Why Your 2026 Marketing Strategy Is Not A Growth Strategy (And How To Make It One).

Most marketing plans are disconnected from growth. Here's why, and how to fix it.

In Brief

Right now, CMO’s and marketing teams are busy creating plans or starting to execute their 2026 marketing plans. But way too few of these plans are connected to the real drivers of growth, and too few marketing people can explain how their work will hit the growth number. In 2026, that gap is where brands quietly lose.

What’s happening?

I’ve had the same conversation too many times.

A CMO walks me through the plan: brand refresh, positioning work, agency brief, campaign rollout, content calendar, a shiny new platform idea, maybe a social play that “will drive engagement.” They are awfully busy briefing agencies, driving campaigns, sticking to their plans.

All solid. All familiar. Nothing wrong about this, accept:

Then I ask one question:

“How does this get you to your growth target?” “Do you know why your audience chooses you?” “Do you know why they don’t?”

And the room goes… silent.

Not because they don’t care — but because in many organizations, marketing has become a high-output project machine. The work gets done. The decks get approved. The agencies get fed. The campaign launches. Companies loose sight of the big picture.

But the link between marketing investment and growth is often a foggy hope, not a disciplined system.

What does it mean?

Growth is not a marketing activity problem.

It’s a choice problem.

All growth problems are choice problems. Why? Because choice is the only path to revenue growth, and there are only three ways growth happens in the real world:

1. More people choose you (penetration)

2. People choose you more often (frequency)

3. People choose you at a higher price (pricing power)

That’s it. Everything else is a supporting act.

Brand strategy matters — but it only matters if it increases one of those three forms of choice. Positioning matters — but only if it changes who chooses you, why they choose you, or what they’ll pay. Campaigns matter — but only if they shift behavior, not just awareness.

All marketing effort should be connected to the three ways to grow (above), otherwise they are disconnected from growth.

A lot of marketing is “good work” that doesn’t move choice.

It looks like progress. It feels like progress. It often wins awards for progress. But it doesn’t produce growth because it isn’t built on a clear theory of why humans choose — and what specifically must change for them to choose you.

That missing link is the void.

And the void is expensive.

CMOs are often managing a factory of activity while being asked to deliver an outcome of psychology.

That’s not a skills gap. It’s an operating gap.

Where should you focus?

If you’re a CMO in 2026, the job evolves from “marketing leader” to something sharper:

1) Become Chief Choice Officer

Not in title. In practice.

Every major initiative should answer:

• Which choice lever are we moving? (penetration / frequency / price)

• Which audience segment’s choice are we changing?

• What is the psychological barrier today?

• What must be true in their mind for them to choose us?

If an initiative can’t answer those questions, it’s not strategy. It’s motion.

2) Replace the “Marketing Plan” with a Choice Plan

A marketing plan lists activities.

A choice plan links activities to outcomes.

Your plan should read like a chain of causality, not a list of deliverables.

Example:

• We are losing new buyers because the category sees us as “a good choice, not the most relevant choice”

• We’re only chosen during weekends, what new formats and occasions do we need to invest in to drive frequency during weekdays?

• So we will sharpen a single, defensible value proposition with new offerings and marketing campaigns centered around certain occasions and moments.

• Then we will reduce trial friction (availability, onboarding, sampling, guarantees).

• Then we will deploy comms that create reassurance and identity fit.

• Result: more people choose us this quarter.

That sounds more like a growth plan linked to growth.

3) Stop worshipping “brand work” as the answer

Brand matters more than ever — but the role of brand is not decoration.

Brand is a value perception system.

If your brand work doesn’t change how value is perceived (and therefore chosen), it’s not brand strategy. It’s brand therapy.

What should you consider doing?

Here’s a practical tool you can introduce in the article. It’s simple. It’s brutal. It’s useful.

The Choice Ledger (run every initiative through this)

For every major marketing investment, write a one-page “Choice Ledger”:

1. Primary choice lever: penetration / frequency / price

2. Target chooser: who specifically must change behavior?

3. Current barrier: what stops them choosing today?

4. Desired belief: what must they believe for choice to change?

5. Mechanism: how will this initiative create that belief?

6. Proof: what will make it credible (product, service, people, environment, comms)?

7. Leading indicator: what signal tells us choice is moving before revenue shows up?

If you can’t fill this in, pause the project. Not because it’s bad work — but because it’s unlinked work.

What “choice-linked marketing” looks like in real life

• Product: sharper value promise, fewer confusing variants, better “first experience,” stronger proof points

• Service: remove friction, simplify onboarding, reduce risk, make switching easy

• People: train frontline and sales to deliver the same promise (consistency is underrated)

• Environments: retail, digital, packaging — eliminate doubt and amplify the “why us”

• Comms: not louder; clearer. Not more content; better meaning.

The blank stare test (use this as the punch)

If you’re a CMO, try this in your next leadership meeting:

“If we don’t understand how choice happens, and if we don’t invest in it, how do you suppose we will grow the business?”

When brands don’t grow, they drift. They leak. We call it The Relevance Gap™ (because relevance is the key driver of chocie).

This is the gap we obsess over at Original Minds.

Not “how to do better campaigns.” Not “how to write nicer positioning.” But how to close the distance between:

• what makes humans choose and

• what brands actually deliver and communicate

Because relevance isn’t something you claim. It’s something customers grant — in a specific moment, in a specific context, against specific alternatives.

And when that alignment drifts, growth doesn’t collapse overnight.

It erodes.

Quietly.

Then suddenly.

If you’re a CMO or commercial leader and you want a clean read on where your brand is being chosen vs quietly losing choice, DM “Score” and we’ll help you understand where you’re Relevance Gap™ lies, and how to close it.