Marketing Strategy is Not One-and-Done

Why Static Strategies Die While Adaptive Brands Thrive

It’s completely cliche to say at: marketing is always changing. But here's what's not: marketers who treat strategy as a one-and-done exercise are setting themselves up for failure. The graveyard of marketing is littered with brands that couldn't (or wouldn't) evolve. Meanwhile, the organizations thriving today aren't just adapting—they're anticipating what's next and building frameworks that flex by design.

I mean, can you imagine if when the internet really started taking off in the mid-’90s* marketers just said, “Nah, we’re good!” and continued strictly traditional media like print ads, billboards, and TV commercials? 

Or at the height of the pandemic if marketers stayed the course on holding in-person events? 

Or in the past year… if you’ve been able to ignore AI, then kudos to you. Let me buy you a coffee!

All that is to say, any kind of advancement, especially technological, is going to impact audience behavior. And no matter what kind of marketing we do or where we do it, at its core it’s about getting someone ( the audience) to take a step… to change their behavior. So naturally how we do that, our marketing strategy, needs to evolve too.

What is Marketing Strategy?

Before we dive into exploring why and when you should revisit your marketing strategy, let’s define it. If you’ve read any of my other posts, you know that I’m big on precision in language.

At CID, we define marketing strategy as the art of planning and directing an approach to winning. Fueled by organized research, insights, and direction, strategy is an objective lens to align your approach to reaching and engaging with your target audience.

All this is to say: marketing strategy is about understanding customer needs, positioning your products or services, and determining the channels and messaging to connect with consumers. But the magic isn’t in creating the strategy—it’s in evolving it continuously.

The ROI Imperative: Why Adaptive Strategy Pays Off

With 40% of marketing leaders facing pressure to prove ROI (according to our 2025 client survey), the stakes for getting strategy right have never been higher. Burnout-inducing workloads and shrinking team sizes mean marketers need strategies that deliver measurable results—not just pretty presentations that gather dust. When your resources are stretched and you're being asked to do more with less, you can't afford strategies that miss the mark. You need approaches that adapt as quickly as your market does.

Need Proof that a Single Strategy Will Not Work Indefinitely?

Let’s briefly consider some real-life examples of brands that failed to evolve their strategy:

• Meta's Metaverse: remember when the Metaverse was everywhere? Meta invested billions in the technology, and while they’ve pivoted towards AI (like everyone else) they haven’t given up on it yet either, despite it contributing to significant financial losses (possibly up to the tune of $17B in 2023).
  
  
• Peloton's Post-Pandemic Plunge: After soaring during pandemic lockdowns, Peloton failed to adapt as the world reopened. Supply chain issues damaged customer satisfaction, while their strategy remained static. This resulted in massive revenue losses, layoffs, and a dramatic stock decline. Despite focusing on content and subscriptions, their recovery remains uncertain.
• Bed Bath & Beyond: Failure to modernize their e-commerce strategy to keep up with competitors and adapt to changing home goods consumer preferences led to bankruptcy in 2023, despite being a household name for decades. Shortly after they were purchased by Overstock.com (who also gobbled up Zulily). So far operating as an online only retailer, brick and mortar may come back in 2025. We'll see if they learned anything.

Who’s done it well?

• Microsoft: From a tech dinosaur to cloud computing and AI leader, Microsoft's strategic pivot under Satya Nadella transformed the company from declining Windows-defender to a trillion-dollar tech innovator.
  
  
• Spotify: Started as a music streaming service, they saw the podcast boom coming and quickly evolved their strategy to become the world's largest audio platform—capturing content that Apple had dominated for years.
  
  
• Adobe: Transformed from selling boxed software to a subscription-based cloud service, dramatically increasing their recurring revenue and market position while making their creative tools more accessible.

Of course, crafting a strategy is only half the battle. The real magic lies in treating your strategy as a living, breathing document, not a one-time exercise.

At CID, we’ve seen it before. We talk with prospective clients who’ve fallen into a "set-it-and-forget-it" trap. They created a brilliant strategy, launched their campaigns, and then... crickets. Or at least less than expected performance. One way to avoid this trap and remember to revisit your strategy is by building in checkpoints that spur continuous improvement. 

5 Ways to Adopt a Continuous Strategy Improvement Mindset

1. Measure early, measure often.
Track key metrics, analyze results regularly, and dig deeper into the "why" behind your data. 

Bonus tip: get yourself a dashboard to make this as easy as possible for you and your team. We use LookerStudio with a lot of our clients but have also used well-built and color-coded spreadsheets. Spend more time on the function vs. the form.

2. Schedule regular strategy reviews.
Your cadence will depend on your business, how fast (or slow) your sales cycle is, what kind of seasonality might exist for you, etc. For most B2B businesses, we recommend doing this on a trimester or quarterly basis.

Also, recognize that you will need to prepare for this conversation. Summarize findings from the last quarter and send them to the team ahead of time to make the meeting as effective as possible. Your social media person might have an interesting take on email performance, even if it’s not an area they are responsible for. If you’re the director or team lead, have a hypothesis about where you think you should go, and then discuss and debate as a team. Make sure you leave with at least one thing you can adopt or put into place before the next meeting.

3. Embrace experimentation.
This is where your hypothesis comes into play! Consider testing new tactics, channels, and messaging. Even small experiments can yield big results and inform future strategic decisions. 

4. Look outside of yourself.
Yes, keep an eye on what’s going on in your industry, what your customer sentiment is, and what your competitors are doing. But also look at adjacent industries for inspiration. For example, if you’re in Financial Services, also keep an eye on what’s happening in FinTech. Share what you find that’s admirable with your team, and talk about it in those strategy review meetings.

5. Foster cross-team collaboration.
When was the last time you sat in on a sales call? Or a customer service call? Sometimes networking with other teams in your own company can give you additional perspectives and help you keep your strategy connected to overall business goals.

The Bottom Line

A winning strategy isn’t a static blueprint. It should be a living breathing framework that evolves. You’ve got to adapt, refine, and remind yourself that the only constant in marketing and life is change.  

Ready to move your Brand Forward with a strategy designed for continuous evolution? CID's team combines bold thinking with practical execution—delivering marketing approaches that adapt as quickly as your market does. Contact us to start building momentum that matters.