Long term support and advisory board member of Little Grey cells Club, Cecilia Weckstrom’s latest paper.
Every marketing function I’ve watched try to transform has run one of four playbooks. Fast execution. Balancing brand and performance. Better tools. Specialist expertise.
Each one works, for a while. Then the key people move on, the consultants leave, or the programme gets reorganised. And the company is solving the same problems again, having already spent the budget to solve them the first time.
The pattern isn’t about bad execution. It’s about what’s missing between the investments. Speed without principles stays directionless. Tools without shared logic stay disconnected. Expertise that concentrates in a few heads walks out the door with them.
A company that restarts its transformation every three years doesn’t spend 1x. It spends 3x for 1x of value. The board paper never frames it that way.
The question that cuts through: if your top marketing people left tomorrow, would your capability keep working — or would you be back to sitting up?
The full piece maps what the progression from sitting up to running actually looks like, and why most marketing functions are stuck upgrading the ingredients without building the connective tissue between them.
Read the full piece here.
