / Profile Books, 2011).
2. Virginia Postrel, “Want to Be the Next Apple? Lose the Bafflegab”, review of the book, source of the corner grocery example.