Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. Here’s What Gets Eaten First.

Peter Drucker’s line has become so familiar that most people recite it without thinking about what it actually means. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Fine. But if you’ve ever watched a well-funded, well-planned marketing strategy collapse inside an organisation that wasn’t ready for it, you already know the feeling. The plan was sound. The culture was the problem.

This isn’t an abstract leadership concept. It’s a commercial reality that plays out in marketing teams every week, across every sector, at every budget level. Strategy is the easy part. Getting an organisation to actually execute it, consistently, without reverting to old habits, that’s where most go-to-market plans fall apart.

Why Strategy Feels Safer Than Culture

Strategy is documentable. You can put it in a slide deck, present it to the board, circulate it to the leadership team, and walk away feeling like something has been accomplished. Culture is none of those things. It’s the set of behaviours that happen when no one is watching, the decisions people make under pressure, the things that get rewarded quietly and the things that get punished quietly.

That asymmetry is why so many organisations over-invest in strategy and under-invest in culture. Strategy is legible. Culture is felt. And most senior leaders, including most marketing directors, are more comfortable with the legible version of their business than the felt one.

I’ve been in rooms where a genuinely good go-to-market strategy was presented with clarity and rigour, and I’ve watched it die not because anyone disagreed with it, but because the team had no shared language for executing it, no real accountability structure beneath the surface, and no genuine belief that leadership would back them if it went wrong. The strategy was fine. The soil it was planted in was wrong.

If you’re building or refining your go-to-market approach, the broader Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the structural and commercial dimensions that sit alongside the cultural ones covered here.

What Culture Actually Is in a Marketing Context

Strip away the values posters and the away-day team exercises. In a marketing context, culture is three things: what gets measured, what gets rewarded, and what gets tolerated.

What gets measured shapes attention. If your team is measured on click-through rates and cost-per-click, that’s where cognitive energy goes. Not brand health, not long-term audience development, not the kind of work that builds commercial advantage over a three-year horizon. The measurement system is a cultural signal, and it’s usually louder than anything written in a strategy document.

What gets rewarded shapes ambition. If cautious, incremental work gets recognised and bold creative bets get quietly shelved after one bad week, your team will learn that lesson faster than any training programme could teach it. The reward structure is the real brief.

What gets tolerated shapes norms. If someone consistently misses deadlines and nothing happens, that becomes the standard. If a senior person talks over junior colleagues in briefings and leadership says nothing, that becomes the culture. Tolerance is not neutrality. It’s endorsement.

Early in my career, I was in an agency where the unofficial rule was: never tell the client something they don’t want to hear. It wasn’t written anywhere. Nobody said it out loud. But it was enforced constantly, through tone, through reaction, through who got put on which accounts. The strategy documents we produced were excellent. The client relationships were built on sand. That’s culture eating strategy for breakfast, in real time.

The Moment a Strategy Meets the Organisation

There’s a specific moment in every strategy cycle where the rubber meets the road. It’s not the presentation. It’s not the sign-off. It’s the first time someone in the team has to make a decision that the strategy would answer one way and their instincts, habits, or fear would answer another.

What happens in that moment tells you everything about the culture.

I remember my first week at Cybercom. There was a brainstorm running for a Guinness brief. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and literally handed me the whiteboard pen. I’d been there five days. My first thought was honest: this is going to be difficult. But the culture of that room, the expectation that you contribute, that you don’t wait for permission, that ideas are currency regardless of your tenure, meant I picked up the pen and got on with it. A different culture would have produced a different outcome. The brief was the same either way.

That’s what culture does. It determines what people do with the same raw materials. Two teams given an identical go-to-market strategy will execute it completely differently depending on the environment they’re operating in. This is why copying a competitor’s strategy rarely works. You’re copying the output without the input.

Incentive Structures Are the Most Honest Part of Any Organisation

If you want to understand what a business actually values, don’t read the mission statement. Look at how people are paid, what gets them promoted, and what gets them fired. Those three data points will tell you more about the real culture than any internal document.

This matters enormously in marketing because the incentive structures in most marketing functions are misaligned with the strategies those functions are supposed to execute. A team incentivised on short-term lead volume will not, regardless of what the strategy says, invest meaningfully in brand building. A performance team paid on last-click conversions will not advocate for upper-funnel investment. It’s not a failure of understanding. It’s a rational response to the incentive environment.

I spent years overvaluing lower-funnel performance, and I was partly responding to the same incentive signals. When you can show a clean number, a cost per acquisition, a return on ad spend, that number gets attention. What’s harder to show is the audience you didn’t reach, the brand consideration you didn’t build, the growth that didn’t happen because you were only capturing existing demand rather than creating new demand. The incentive structure made the measurable look more valuable than the important.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation and go-to-market strategy makes a similar point: organisations that restructure their commercial model without addressing the underlying incentive architecture tend to revert. The new strategy sits on top of old incentives, and the old incentives win.

Why “Hiring for Culture Fit” Is Often the Wrong Frame

There’s a version of culture-building that’s actually culture-preserving, and it’s one of the more damaging habits in marketing leadership. When hiring managers say they want someone who’s a “culture fit,” they often mean someone who won’t disrupt the existing dynamic. Someone comfortable with the current norms. Someone who won’t ask difficult questions.

That’s not culture. That’s stasis.

The best marketing teams I’ve built or worked within had strong shared values and wildly different perspectives. They agreed on standards: honesty with clients, rigour in thinking, accountability for outcomes. They disagreed constantly on approach, on creative direction, on channel prioritisation, on what the data actually meant. That tension was productive. It was the mechanism by which better decisions got made.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, the cultural challenge wasn’t maintaining the original vibe. It was deciding which elements of the original culture were genuinely valuable and which were just familiar. Some things that felt like culture were actually just habits of a small team. They didn’t scale. Letting go of them was necessary. Holding onto the things that actually mattered, intellectual honesty, direct feedback, commercial focus, that was the real work.

Hiring for culture fit, done badly, produces teams that agree too easily and challenge too rarely. That’s a strategic liability dressed up as a cultural virtue.

The Go-To-Market Failure Pattern Nobody Talks About

There’s a pattern I’ve seen repeat across sectors and business sizes. A company builds a go-to-market strategy. It’s well-researched, commercially grounded, appropriately ambitious. It launches. Six months later, it’s underperforming. The response is to revise the strategy.

But the strategy wasn’t the problem.

The sales team was still selling the old way because that’s what their manager rewarded. The marketing team was still optimising for the metrics they’d always used because no one had changed the reporting structure. The product team was still building features based on the loudest customer voices rather than the target segment defined in the strategy. The strategy was sound. The organisation executed a different strategy, the one encoded in its existing habits and systems.

Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder than it used to touches on this: the difficulty isn’t usually the strategy itself, it’s the coordination and alignment required to execute it across functions that have different priorities, different metrics, and different definitions of success.

Forrester’s work on go-to-market struggles in complex sectors makes a related point: organisations that treat GTM as a strategy exercise rather than an organisational change exercise consistently underperform their own plans.

If your strategy keeps failing in the same way, the strategy is probably not the variable. The execution environment is.

What a Culture That Supports Strategy Actually Looks Like

It’s worth being specific here, because most descriptions of “healthy culture” are too vague to be useful. A culture that supports strategic execution has a few observable characteristics.

First, decisions are made at the right level. People close to the work have the authority to make decisions within their domain without escalating everything. This sounds obvious but it’s rare. In most organisations, decision-making is centralised well above the level where the relevant information lives. Strategy gets diluted in the escalation process.

Second, bad news travels fast. In cultures that support execution, people are not punished for surfacing problems early. They’re expected to. The alternative, cultures where bad news gets buried until it’s a crisis, produces the kind of strategic drift where a campaign is clearly not working and nobody says anything for three months because the incentive is to look fine, not to be fine.

Third, there is a shared definition of success. Not just a shared strategy document, but a genuine common understanding of what winning looks like and how it will be measured. When different functions have different definitions of success, the strategy fragments at the seams between those functions. Sales defines success as closed revenue this quarter. Marketing defines it as pipeline volume. Product defines it as feature adoption. All three can be individually “succeeding” while the business is collectively failing.

Fourth, the organisation learns. Not just from successes, which is easy, but from failures. A culture that treats failure as evidence of incompetence rather than information will stop taking the risks that strategy requires. You end up with a team that executes cautiously within safe parameters, which is fine for maintenance but useless for growth.

BCG’s framework on successful product launch strategy identifies organisational alignment as one of the primary determinants of launch success, above the quality of the strategy itself. That finding transfers well beyond biopharma.

The Role of Leadership in Shaping Execution Culture

Culture is not set by values documents or away days. It’s set by what leaders do, particularly what they do under pressure.

If a marketing director says they want bold creative work and then pulls a campaign the moment a stakeholder raises an eyebrow, the team learns the real rule. If a CEO says they value long-term brand investment and then cuts the brand budget the moment a quarterly number looks soft, the organisation learns what the hierarchy of priorities actually is.

I’ve judged the Effie Awards, which means I’ve spent time evaluating campaigns against evidence of commercial effectiveness. One thing that’s consistently true of the work that wins: there was someone in the organisation who protected it. Not because they were certain it would work, but because they believed in the thinking and were willing to back it. That’s a cultural act, not a strategic one. The strategy was the brief. The culture was what allowed the brief to be executed properly.

Leadership behaviour is the most powerful cultural signal available. More powerful than any internal communication, any training programme, any set of stated values. When leaders behave consistently with the culture they claim to want, that culture becomes real. When they don’t, the gap between stated and actual culture is where strategy goes to die.

Growth Requires Culture That Tolerates Uncertainty

One of the things I’ve come to believe more firmly over time is that most performance marketing is capturing demand that already existed, not creating new demand. The person who tries something on in a clothes shop is far more likely to buy than someone browsing the rail. But someone had to get them into the shop first. That upstream work, reaching people who weren’t already looking, building familiarity before intent, is where growth actually comes from.

That kind of marketing is harder to measure precisely and easier to cut when budgets tighten. Which means it requires a culture that can tolerate uncertainty, that can hold the line on investment in things that don’t produce an immediate, clean number. Most organisations don’t have that culture. They say they do. But the first time a CFO asks for the ROI on a brand campaign and the marketing team can’t produce a spreadsheet that satisfies them, the budget moves downstream.

This is not a measurement problem. It’s a culture problem. An organisation that genuinely understands how growth works will have built the internal language and the internal confidence to defend investment in demand creation. An organisation that hasn’t will always default to capturing existing demand, which is efficient in the short term and limiting in the long term.

Tools like Hotjar’s growth loop frameworks and approaches covered in growth hacking literature can sharpen tactical execution, but they operate within a cultural context. If the culture doesn’t support the kind of experimentation and iteration those approaches require, the tools don’t help much.

There’s more on the structural side of this challenge across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, including how to think about market entry, channel strategy, and the commercial architecture that sits beneath the cultural layer.

Changing Culture Without Losing What Works

Culture change is slow, and most attempts to accelerate it produce theatre rather than change. The away day, the new values framework, the all-hands presentation from the CEO. None of these are useless, but none of them are sufficient. Culture changes through sustained behavioural change from the people with the most influence, reinforced by adjusted systems and incentives.

The practical sequence is roughly this: identify the specific behaviours that are blocking strategic execution. Not the values, not the vibe, but the actual observable behaviours. Then identify what’s reinforcing those behaviours: measurement systems, incentive structures, leadership behaviour, team norms. Then change those reinforcing conditions, not the culture directly.

This takes longer than a strategy refresh. It’s less legible to a board. It doesn’t fit neatly into a quarterly planning cycle. Which is exactly why most organisations don’t do it properly, and why most strategies underperform their potential.

The other thing worth saying: not everything about the existing culture is wrong. One of the mistakes I’ve seen in turnaround situations is the assumption that because the business is underperforming, the culture is entirely broken. Sometimes it is. More often, there are genuine strengths in the existing culture that just need to be redirected. The team that’s brilliant at client service but poor at new business development isn’t culturally broken. It’s culturally skewed. The work is rebalancing, not rebuilding from scratch.

Knowing the difference requires honest diagnosis, not the kind of audit that confirms what leadership already believes. That’s a harder conversation to have. It’s also the more useful one.

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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