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Senior operators only. No agency structure. No junior layer.

The CMO Dilemma15 of 20

You have a strategy

Chris Wheeler

You have a strategy. It is good. It went through enough internal review cycles to have its obvious weaknesses addressed and its strongest arguments properly developed.

What it has not been through is a test against the operating reality three levels below where it was written. That distance between the strategy as a document and the strategy as the lived experience of the person managing the paid media budget on a Tuesday afternoon is where every commercial plan either holds together or quietly fractures.

I think about a marketing strategy without execution integrity the way I think about architectural drawings for a building where nobody has checked whether the ground it is being built on can carry the load. The drawings are excellent. The materials specified are right. The design is sound in every respect that can be assessed from the plans. And somewhere in the foundation, in the actual operating conditions of the actual business, there is a condition the drawings did not account for.

You feel it in the gap between what the strategy said and what the results show. The question is whether you can name it specifically enough to fix it.

The examination that changes the conversation

The Marketing MRI is a six-week, senior-led read of the commercial system sitting between your marketing investment and your revenue line.

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