The Problem With Starting at the Bottom
Most marketing does not fail because of bad creative, weak media plans, or the wrong channel mix. It fails because someone started building before the foundations were ready. The campaign launches, the media runs, the content goes out -- and underneath all of it sits a strategy that nobody examined closely enough before the budget was committed.
This is not a creative problem. It is a structural one. And it starts with the order in which decisions get made.
- Most marketing stacks are built from the bottom up -- channels first, strategy last.
- Every layer of the stack inherits the quality of the one above it.
- If positioning is unclear, everything downstream will be weak regardless of execution quality.
- The fix is almost never at the bottom -- it is almost always further up than anyone wants to look.
- Getting four questions right at the top makes the rest of the stack significantly easier to build.
The Marketing Stack Nobody Draws Out
Every marketing function operates on a stack. Whether it has been written down or not, there is a hierarchy of decisions that sits underneath every campaign, every piece of content, every media plan, and every creative execution.
From top to bottom, it looks like this.
Commercial Objective
What is the business actually trying to achieve? Not growth in the abstract. A specific commercial outcome, over a defined timeframe, in a defined market. If this cannot be stated in one sentence without the word
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