Levels of Strategy: Why Most Marketers Are Playing at the Wrong Level

Strategy operates at multiple levels inside any organisation, and the level you are working at determines the decisions you can make, the resources you can access, and the results you can realistically expect. Corporate strategy sets direction for the whole business. Business unit strategy defines how a division competes. Functional strategy, which is where most marketers live, translates those choices into plans for a specific department. Get the level wrong, and you are either overreaching or underdelivering.

Most marketing problems I have seen over two decades are not creative problems or budget problems. They are alignment problems. Someone is building a campaign without a business objective, or writing a channel plan without a positioning, or setting KPIs that have nothing to do with the commercial goal the CEO is actually chasing. That is what happens when the levels of strategy are ignored or misunderstood.

What Are the Three Levels of Strategy?

The framework most business schools teach, and most practitioners quietly ignore, breaks strategy into three tiers. Corporate strategy answers the question: what business are we in, and where are we going? Business unit strategy answers: how do we compete in this specific market? Functional strategy answers: how does our department contribute to that competitive position?

These levels are not interchangeable. A marketing director writing a brand strategy is working at the functional level. A CEO deciding whether to enter a new vertical is working at the corporate level. A general manager choosing to compete on price rather than service in a specific segment is working at the business unit level. Conflating these levels is where organisations tie themselves in knots.

I spent several years running an agency that grew from around 20 people to over 100. The growth did not happen because we had better tactics than our competitors. It happened because we made a corporate-level decision to specialise, which then cascaded into a business unit decision about which verticals to pursue, which then shaped the functional decisions about how we hired, pitched, and priced. Each level informed the next. When one level was unclear, the levels below it became chaotic.

Where Does Marketing Strategy Sit in This Hierarchy?

Marketing is a functional strategy. That is not a demotion. It is a description of scope. Functional strategies are where the work gets done, where budgets get allocated, and where competitive advantage either materialises or evaporates. But functional strategies only work when they are downstream of clear business unit and corporate decisions.

The problem in many organisations is that marketing is asked to fill gaps that should have been resolved higher up. If the business has not decided who it is competing against, marketing cannot write a meaningful positioning. If the business unit has not decided which customer segments matter most, marketing cannot make sensible channel decisions. Marketing ends up doing strategy by default, which means it is doing strategy without the authority, the information, or the commercial context to do it well.

This is one reason why go-to-market planning is so often muddled. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub on this site covers the full scope of how organisations plan and execute market entry and growth, but the underlying issue in most GTM failures is not the plan itself. It is that the plan was built without clarity on what the business is actually trying to achieve at the level above it.

What Is Go-To-Market Strategy and Which Level Does It Belong To?

Go-to-market strategy is the translation layer between corporate intent and functional execution. It is not purely a marketing document, and it is not purely a sales document. It is the plan for how a business takes a product or service to a specific market, with a specific value proposition, through specific channels, to a defined customer. Done properly, it sits at the intersection of business unit and functional strategy.

That positioning matters because it tells you who needs to be in the room when GTM decisions are made. If GTM is treated as a marketing deliverable, you get campaigns without commercial grounding. If it is treated as a sales deliverable, you get channel plans without brand coherence. The organisations that get this right treat GTM as a cross-functional exercise with a single commercial owner, usually a GM, a CCO, or in smaller businesses, the CEO.

Vidyard’s research into why GTM feels harder points to fragmentation across teams as a core driver of execution failure. That fragmentation is almost always a symptom of unclear ownership at the strategy level, not a people problem or a tools problem. When nobody is sure which level a decision belongs to, everyone makes it, and the plan collapses under the weight of conflicting assumptions.

How Do Corporate Decisions Shape What Marketing Can Do?

Corporate strategy sets the playing field. It decides which markets the business will compete in, which it will exit, and where it will invest for growth. Those decisions are not marketing decisions, but they determine almost everything marketing can and cannot do.

If corporate strategy says the business is moving upmarket, marketing cannot keep running acquisition campaigns aimed at SMEs and call it aligned. If corporate strategy says the business is entering a new geography, marketing needs to understand whether that is a beachhead play or a full-scale launch, because the resourcing, messaging, and channel mix are completely different in each case.

I have sat in enough senior leadership meetings to know that corporate strategy is often less explicit than it should be. Executives agree on a direction in a board presentation and then assume it cascades naturally into functional plans. It rarely does. The functional teams are still running last year’s playbook while the board is pointing at a different horizon. Closing that gap is not a communications problem. It is a strategy architecture problem, and it starts with being honest about what has actually been decided at each level.

BCG’s work on brand and go-to-market alignment makes the case that brand strategy and GTM strategy need to be built together, not sequentially. That is a corporate-level insight with functional-level implications. If brand positioning is decided in isolation from how the business actually plans to reach the market, you end up with a beautiful brand that nobody encounters in the right context.

What Does Business Unit Strategy Mean for Marketing Teams?

Business unit strategy is where competitive decisions live. How does this division, product line, or market segment win? On price? On service? On product differentiation? On distribution? These are not marketing questions, but the answers shape every marketing decision that follows.

A business competing on price needs marketing that communicates value clearly and reduces friction in the purchase path. A business competing on service needs marketing that builds trust and demonstrates expertise over time. A business competing on product innovation needs marketing that educates the market, not just converts it. The strategy dictates the brief. The brief dictates the plan.

Early in my career I made the mistake of overweighting lower-funnel performance metrics without asking what competitive position we were actually trying to build. We were efficient at capturing existing demand and terrible at creating new demand. The numbers looked good until they did not, because we had been harvesting a crop we had not planted. Growth requires reaching people who do not yet know they need you, not just converting the ones who have already decided. That is a business unit level insight, and it took me longer than it should have to connect it to the functional work we were doing.

BCG’s analysis of pricing and go-to-market strategy in B2B markets illustrates how business unit pricing decisions ripple directly into channel and messaging choices at the functional level. Pricing is not a marketing decision, but it is a marketing input, and treating it as someone else’s problem is how marketing plans end up disconnected from commercial reality.

What Is Functional Strategy and What Does It Actually Include?

Functional strategy is the plan for how a specific department, marketing, sales, product, finance, delivers its contribution to the business unit and corporate objectives. For marketing, this includes positioning, channel strategy, content strategy, campaign planning, measurement frameworks, and team structure. It is a lot of ground, which is partly why marketing functions struggle to hold it all together coherently.

The discipline of functional strategy is knowing what is yours to decide and what is not. Channel mix is a functional decision. Which segments to target is a business unit decision. Whether to enter a new market is a corporate decision. Marketers who try to resolve all three levels in a single planning cycle usually end up with a document that is too broad to be actionable and too vague to be useful.

The clearest functional marketing strategies I have seen start with a crisp statement of what the business unit strategy requires from marketing, and then work backward from there. What does marketing need to deliver for the business to achieve its competitive objective? That question, answered honestly, cuts through most of the noise that clutters a typical marketing plan.

For teams thinking about growth tactics within this functional layer, Semrush’s breakdown of growth hacking examples is worth reviewing, not as a list to copy, but as a set of cases that illustrate how functional decisions connect to business outcomes when the strategic context is clear.

How Do the Levels Connect in Practice?

The connection between levels is not automatic. It requires deliberate translation at each handoff. Corporate strategy needs to be converted into business unit priorities. Business unit priorities need to be converted into functional briefs. Functional briefs need to be converted into plans. Most organisations do the first and last steps and skip the middle two.

The early days at one agency I joined were instructive in this respect. A brainstorming session for a major drinks brand, the kind of session where someone hands you a whiteboard pen and walks out of the room, forces you to understand very quickly whether you actually have a strategic point of view or whether you have been coasting on process. The answer, in that moment, was that I had a perspective but not a framework. I knew what I thought the brand should do, but I could not articulate clearly why that was the right call at the business level, not just the campaign level. That gap is uncomfortable, and it is worth closing before you are standing in front of a room rather than after.

Connecting the levels in practice means building strategy reviews that include all three tiers, even if the people in the room are primarily functional. It means asking, at every major planning decision, whether the choice being made is consistent with what the business unit strategy requires and whether the business unit strategy is consistent with what corporate has decided. These are not bureaucratic questions. They are the questions that determine whether the work you are doing will matter twelve months from now.

For teams working on creator and content-led GTM execution, Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market shows how functional channel decisions can be made more coherent when they are anchored to a clear GTM brief rather than built from the bottom up.

What Goes Wrong When the Levels Are Ignored?

When organisations ignore the levels of strategy, they end up with activity that is busy but not purposeful. Campaigns that are well-executed but strategically irrelevant. Channel plans that are technically sound but commercially disconnected. Measurement frameworks that report on outputs nobody actually cares about.

The most common failure mode I have seen is functional teams being handed a budget and a vague objective and being expected to produce a strategy. They produce something, because they have to. But without clarity on the business unit and corporate levels, what they produce is usually a rationalisation of what they were going to do anyway, dressed up in strategic language. It looks like a strategy. It functions like a to-do list.

The second failure mode is the opposite: corporate leadership spending enormous energy on vision and direction without translating it into anything actionable at the functional level. I have reviewed marketing plans from businesses where the corporate strategy was genuinely sharp and the functional plan was completely disconnected from it. Not because the marketing team was incompetent, but because nobody had done the translation work. The levels existed but they were not connected.

For GTM teams facing this kind of fragmentation, the right tools can help with execution, but they cannot substitute for the strategic clarity that has to come from above. Tools are functional. Strategy is structural.

How Should Marketers Use This Framework Day to Day?

Understanding the levels of strategy is not an academic exercise. It is a practical tool for knowing where to focus, what to escalate, and what to decide yourself.

Before any significant marketing decision, ask three questions. First: is this a functional decision, or does it require input from the business unit or corporate level? Second: is the business unit strategy clear enough for me to make this decision confidently? Third: if I make this decision and it turns out the business unit strategy is different from what I assumed, how much damage does that do?

Those three questions will not resolve every ambiguity, but they will stop you from building plans on foundations that have not been laid. They will also help you have more productive conversations with senior leadership, because you will be able to articulate precisely what you need from them before you can do your job well, rather than arriving with a plan and hoping they approve it.

For a broader view of how these strategic decisions connect to growth planning and market execution, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section of this site brings together the frameworks, case analysis, and practical thinking that sit across all three levels. Strategy without execution is theory. Execution without strategy is noise. The levels give you the architecture to build something that is neither.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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