How Marketing Hijacked Strategy

Why buzzwords don't bring clarity — and what strategy actually demands

When marketing captured strategy, we didn't just reframe the message. We reframed the work.

Strategy became something to be cascaded rather than constructed. It became a narrative exercise. A brand asset. A motivational toolkit for internal engagement.

In that shift, we lost something fundamental: the connection between strategic intent and structural capability.

We were sold the lie that strategy starts with "why." The key to coherence was a compelling narrative. That the way to create alignment was to craft purpose statements, values posters, and culture decks. In short, we were told to build belief systems before we understood our real constraints.

That's how we got here: strategy-by-slogan. It's clean. It's catchy. And it's killing the strategic and cognitive work.

We replaced strategic tension with storytelling. We started using brand frameworks as if they were strategic architecture. Purpose, mission, vision, values, the sacred sequence. Wrapped in buzzwords, signed off by exec teams, and delivered via slide decks.

But here's the problem: none of it makes your organisation more viable. Not if it isn't grounded in how you actually operate. Not if it isn't shaped by your real relationships with customers, regulators, suppliers, systems, and time.

Buzzwords don't bring clarity. They destroy it. They flatten nuance, mask tension, and encourage performance over sensemaking.

Where did this orthodoxy come from?

It didn't emerge from strategic necessity. It emerged from a long lineage of narrative influence.

The concept of a "mission" has its roots in both religious and military contexts. Jesuit missionaries and 19th-century military planners both used the term to describe a directed act of purpose. When it entered the business lexicon in the 20th century, it still carried the weight of a top-down mandate: What are we here to do, and how will we execute?

By the 1960s, the influence of misconstrued military doctrine on business was evident. Strategy became about control, planning, and target-setting. Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives (1954) laid the foundation for modern managerial practice by advocating that organisational performance could be structured around clear, predefined goals. This gave "mission" and "objectives" a managerial home.

But it was Collins and Porras who truly mainstreamed the belief that organisations needed more than plans. They needed belief systems. Their 1994 book, Built to Last, introduced the idea of a "core ideology" comprising purpose and values. This approach, they argued, should remain constant even as the organisation's strategies evolved. Visionary companies, they claimed, held these ideals deeply and used them to stimulate progress.

And with that, mission, vision, purpose, and values became foundational artefacts of strategy documents everywhere, taught in business schools, pushed by consultancies, and embraced by internal comms departments as proof of alignment.

What began as social philosophy became strategic orthodoxy. And eventually, what started as direction became decoration.

When marketing captured strategy, we began to confuse coherence with communication.

Clarity became the goal not in action but in narrative.

But this confusion runs deeper than slogans. When marketing logic enters the room, it doesn't just distort the message, it collapses the structure.

The boundaries between policy, grand strategy, and strategy begin to blur, and with them, the coherence of the whole.

• Policy defines what matters and why: It sets out long-term priorities, values, and intent, the overarching direction the organisation stands behind. Policy expresses purpose, not just in terms of goals, but in terms of what the organisation is for.

• Grand strategy connects that purpose to power: It links policy to the broader environment, shaping how the organisation positions itself, how it builds or uses influence, and how it aligns its partnerships, resources, and legitimacy over time. Grand strategy holds the thread between external pressures and internal coherence.

• Strategy turns intent into directional choices: It steers how the organisation navigates trade-offs, builds capabilities, adapts to constraints, and moves toward long-term advantage. Strategy isn't just about planning. It's about shaping how the organisation interprets, prioritises, and responds to what's emerging.

Marketing collapses these distinctions into a single page of purpose, vision, and values.

Policy gets mistaken for positioning. Strategy gets reduced to messaging. And grand strategy disappears altogether.

The result? No anchor. No integration. Just loosely connected slogans, each trying to do too much — and achieving too little.

Marketing didn't create the problem; it amplified it. The real issue was a vacuum: a retreat from strategic discomfort into narrative certainty.

There's a reason the term "strategic narrative" has become so popular. It gives the illusion of strategic work without the discomfort of actual manoeuvre. It lets you communicate intent without engaging with constraints.

Strategy isn't what you say. It's what you can actually do under pressure.

We've been sold the idea that if everyone believes the same story, the organisation will move. But belief isn't the problem. Capability is. Belief without capability creates dissonance; the kind people quietly disengage from.

That's the real issue with story-driven strategy: it's surface coherence. It creates the appearance of alignment without solving the underlying tensions. Real strategic coherence doesn't come from saying the same thing; it comes from being able to move in the same direction under pressure. That doesn't start with purpose. It begins with context, constraints and structural couplings.

These aren't just new slogans. They're conditions for movement, things that determine whether your organisation can respond under pressure, not just how it describes itself.

Strategy doesn't just guide the organisation — it's shaped by it

This is the part belief-led strategy avoids: the fact that your organisation defines the limits of your strategy. Not the words. Not the ambition. Not the brand.

Strategy isn't a vision pasted onto a PowerPoint. It's a negotiation with reality, between what you want to do and what you can do now, with the structures, systems, and constraints you already carry.

We've become addicted to strategy work that avoids that negotiation altogether.

We set strategic goals based on ambition, not on what the organisation is currently capable of, or where it can realistically stretch. We write value statements while skirting the deeper question: how will these values survive contact with delivery pressures, legacy systems, or misaligned incentives?

We ignore the rate at which different parts of the organisation can adapt as if culture can override coordination. This is where the belief culture eats strategy for breakfast prevails.

The result? Elegant decks. Confident messaging and execution environments that are out of sync, out of energy, or out of shape.

Strategy doesn't live in slides; it lives in the tensions between roles, structures, systems, and feedback loops.

And if you're not building strategy through those relationships, you're merely describing a preferred future and hoping it comes to fruition.

From narrative to navigation

To move from story to strategy, we need to stop trying to define meaning at the centre and start designing manoeuvrability at the edge.

That begins with asking different questions:

• What's the actual load this strategy places on the organisation?

• Where are we capable of absorbing that load, and where are we too rigid, too slow, or too politically constrained?

• What's the real stretch — and how much of it can be delivered now versus later?

These are not abstract questions. They are the ones that determine whether your strategy will hold under tension or collapse into performative alignment.

Because most strategy work is built on untested assumptions about pace, capacity, and control.

We assume teams will move together. They don't.

We assume values will drive decisions. They don't.

We assume narrative equals clarity. It doesn't.

Clarity in language is no substitute for coherence in behaviour.

The real test isn't whether your strategy makes sense in the room. It's whether your organisation can act on it outside the room.

And when it can't, the answer isn't more belief. It's a structural change; it's a redistribution of authority. It involves making different trade-offs and holding various tensions. That's where real strategy lives.

What strategy actually demands

Strategy isn't a message. It's a sequence of manoeuvres, through pressure, through constraint, with coherence and intent.

It doesn't need better storytelling. It requires the ability to reorient, reconfigure, and respond. It needs a viable orientation. It requires real manoeuvrability. Narrative can support that. But it cannot replace it.

When strategy is reduced to belief without behaviour, to messaging without manoeuvre, it stops being strategy altogether. It becomes performance.

Let's stop pretending slogans are a substitute for structure.

Let's stop mistaking storytelling for strategy.

Let's stop confusing clarity with capability.

We don't need story-driven strategies. We need strategies that can survive first contact with reality.