The Strategy-Execution Gap: Why Great Plans Fail and How to Fix It

You've invested weeks in strategic planning. Your marketing strategy deck is polished, comprehensive, and approved by the Board. The team is energised. Yet six months later, you're sitting in a review meeting wondering why the results don't match the ambition.

Sound familiar?

This is the strategy-execution gap, and it's the silent killer of marketing success. After two decades working with organisations from multinational brands to ambitious scale-ups, I've seen brilliant strategies gather dust while competitors with decent plans and excellent execution race ahead.

The uncomfortable truth? Most marketing strategies fail not because of flawed thinking, but because of flawed implementation.

The Seduction of Strategy

There's something intoxicating about strategy development. The big thinking, the frameworks, the possibility. A well-crafted strategy feels like an achievement in itself. Boards love it. Leadership teams align around it. Everyone leaves the planning session feeling accomplished.

Then reality hits.

The strategy document gets filed. Daily priorities take over. The grand vision fragments into disconnected tactics. Three months in, someone asks, "Whatever happened to that new positioning we agreed on?" and the room goes quiet.

This isn't a failure of intelligence or commitment. It's a failure to recognise that strategy and execution aren't separate phases—they're interconnected parts of the same process. Like a honeycomb, where each cell supports and connects to the others, great marketing requires every element to work together.

Why the Gap Exists

1. Strategy Is Created in Isolation

Most strategic planning happens in a bubble. Senior leaders retreat for a planning day, consultants facilitate workshops with carefully selected stakeholders, and strategies emerge from these controlled environments.

The problem? The people who'll actually implement the strategy - your marketing team, sales force, customer service staff - weren't in the room. When strategy lands on their desk as a finished product, they're expected to execute someone else's vision without the context, ownership, or practical input that makes implementation possible.

2. We Underestimate Complexity

On a whiteboard, the strategy looks beautifully simple: three pillars, five initiatives, clear KPIs. In reality, each of those initiatives involves dozens of decisions, countless dependencies, and unexpected obstacles.

That "simple" repositioning requires new messaging across 147 different touchpoints. The "straightforward" campaign launch needs coordination across 250 partner retailers who've got differing opinions about the campaign and therefore might not share your motivations. The strategy assumed resources that don't exist or capabilities you haven't built yet.

3. Execution Gets Treated as Tactical

Here's the bias that kills strategies: we treat strategic thinking as high-level intellectual work and execution as low-level tactical work. So organisations invest heavily in strategy development and minimally in implementation support.

But execution isn't about mindlessly following orders. It requires constant problem-solving, adaptation, and decision-making. It's where strategy meets reality and either bends or breaks.

4. Nobody Owns the Connection

Most organisations have clear ownership for strategy development (senior leadership, strategy team, external consultants) and clear ownership for execution (marketing team, agencies, operations). But who owns the critical space between them?

Who's responsible for translating strategic intent into implementable plans? Who makes the thousand micro-decisions required to bring a strategy to life? Who ensures the strategy adapts as implementation reveals new realities?

Usually, nobody. And that gap is where strategies die.

Bridging the Gap: Why you need an Executioner

The Execution Day needs to kill the strategy or show that it can indeed be brought to life

We believe in building the honeycomb—connecting strategy to execution, engaging people who'll make it happen, and providing the structure needed for ideas to become reality.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Start with the End in Mind

Before finalising strategy, ask: "What would it take to actually implement this?" Not hypothetically—specifically. What resources? What capabilities? What changes to current operations? What might break or need rebuilding?

If you can't answer these questions clearly, your strategy isn't ready. You're designing a building without considering whether the foundation can support it. And I know strategy days are meant to be all about 'blue sky thinking' - and yes, having a negative nelly who crushes ideas before they get a chance to breathe can kill innovation - but in reality, your strategy day isn't done until you have an execution day to test whether it can actually be done.

Involve Implementers Early

The people who'll execute your strategy have invaluable knowledge about what's possible, what's difficult, and where the real obstacles live. Involve them in strategy development—not to water down ambition, but to ground it in reality.

This doesn't mean strategy by committee. It means senior leaders set the ambition while those closer to implementation pressure-test how to get there. The resulting strategy might look different from your original vision, but it will actually be implementable.

Build Implementation into the Strategy

Your strategy shouldn't end with "what" and "why"—it must include "how." Not every detail, but the key elements:

• Sequencing: What needs to happen first, and what depends on it?

• Resource Requirements: What investment is needed beyond the obvious?

• Capability Gaps: What skills or systems need developing?

• Decision Rights: Who can make what decisions as implementation unfolds?

• Governance: How will you manage progress and adapt as needed?

Think of your strategy as 60% direction and 40% roadmap. Both are essential.

At the end of the day, execution isn't just a marketing problem—it's an organisational challenge. Treat it that way from the start.