Beyond tactification: reuniting marketing with strategic decision making
Companies that separate marketing from strategy are making decisions without market intelligence, leaving growth to pure chance.
"It's time to accept that Marketing and Strategy are one discipline." This provocative assertion from Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management and author of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, challenges the organizational structure of virtually every B2B company today.
While executives nod appreciatively at the concept of customer-centricity, their organizational charts tell a different story: marketing sits in one silo executing communications, while strategy lives elsewhere—typically in the CEO's office or a dedicated function divorced from market realities.
This separation isn't just an organizational curiosity; it's a fundamental misunderstanding that hobbles growth and wastes resources.
When marketing becomes merely the department that "colors in" the assets after the real strategic decisions have been made, companies surrender their greatest competitive advantage: true market orientation.
The false separation
How did we get here? Historically, strategy emerged from military thinking, while marketing developed as a commercial discipline. As businesses grew more complex in the mid-20th century, management theorists artificially separated these functions in the name of specialization and efficiency. Marketing became increasingly focused on promotion and communication rather than its original market-making purpose.
Mark Ritson, marketing professor who taught at MIT, London Business School, and Melbourne Business School, diagnoses this as the "tactification of marketing."
Ritson argued (back in 2016 for what it's worth), that modern marketers lost the fundamental diagnostic skills to help their companies grow—focusing instead on communications tactics while lacking understanding of how to diagnose markets, their company's position, and build effective strategy.
In B2B contexts, this tactification manifests as marketing teams producing sales support materials rather than strategic direction, focusing on short-term lead generation versus long-term market position building, and executing communications without underlying strategic choices.
Marketing IS strategy
Back to Roger Martin. His core insight is deceptively simple: both marketing and strategy ultimately answer the same questions: "where to play" and "how to win." What executives often miss is that these choices can only be effectively made through proper market diagnosis—the central competency of strategic marketing.
When marketing functions as it should, it begins with rigorous analysis of market structure, segmentation patterns, and unmet customer demands. From this diagnosis naturally emerges the strategic choices of which segments to target, what framing position to adopt, and how to allocate resources for maximum impact. The artificial separation of marketing from strategy forces companies to make these choices without the market understanding required to make them successfully. No research. Flying blind.
If marketing is just promotion and communications, it is simply the decorating function for the house that strategy has already designed and built. This relegates marketing to a tactical afterthought rather than the foundational insight engine that should drive strategic choices.
The B2B blind spot
This disconnect is particularly pronounced in B2B companies, especially those that are founder-led or engineering-driven. These organizations often default to product-led thinking, where capabilities and features drive strategy rather than market needs and competitive positioning.
The typical B2B growth approach follows a predictable pattern: develop technical capabilities, add features customers request, rely on sales relationships, and support with marketing communications. What's missing is the market-oriented strategic foundation that answers critical questions:
- What is the customer's real "job to be done" that we solving?
- Which segments present the greatest opportunity?
- What unmet needs exist that competitors aren't addressing?
- How can we position distinctively against alternatives?
Without this market-oriented strategic integration, B2B companies typically underperform their potential, facing commoditization pressure, difficulty scaling beyond founder relationships, and vulnerability to more market-oriented competitors.
Conventional B2B growth v. market orientation
| Strategic Question | Conventional B2B Approach | The Market Oriented Firm |
|---|---|---|
| Where to play? | Based on existing capabilities, historical accounts | Derived from market structure analysis and segment attractiveness |
| How to win? | Product feature differentiation, sales relationships | Relatively differentiated value propositions addressing unmet market demands |
| Growth planning | Sales-led forecasting, incremental product development | Market-driven opportunity sizing, strategic positioning anchored in market perceptions |
| Resource allocation | Function-by-function budgeting | Integrated investment in strategic capabilities and market positions |
| Performance metrics | Activity-based KPIs, revenue targets | Market share growth, segment penetration, positioning strength |
The integrated approach doesn't diminish the importance of product, technology, or sales capabilities—it simply ensures they're directed toward the most attractive market opportunities with the clearest competitive advantage.
Reintegration principles
Reuniting marketing and strategy doesn't require wholesale organizational restructuring, but rather a reorientation around core principles:
- Diagnosis before decision: Implement rigorous market research and analysis as the foundation for all strategic choices, ensuring targeting and positioning flow from market structure rather than internal preferences.
- Strategic primacy of marketing: Position marketing leadership as drivers of market diagnosis and strategic choices rather than downstream executors of communications.
- Continuous strategic dialogue: Replace the annual planning ritual with ongoing strategic conversations grounded in evolving market dynamics and competitive positions.
- Whole-company market orientation: Build market insight capabilities across functions, ensuring product development, sales, and operations share a common understanding of target segments and positioning.
Side note: Realigning a company to a true "market orientation" as above is in fact difficult, time consuming, and expensive. It requires cultural change, not only process, people, technology change.
The intermediate step is is adopt points 1-3 supported by a growth capital allocation framework that ensures capital is correctly deployed in accordance with the firm's current go-to-market culture.
A call for strategic reorientation
The gap between how companies approach marketing and what the discipline should actually deliver represents a significant opportunity for those willing to challenge conventional structures.
When marketing reclaims its strategic role, when it speaks the language of finance and capital allocation, it transforms from a cost center to the primary driver of sustainable competitive advantage.
Ask yourself: Are your strategic choices truly grounded in systematic market diagnosis, or are they based on internal capabilities, history, and executive intuition? The answer may reveal why your growth initiatives aren't delivering the expected results.
The companies that outperform today—and will outperform in coming years—won't be those with marginally better products or incrementally more efficient operations. They'll be those that reconnect their strategy with the market (and marketing) to make superior choices about where to play and how to win.
This is the last daily post until mid-year while I launch a consulting firm focused on the topic in this and recent posts: helping executives in growth challenged businesses align growth capital allocation with their natural growth culture and market needs.