Marketing rarely loses relevance due to a lack of ideas, budget, or creativity. It loses relevance due to a lack of a plan that connects each initiative to the value of the business. It is this plan that separates marketing that is merely visible from marketing that drives the company forward.
Every marketing leader knows the scenario: the team delivers campaigns, content, activations, and media at an intense pace, and yet, in the earnings meeting, someone on the board asks, "But what did this bring to the business?" The question exposes a real gap between what marketing produces and what the company needs it to produce.
And it's not an isolated perception. Research from McKinsey The study showed that the misalignment between CEOs and CMOs grew by 20% between 2023 and 2025, largely because marketing appears disconnected from company growth metrics. In the same survey, 7% of CEOs measure marketing by revenue and margin growth, but only 3% of CMOs track this metric as a priority. It's people looking at the same work with different standards.
At Anacouto, we wrote the paper. Strategic Planning 2027 precisely to address this gap. The thesis of this article is straightforward: what increases the The impact of marketing on business. It's not about doing more marketing, it's about better planning the connection between brand, marketing, and value. Below are the principles that underpin this type of plan.
The problem isn't the marketing, it's the plan that connects it to the business.
Marketing disconnected from the business is not a failure of execution, it's a failure of planning. When the corporate strategy defines where the company is going (markets, goals, portfolio) and marketing runs on a parallel track of campaigns and calendar, the result is predictable: a lot of activity, little impact on what the company measures.
We believe that effective planning stems from the integration of corporate strategy and branding strategy. The former defines the vision for the future; the latter is the engine that brings that vision to life and accelerates its progress. The link between the two is... purpose – the guiding thread that keeps business and brand decisions pointing in the same direction. Without this formalized integration in a plan, marketing becomes a cost center that produces parts; with it, it becomes a growth lever that generates value. The evidence supports the argument: according to McKinsey, companies that treat brand and communication as one of their two main growth strategies are twice as likely to grow 51% or more in revenue (67% versus 33% versus 33%).
Start with the value, not the campaign.
The first change in method is to reverse the starting point. At Anacouto, one of the inspirations for our planning is the model... Working Backwards, From Amazon: start with the desired outcome and the experience you want to deliver, and only then build the path to get there.
In practice, this changes the quality of marketing decisions. Instead of starting from current limitations and asking "what can we do this quarter?", the team begins to ask "what transformation do we want to generate for the customer and for the business, and what needs to exist for this to happen?". The campaign ceases to be the beginning of the conversation and becomes the consequence of a value choice. It's a subtle difference in discourse and a huge one in impact: first, what would make a difference is defined, then what is produced. This is the logic that the Harvard Business Review summarized in 2024, arguing that marketing needs to be at the center of the growth strategy, not as a dissemination of what has already been decided, but as part of the decision.
Plan in layers, not by deadlines.
The second change is to stop trying to answer everything within the same time frame. One of the most common planning pitfalls is mixing ten-year decisions with decisions for the next few weeks, which often leads to plans that are either too rigid or too tactical. Brand is built in the long term; performance is adjusted in the short term. Treating both with the same yardstick weakens both.
Therefore, we work with a layered logic, inspired by the concept. Zoom Out / Zoom In From Deloitte: looking to the distant future to understand major transformations and, at the same time, defining what needs to begin now. In practice, the plan is organized into horizons that interact with each other:
Vision (10 years): What kind of future do we want to build? That's where the brand resides.
Ambitions (3 years): What do we need to achieve to get there?
Priorities (12 months): What really needs to happen this year?
Execution (90 days): What initiatives are starting now?
When marketing considers these layers simultaneously, each short-term action carries a long-term intention, and brand building is no longer sacrificed every time the quarterly target gets tight.
Make the plan a living system with clear owners.
The third change is the most crucial: stop treating planning as a document that is reviewed once a year. In a context of constant change, strategy is not an immutable plan, it is a living decision-making system. And a living system is sustained by three disciplines.
The first is the review ritual. Instead of reviewing the plan only at the end of the cycle, periodic moments are created to monitor not only the performance indicators, but also changes in the market, behavior and technology, and to adjust priorities when the context requires it. The second is accountability. No plan yields results without clarity about who does what: each strategic initiative needs an owner, clear objectives, and autonomy to happen, with rituals focused on decisions, not just status. The third is to plan in order to experiment. The best strategies evolve from testing: transforming big bets into testable hypotheses, prioritizing pilot projects before large investments, and defining indicators that measure learning, not just results.
This is where artificial intelligence comes in as a planning partner, not just a production tool. AI accelerates diagnosis (consolidating research, analyzing competitors, synthesizing trends), enhances scenario building, and supports the structuring of OKRs and continuous reviews. As a result, the team dedicates less time to operations and more to what generates real value: interpreting context, debating priorities, and making better decisions. The better the strategic thinking, the better the use of AI.
From strategy to execution: marketing has a greater impact on business.
Increasing the impact of marketing on a business isn't about volume, but about connection. A plan that starts with value, is organized in layers, and functions as a living system makes marketing stop running parallel to the strategy and start becoming part of it. It's the difference between marketing that fills the calendar and marketing that drives the company's numbers.
At Anacouto, this is how we work: from strategy to execution, ensuring that what the brand... é, what she he does and what she he speaks They must be aligned and connected to the growth of the business. That is the role of a well-executed strategic plan: to transform marketing energy into measurable value for the organization.
Is your company's marketing connected to the business strategy or running parallel to it? To build this plan, talk to an Anacouto specialist and... Learn about what we do..
