Most teams confuse a marketing plan with a marketing strategy. They're not the same thing — and the difference matters more than you think. I've walked into a lot of marketing planning sessions over the years. And my first question is always simple: Why are we doing these things? What's the connection across all of this activity? And - most importantly - why would the customer care enough to engage? Most of the time, what comes back is a description of the calendar itself.

Most purchases don't start with an ad or Google search. They start with a memory. I spent nearly a decade at J.P. Morgan — Doing everything from building multimillion-dollar, global campaigns and managing sales enablement functions across some of the most complex B2B categories out there. And one thing I saw over and over again: Teams pouring budget into performance marketing while the brand quietly faded from buyers' minds. The research backs this up. Professor Jenni Roman

Picture two scenarios. It's Friday afternoon and someone's thinking about grabbing coffee before a long commute home. They don't Google "best coffee near me." They just think and a brand appears. Maybe it's Starbucks. Maybe it's a local spot they love. Whichever one comes to mind first has a significant advantage in winning that purchase. Now picture a VP of Finance who's been tasked with finding a new treasury solution. She doesn't start by searching LinkedIn. She starts by

Marketers love to talk about differentiation and unique value propositions and you can burn a lot of energy trying to perfect something that really doesn't change anything in your performance. "What makes us different?" It's the wrong question. I know that sounds provocative. So let me explain. Byron Sharp's research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute — built on decades of data across hundreds of categories — makes a distinction that most marketers have never been taught: differ