Checkers Strategy: Why Most Brands Play the Wrong Game

A checkers strategy is a go-to-market approach built on occupying more squares than the competition, expanding coverage systematically across channels, segments, or geographies rather than betting everything on a single decisive move. It is less about genius positioning and more about disciplined presence. Most brands that struggle with growth are not losing on strategy. They are losing because they are playing chess when the market rewards checkers.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Chess rewards the brilliant move. Checkers rewards the player who controls more of the board, consistently, over time. If you have ever watched a brand with average creative and average media outperform a sharper competitor, you have probably watched checkers beat chess without knowing what you were seeing.

What Does a Checkers Strategy Actually Mean in Marketing?

Strip away the analogy and a checkers strategy is about coverage logic. It asks a simple question: where does your brand need to be present to win, and are you present there? Not brilliantly present. Not disruptively present. Just present, with enough weight and consistency that when a buyer enters the market, you are already in their field of vision.

This runs counter to how most marketing teams are trained to think. We are taught to find the insight, nail the positioning, land the big idea. Those things matter. But they are chess moves. They assume the game is won by the cleverest player at the table. In most categories, that is not how it works. The game is won by the brand that shows up most consistently across the most relevant touchpoints, over the longest period of time.

I have spent time across more than 30 industries, and the pattern holds more often than most strategists would like to admit. The brand with the sharper positioning does not always win. The brand with the more disciplined coverage usually does. That is not an argument against sharp positioning. It is an argument for not mistaking positioning for strategy.

If you are building or refining your go-to-market approach, the broader principles behind this kind of coverage thinking are covered in depth across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub. The checkers framing is one lens among several, but it is a useful one for teams that are strong on ideas and weak on execution discipline.

Why Performance Marketing Is Not the Same as Coverage

Earlier in my career, I put too much faith in lower-funnel performance. The numbers looked good. Conversion rates were strong. Cost per acquisition was efficient. It felt like marketing was working. What I did not fully appreciate at the time was how much of that performance was capturing demand that already existed rather than creating new demand. We were harvesting. We were not planting.

The clothing shop analogy is one I keep coming back to. When someone walks into a shop and tries something on, the probability of purchase is dramatically higher than for someone who has never encountered the brand. Performance marketing tends to find the people who have already tried the jacket on. It is efficient, but it is fishing in a pond that someone else stocked. A checkers strategy asks who is stocking the pond, and whether you are one of them.

This is not a case against performance marketing. Managing hundreds of millions in ad spend across my agency years taught me that performance channels, done well, are genuinely valuable. The problem is when performance becomes the whole strategy, because then you are only ever competing for existing intent. You are not building the category of buyers who will eventually enter the market with your brand already in their consideration set.

Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models makes a related point: sustainable growth requires reaching new audiences, not just optimising conversion of the ones already in market. That framing aligns closely with what a checkers strategy is trying to do. Occupy more squares. Build presence in places where future buyers are before they become buyers.

How Does Checkers Strategy Apply to Channel Planning?

The most direct application is channel mix. A checkers approach to channel planning says: before we optimise any single channel, let us ask whether we are present in the right channels at all. This sounds obvious. In practice, most brands have a dominant channel and a collection of underfunded satellites around it. That is not a checkers strategy. That is one strong piece and a lot of noise.

True coverage means each channel is funded to a level where it can actually do a job. Not just technically present, but meaningfully present. There is a threshold below which a channel produces no useful signal and no useful impact. Being on every channel at sub-threshold spend is worse than being on fewer channels properly. This is the trap that kills the checkers strategy before it starts: confusing presence with coverage.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the clearest lessons was that spreading resource too thin was always more damaging than being selective and going deep. The same logic applies to channel planning. Checkers does not mean touching every square. It means controlling the squares that matter, with enough weight to hold them.

Creator-led channels are a good current example of this tension. Later’s research on go-to-market with creators shows how brands are using creator partnerships to occupy channels and audience segments they would struggle to reach through owned or paid media alone. That is checkers thinking: identifying squares where you are not present and finding the most efficient way to get there.

What Is the Difference Between Coverage and Dilution?

This is the question that separates the strategy from the mistake. Coverage means you are present in the right places with enough weight to matter. Dilution means you have spread budget and attention so thin that you are not really anywhere. Both can look like a checkers strategy from the outside. The difference shows up in the results.

The diagnostic is simple but uncomfortable. For each channel or segment you are present in, ask: are we here with enough frequency and quality that a buyer would actually remember us? If the honest answer is no, you are not playing checkers. You are ticking boxes. Ticking boxes feels like progress and produces almost none.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years. The entries that impressed me most were rarely the ones with the most channels in the plan. They were the ones where every element of the plan was doing a specific job, with enough weight behind it to actually do that job. The plans that fell apart under scrutiny were the ones where channel selection had been driven by trend or by committee rather than by coverage logic.

Dilution is also a political problem. When every stakeholder wants their preferred channel represented, the budget gets sliced into pieces that are too small to work. A checkers strategy requires the discipline to say no to some squares in order to hold the ones that matter. That is harder than it sounds in most organisations, and it is one reason why the strategy is more common in theory than in practice.

How Does Checkers Strategy Apply to Audience Segmentation?

Coverage logic applies to audiences as much as it applies to channels. The question is not just where you are present but who you are present to. Most brands have a core audience they know well and a set of adjacent audiences they have thought about but never properly committed to. A checkers strategy says those adjacent squares are not optional extras. They are part of the board.

The practical challenge is that reaching new audience segments requires different creative, different channels, and different measurement. It is more expensive and more uncertain than doubling down on the core. That is exactly why most brands do not do it, and exactly why the ones that do tend to build compounding advantage over time.

There is a version of this that Semrush documents in their analysis of growth approaches: the brands that grow fastest are typically the ones that find ways to expand their addressable audience rather than just increasing share of a fixed pool. That is the audience dimension of a checkers strategy. More squares, not just more weight on the same squares.

The risk is that audience expansion without a coherent brand narrative produces fragmentation. You can be present to five different audiences and mean something different to each of them, which means you mean nothing to any of them at scale. Checkers strategy works when the coverage is coherent, when the same brand is recognisable across the squares it occupies, not when each square has its own version of the brand.

Does Checkers Strategy Work for B2B as Well as B2C?

It works differently in B2B, but the underlying logic holds. In B2C, coverage is largely about reach and frequency across channels and audience segments. In B2B, coverage is about being present across the buying committee, across the buying cycle, and across the channels where different stakeholders form their views.

B2B buying decisions involve multiple people, often with different priorities and different information sources. A checkers strategy in B2B asks: are we present to the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, and the end user, or are we only talking to one of them? Are we present early in the cycle when requirements are being shaped, or only showing up when the RFP has already been written?

Vidyard’s Future Revenue Report highlights how much pipeline potential goes untapped when go-to-market teams focus narrowly on a single buyer persona or a single stage of the funnel. That is a B2B version of the same problem: playing on too few squares and wondering why the board is not moving in your favour.

The B2B application also extends to geography and vertical. Many B2B brands have strong penetration in one or two verticals and thin presence everywhere else. A checkers approach asks whether that distribution is a deliberate choice or a historical accident. In my experience, it is usually the latter, and the brands that take the time to map their coverage deliberately tend to find gaps that are easier to fill than they expected.

How Do You Build a Checkers Strategy Without Losing Focus?

The tension in a checkers strategy is real. Coverage requires breadth. Breadth requires resource. Resource is always finite. The way to hold that tension without losing focus is to be explicit about which squares you are trying to occupy and why, rather than letting coverage expand organically in response to opportunity or pressure.

Start with a coverage audit. Map every channel, audience segment, and geography where your brand could plausibly be present. Then assess your actual presence in each: are you there, and are you there with enough weight to matter? The gaps between where you could be and where you are, weighted by commercial opportunity, become your coverage roadmap.

Prioritise by two dimensions: the size of the opportunity in each square, and the cost of building meaningful presence there. Some squares are high opportunity and low cost. Those are your first moves. Some are high opportunity and high cost. Those require a longer commitment and a clearer business case. Some are low opportunity regardless of cost. Leave those alone.

BCG’s work on scaling agile organisations is useful here not because it is specifically about marketing coverage but because the underlying principle is the same: systematic expansion requires a framework for deciding where to go next, not just the ambition to be everywhere. Without that framework, coverage becomes a resource drain rather than a compounding advantage.

The other thing that keeps a checkers strategy focused is a clear view of what winning looks like in each square. Not vanity metrics. Not impressions or reach. Actual business outcomes: new buyers acquired, consideration increased in a segment, pipeline generated from a previously untouched vertical. If you cannot define what winning looks like in a square, you should not be investing in it yet.

What Does Checkers Strategy Look Like in Practice?

Early in my agency career, there was a moment that stuck with me. I was in a brainstorm for Guinness, the kind of session where the energy in the room was high and everyone was pitching big ideas. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen on his way out. The internal reaction was something close to panic. Not because the ideas were hard to find, but because the room was full of people who had been doing this longer than I had, and the brand deserved more than a collection of clever thoughts. What I learned from that session was that the brands that get big ideas executed well are rarely the ones chasing the single brilliant concept. They are the ones that have built enough presence, enough trust, enough coverage that the big idea has somewhere to land.

Checkers strategy in practice looks like a media plan where every channel has a defined job and enough budget to do it. It looks like a content strategy that reaches different audience segments at different stages of the buying cycle, not just the ones who are ready to buy today. It looks like a geographic expansion plan that is sequenced by opportunity rather than driven by the loudest internal voice. It looks like a product launch that builds presence in adjacent segments before the core segment is saturated.

BCG’s analysis of successful product launches in complex markets makes a point that applies well beyond biopharma: the brands that launch well are the ones that have mapped their coverage requirements before launch, not the ones that figure it out as they go. That is checkers thinking applied to one of the highest-stakes moments in any brand’s commercial life.

The most common failure mode I have seen is not that brands lack the ambition for coverage. It is that they lack the discipline to fund each square properly once they have committed to it. A checkers strategy with underfunded squares is not a strategy. It is a wish list. The difference between the two is the willingness to make hard choices about where you are not going to play, so that the squares you do commit to are held properly.

If you want to go deeper on the frameworks that sit underneath this kind of thinking, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full range of tools and approaches, from audience mapping to channel architecture to measurement. The checkers framing is a useful starting point, but it sits inside a broader set of decisions that determine whether a go-to-market strategy actually works.

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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