There’s good news for strategists: we are in an era of less strategy. Which means there is opportunity for brave souls who can see around corners.
First, some evidence of the strategy pullback:
--
Who's Bored?
There’s a sameness, a flatness to the ways brands compete. It’s like companies have forgotten that they need to differentiate.
Lauren Leek shared an excellent quantitative analysis recently of the chainification of London high streets: what’s notable is not just the presence of chains on main drags, but the presence of the same set of chains from high street to high street. She did a similar analysis of word diversity in song lyrics and which films are most watched.
Once you start thinking about homogenization, you see it everywhere: book covers, sneakers, even AI all converge on the same design or features or functionality. It’s why when you see something truly new, it’s startling.
Lack of differentiation can signal a lack of strategy. It’s not preventing high street chains from continued expansion, but homogenization within a category can make the entire category super boring for customers.
And that just might be an opportunity for those with a strategy.
--
Ceding of Strategic Choice
One of strategy guru Roger Martin’s great gifts to the practice is the concept of ‘where to play.’ It’s a strategic choice about category, targeting, price, and channel, and part of it is being handed over to ad platforms.
With more budget shifting to media and away from marketing fixed cost, choices about targeting and category are now outsourced to algorithms. You pop your basic ads into Google or Meta, the platform riffs on your ad creative and uses secret sauce to find prospects on the cusp of conversion. It’s effective at driving revenue—and it crowds out strategy.
Brands are ceding ‘where to play’ to ad platforms. It’s going great for the platforms—social advertising alone was up over 30% in 2025—but it’s chipping away at brand equity. Algorithms solve for what works for the most people, which ends up sanding off the rough edges that make a brand distinctive.
As brands have moved beyond core audiences, they may gain temporary revenue bumps, but over time they lose meaning. It’s hard to imagine this won’t accelerate in the next couple of years.
--
Synthetic Personas
Market research is arguably a lot less necessary when you can throw some ads into the Meta maw and see what works. And yet the habit persists: brands continue to seek input from panels and surveys. They’re just moving it in-house and taking advantage of AI-generated synthetic personas derived from real people.
What’s the point of this type of research? It’s backward-looking, one more step removed from actual humans, and ineffective in addressing the ‘say vs do’ problem that plagues conventional research. Whatever it’s doing—which may just be checking a box at this point—it’s not driving strategy.
--
Strategy is a risky choice right now. It takes a while to prove out, and most companies (or at least their execs) don’t have the luxury of time.
It is also, as Alex M. H. Smith has argued, not really necessary. Companies are getting by without strategy, so why bother?
There are a number of conditions that may make strategy necessary in the near term:
1. A change in demand. Even the K-shaped economy may lose steam at some point.
2. A shift in competition. Maybe a substitute for your category emerges, and incumbents need to look snappy for a change.
3. A change in cost of capital. This one is happening—just look at the bond market.
4. Related: a need to sell. There are many reasons that PE firms are struggling with exits, but short-termism may be one of them.
5. Paid media runs out of steam. At some point, the algorithm has found everyone that matches your current marketing model. How do you create new demand for your brand?
This last point may be the real canary in the coalmine. And it may be hard to discern: CMOs may think, ‘it’s just us’ without realizing the problem is system-wide. It’s the low-tide moment when weak strategy is exposed.
Get ready, strategists—your moment to shine may be right around the corner.
But the opportunity doesn’t mean that you should pull your old strategy books from wherever they’ve been moldering. Timeless strategy dynamics—differentiation, commitment—still apply, but strategy development has changed.
It’s faster, more dynamic, and takes advantage of feedback loops that didn’t used to exist. When speed and rigor are no longer at odds, it’s possible to test strategy to reduce the risk of missteps. What becomes possible through strategy experimentation:
- Finding the most powerful ways to differentiate. Is it product? Brand? Community?
- Recreating brand equity for brands that have let ad platform algorithms chip it away.
- Understanding the ‘edges’ of a rebranding. How does repositioning open up wholly incremental audiences? Where does it start to alienate existing customers?
If you think your tide might be going out, we’d love to chat.