In February 2025 I had the pleasure of presenting at the Figaro Winter Conference…
In February 2025 I had the pleasure of presenting at the Figaro Winter Conference, sharing insights on a challenge that’s been bothering me for ages - that’s the disconnection between marketing strategy and execution.
-- If you read to the end of this piece I promise to share a link to the talk with you. And then you can enjoy it all again being read out by a bloke in Northern accent, albeit a bloke with plenty of experience in this stuff --
Thankfully most of the audience were nodding along throughout the talk, and writing stuff down or taking pictures so I think I wasn’t talking complete rubbish.
In truth I was talking about something which most of us know (hence the nodding) but few of us address. That is, that brands are continuing to struggle to align their big picture thinking with day-to-day tactics. This gap isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s costing businesses real money and opportunities.
Throughout my talk, I outlined a framework for bringing these two worlds together and I wanted to share these insights by turning them into a practical guide of sorts. Just for you.
The Big Problem: Disconnected Thinking and Doing
Let’s face it – the biggest challenge for most brands today isn’t coming up with a fantastic strategy or executing brilliant campaigns. It’s connecting these two worlds in a meaningful way. In my years of working with clients across various industries, I’ve consistently seen a pattern where boardroom strategies become diluted, misinterpreted, or completely abandoned by the time they reach the execution stage. This disconnection means that brands often end up with tactical activities that might drive short-term metrics but fail to build long-term value.
The reality is stark: many brands have fallen into the trap of “This works, let’s keep doing it!” without questioning whether what “works” today is actually building for tomorrow and this mindset has led to an over-reliance on paid channels, creating what we at Curated call a “junk food marketing diet” - that’s quick, tasty results but which ultimately can harm your brand’s health. The consequences are becoming increasingly visible as brands struggle to drive sales at previous levels, with many experiencing declining searches for their own brand names - a clear indicator that tactical performance isn’t translating to strategic brand building.
This disconnect doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It occurs because strategy and execution often live in different departments, report to different metrics, and speak different languages. When marketing becomes siloed, with SEO teams, paid media specialists, and content creators all working independently, the cohesive vision gets lost in translation. The cost? Wasted budgets, conflicting messages, and missed opportunities to create meaningful connections with customers.
Persona Non Grata: Why Customer Understanding Matters More Than Ever
When I mentioned personas during my talk, there were more than a few eye-rolls in the audience. And therein lies the problem. Personas have gotten a bad rep over the years because they’re often created and then ignored, left to gather dust in a shared drive. But in today’s complex marketing landscape, understanding who you’re actually talking to isn’t optional – it’s essential.
The issue isn’t with the concept of personas; it’s with how we’ve been approaching them. Traditional personas tend to be assumption-based rather than behaviour-driven, focusing on demographics instead of motivations. They’re static documents created once and never updated, despite the fact that customer preferences evolve constantly. This outdated approach to persona development has led many marketers to dismiss them entirely, and at their peril too. (Search your shared drive for ‘Persona’ and have a read. You can also send it over to us for analysis if you’re feeling brave)
What we need instead are dynamic, evolving “live” personas that adapt to customer behaviours and which actually inform marketing decisions. These modern personas should integrate user experience insights (how customers engage with content and platforms), journey mapping (how customers navigate and make decisions), and purchase behaviour analysis (what drives customers to make a purchase). When constructed properly, these personas become powerful tools for aligning strategy with execution.
I shared an example from our work with Milk & More, a well established milk delivery service. Prior to working with us, they were targeting broadly the same audience as one homogeneous group with little segmentation. We built detailed personas using their CRM data, analytics, and business information, combined with our own research, to develop a marketing plan for four distinct key audiences. The results speak for themselves: we reduced spend by 30% while increasing new customer acquisition by 50%. The key to this success was to ensure that these documents became “live” personas that we continuously review and align with emerging trends and consumer sentiment.
Strategy Doesn’t Sleep: The Always-On Approach
Another critical realisation for marketers in 2025 is that strategy isn’t a one-time exercise. The days of the annual strategy retreat that produces a document that sits untouched for months are well and truly over. In today’s volatile marketplace, strategy must be always-on, always adapting, and always learning. We published a piece back in 2020 entitled ‘The retainer is dead’. OK, it was a bit bold, but the point stood: any monthly retainer should be dynamic, evolving in real time.
The modern approach requires agility and an “emergent strategy”, one that can evolve as market conditions change and new information becomes available. This is particularly important in a world where consumer preferences shift rapidly, new platforms emerge overnight, and economic conditions can transform in an instant. Brands that set their strategy and forget it are essentially navigating with outdated maps.
This is where the concept of “Assurance” comes in. Assurance is our framework for continuous strategic adaptation based on the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). This approach creates a virtuous cycle where strategy informs tactics, tactics generate data, data provides insights, and insights refine strategy. It’s a dynamic process that ensures all marketing activities remain aligned with both short-term objectives and long-term business goals.
Assurance in Action: Learning from Real-World Success
To demonstrate how this always-on strategic approach works in practice, I shared a case study about Specsavers during the upheaval of 2020 when all their shops closed and budgets were slashed due to the pandemic. Using our Assurance insights approach, we helped shape their content, product, and marketing strategy based on real-time consumer behaviour.
The results were remarkable (no, really). Specsavers achieved their best-ever year for organic traffic, new customers, and sales during the ‘Covid years’. How? By responding to the actual needs of consumers rather than sticking to pre-pandemic assumptions. When we analysed search behaviour during the pandemic, we discovered that the most popular searches had shifted dramatically from traditional queries like “free eye test” to urgent concerns such as “Are opticians open” and “When do opticians open” (both phrases that had never been searched before but were now being searched for in droves). Also “Blue light glasses” and even “Glasses steaming up” (a common complaint among mask-wearers) became rising stars for organic clicks. By pivoting their content and messaging to address these immediate concerns, Specsavers remained relevant and helpful during a time when many competitors were forced to the sidelines.
This demonstrates that the real challenge isn’t choosing between organic versus paid channels but rather addressing short-termism versus long-term growth. Marketing should be business-led, not channel-led, avoiding the “junk food mentality” that feeds immediate results at the expense of sustainable health. The best marketing reveals what we don’t already know: unexpected insights that challenge assumptions and open new opportunities.
Breaking Silos: The Integration Imperative
A critical step in closing the strategy-execution gap is breaking down the silos that exist in most marketing organisations. The best results in our experience come from cross-functional collaboration, as no single channel works in isolation. This isn’t just about better communication, it requires structural changes in how marketing teams operate.
The traditional approach of separating SEO, paid media, content, social, and other specialties into distinct teams with separate goals and metrics inevitably leads to disconnected customer experiences. Instead, we need integrated teams organised around customer journeys or business objectives, with shared metrics that reflect overall business impact rather than channel-specific vanity metrics.
This integration extends beyond marketing to include product development, customer service, sales, and other customer-facing functions. When insights from customer interactions flow freely across departments, the entire organization becomes more responsive to actual customer needs and behaviours. For example, customer service teams often have the most direct understanding of pain points and objections – information that should inform content creation, product improvements, and marketing messages.
A practical framework to close the gap
This framework provides a structured approach to keeping strategy and execution aligned, bringing together key elements that ensure marketing remains cohesive, adaptive, effective.
First, it starts with clear, measurable business objectives that align with overall goals. These objectives should then translate into specific marketing goals that directly drive business outcomes. Next comes audience understanding through dynamic personas that go beyond just demographics to capture motivations, behaviours and journeys. These personas inform a content and channel strategy that maps appropriate messages to each stage of the customer journey.
The framework should also incorporate feedback loops that continuously gather data on performance, customer responses, and market changes. These insights feed back into strategy refinement, creating a dynamic system that evolves with changing conditions. And finally, cross-functional collaboration ensures that insights and actions are coordinated across teams and channels, creating a seamless customer experience.
What makes this framework powerful is its focus on connection - connecting business goals to marketing metrics, connecting customer understanding to tactical execution, and connecting performance data back to strategic decision-making. It’s this continuous loop of connection that prevents the strategy-execution gap from forming in the first place.
AI: Beyond the Hype to Practical Application
No marketing discussion in 2025 would be complete without addressing AI. As search evolves and AI-driven search changes how people find information, marketers need to adapt their content strategies to ensure visibility. This means focusing on answer-led, structured, and entity-rich content that performs well in AI search environments – even thinking about scenarios where users might not click through to websites.
I’d caution against producing low-quality AI content, noting that Google is actively clamping down on such material by updating its quality rater guidelines. The key is to use AI strategically rather than as a replacement for human creativity and judgement. Ai is such a valuable tool to help us enhance productivity and insight.
For Curated, that means embracing AI to enhance how we work – not replace what we do best.
We’ve been using AI behind the scenes to take care of some of the more repetitive or time-consuming processes – the kind of tasks that used to eat into time better spent on creative thinking or strategic planning. It’s helped us free up more space for deeper insight, better ideas, and faster decision-making.
In short, AI enables us to be more dynamic – shifting gears quickly, adapting strategy as things change, and focusing on the work that actually moves the needle for our clients. It’s not about cutting corners. It’s about sharpening focus.
AI in Action: JTBD and MECE Frameworks
To demonstrate practical applications of AI in marketing strategy, I shared two frameworks we’ve implemented with AI assistance. The first is the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework, which ensures marketing aligns with what customers actually need. This approach recognises that customers don’t buy products or services – they “hire” them to accomplish specific jobs. For example, someone doesn’t just buy a drill; they hire it to make holes in walls. To put pictures up. Or something.
AI helps us define these jobs to be done and can help incorporate them into ad copy and content. Curated worked with a transcription service for many years and we completed a JTBD exercise to identify jobs like “transcribe on the go using different devices,” “transcribe without internet access,” and “organise transcripts for easy access later.” Each job connects to specific situations, keywords, and ad messaging, creating a cohesive approach that resonates with actual customer needs.
The second framework is MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive), which helps structure marketing efforts to prevent overlaps and gaps. This approach ensures that no efforts are duplicated and nothing critical is missed – making it ideal for content planning and campaign development. We use AI to maintain MECE principles when carrying out specific tasks relating to content planning, which results in way more effective and efficient campaigns.
The new consultancy model?
Toward the end of my presentation, I proposed what I see as the new consultancy model for the digital age - one that combines thinking with doing. Traditional consultancy focuses primarily on strategy development, often producing lengthy, expensive slide decks. The new model recognises that building strategic foundations no longer needs to take months or cost a fortune.
With AI-assisted analysis, we can match the thinking capabilities of big consultancies faster and at a lower cost, speeding up problem analysis and leaving more time for testing and learning. But crucially, this model doesn’t stop at thinking. It extends to activating those insights through tactical execution, measuring results, and refining approaches based on performance data.
This integration of strategy and execution in a single, agile process is the essence of closing the gap. It eliminates the handoff between strategic planners and tactical implementers, reducing the loss of context and intent that often occurs in that transition. In the future (or now, if you’re working at Curated), it’s the same team that develops the strategy and helps guide its implementation, ensuring that the original vision informs every tactical decision.
The wrap
As I wrapped up my talk, I shared 7 essential principles for connecting strategy and execution in 2025. It wasn’t just conference room fluff, it was practical guidelines for marketers ready to close the gap.
The key takeaway was (and still is) that strategy and execution must align with business goals, not just marketing metrics. This connection gives marketing real influence in your organisation. Remember, marketing isn’t about channels, it’s about business impact. This perspective transforms marketing from a tactical service into a strategic driver.
Marketing should reveal what we didn’t know before. The most valuable insights challenge our assumptions and uncover unexpected opportunities, like Specsavers discovering people suddenly searching for “glasses steaming up” during the pandemic.
These insights should flow beyond marketing, informing product development, customer service, and other business functions. And personas aren’t fluff – they’re your marketing compass, provided they’re built on real behaviours and continuously updated. (Remember that eye-roll I mentioned?)
And AI isn’t here to replace us. It’s a fabulous productivity tool that frees marketers to focus on higher-value creative work.
And finally, strategy never sleeps. The most successful brands are those that are choosing to stay ahead of trends in a rapidly changing marketplace.
So what now?
Start by auditing where marketing insights currently feed into your business. Are they siloed within marketing, or are they informing decisions across departments?
Shift your focus from channel performance to business impact by redefining metrics around business outcomes rather than channel-specific activities
Build cross-team feedback loops for better insight flow, use AI to automate routine tasks, and re-evaluate your personas. Are they gathering digital dust, or actively guiding decisions?
The journey to connecting strategy and execution isn’t a quick fix, but these steps will help you create marketing that delivers both short-term results and long-term business value. In marketing today, this connection between thinking and doing separates brands that merely survive from those that truly thrive.
Want to chat more about implementing these ideas? Get in touch. After all, connection is what it’s all about: simon@curated-digital.com
Oh, and watch this video (did you just scroll down without reading? Naughty! Actually that’s fine if you’re happy to hear me say all of the above in a Northern accent)
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