How leadership whiplash can derail even a great marketing plan.
I’ve never believed a marketing strategy should be carved in stone. Markets change. Competitors move. Customers tell you things you didn’t know when you built the plan. Campaigns underperform. Other tactics work better than expected. New opportunities appear. If the evidence tells you something needs to change, you change it.
That’s strategy.
What I’ve seen create problems is something very different. The team develops a plan, agrees on the priorities, and begins executing. A few weeks later, someone on the leadership team sees what a competitor is doing and decides the company needs to respond. Then the CEO attends a conference and comes back excited about a new idea. Sales asks for a campaign around another market segment. A board member mentions a tactic that worked at another company. Someone reads about a new technology or channel and suddenly that needs to become a priority too.
None of these ideas is necessarily bad. In fact, some may be excellent. The problem is that they keep arriving before the organization has had enough time to learn anything from the decisions it already made.
I’ve worked with leadership teams where this became one of the biggest obstacles to marketing performance. Everyone wanted growth. Everyone agreed that Marketing needed greater focus. Everyone supported the strategy when it was presented, but maintaining that focus became much harder once execution began and new ideas started competing for attention.
Marketing teams are particularly vulnerable to this because so much of what they do is visible. Everyone sees the website. Everyone receives the emails. Everyone has opinions about the brand. Executives see competitors’ ads, attend conferences, read articles, hear new ideas from peers, and naturally start thinking about whether their own company should be doing something similar. That curiosity is healthy. It becomes a problem when every interesting idea turns into an immediate assignment.
Over time, the marketing team learns to anticipate the next change in direction. Why invest deeply in the current initiative if another priority is likely to replace it next month? Why build a six-month content program when the topic may change after three weeks? Why spend time improving a campaign if leadership is already talking about launching something else?
The result isn’t usually open resistance. Good teams adapt. They update the presentation, revise the campaign, shift the budget, change the messaging, and move resources to whatever has become most important this week. From the outside, they may even look highly responsive.But responsiveness and progress aren’t always the same thing.
Marketing needs enough consistency to learn. A campaign needs time to generate data. Positioning needs repetition before the market begins to associate it with the company. Content needs time to build an audience. SEO takes time. Account-based marketing requires sustained engagement with the same accounts. Partnerships need to develop. Even paid campaigns, where results arrive relatively quickly, often improve through testing rather than succeeding perfectly on the first attempt.
If the strategy keeps changing before those feedback loops have time to develop, the organization never really discovers whether the original idea worked. It simply moves on.
I think this is one reason why marketing can sometimes look less effective than it actually is. Leadership may see a long list of initiatives that never produced meaningful results without recognizing that very few of them were allowed to mature. The company tried ABM for three months, content for four months, a new vertical for six months, a podcast for five episodes, and two different positioning directions in the same year. Technically, all of those things happened. Strategically, none of them may have received enough sustained attention to prove much of anything.
This doesn’t mean companies should keep funding something that clearly isn’t working. Persistence can become its own form of bad strategy. If the data tells you an audience isn’t responding, a channel is too expensive, a message isn’t resonating, or market conditions have changed, continuing simply because it was in the original plan doesn’t make sense. The distinction is why you’re changing.
Changing direction because of evidence is learning. Changing direction because someone became excited about a new idea is something else.
That’s where marketing leadership becomes as much about managing priorities as developing them. One of the responsibilities of a CMO or marketing leader is to absorb new information without allowing every new input to immediately redirect the organization. Some ideas should change the strategy. Some belong in the next planning cycle. Others are worth testing on a small scale without disrupting the larger plan. And plenty of good ideas simply need to wait.
That can be a difficult conversation, especially when the new idea comes from the CEO. The easy answer is yes. The more useful answer may be, “That’s worth exploring. Here’s what we’re currently committed to, here’s what we’re learning, and here’s what would need to change if we make this a priority now.”
That isn’t protecting Marketing from leadership. It’s protecting the company from the cost of constantly restarting.
There’s a hidden expense every time priorities change. Creative work gets abandoned. Campaigns are interrupted. Agencies and internal teams need to be redirected. Budgets move. Timelines change. Sales has to learn another message. Data from one initiative becomes less useful because the next initiative is measuring something different. Even when the new direction is better, the transition itself consumes time and attention.
Do that occasionally and it’s simply part of running a business. Do it constantly and the organization begins spending more energy changing direction than moving forward.
I’ve also found that frequent priority changes can make it harder to hold Marketing accountable. If leadership wants to know whether the strategy worked, the team needs some reasonable period in which to execute it. Otherwise, performance conversations become disconnected from the conditions under which the work happened.
Accountability works both ways. Marketing should be expected to establish clear goals, measure results, report what it’s learning, and recommend changes when the evidence supports them. Leadership has a corresponding responsibility to provide enough consistency for that process to work.
The best planning environments I’ve worked in weren’t rigid. They were disciplined. We knew the major priorities, understood why they mattered, and agreed on what success would look like. New ideas still came up, but they were evaluated against the strategy rather than automatically added to it. If something genuinely deserved to become a new priority, we also decided what would become less important as a result.
That creates room for both focus and flexibility.
A strategy should absolutely change when the business learns something important. In fact, if your marketing strategy looks exactly the same after a year of customer conversations, campaign results, competitive changes, and market feedback, I’d probably wonder whether anyone was paying attention.
But learning requires enough stability to produce evidence in the first place.
Give the strategy room to work. Measure it. Challenge it. Improve it. Change it when the facts give you a reason.
Just don’t start over every Tuesday.
