Playing to Win: What Most Strategy Frameworks Get Wrong

Strategy is one of the most overused words in marketing, and one of the least understood. Most of what gets called strategy is actually planning: a list of activities, a media schedule, a content calendar dressed up in confident language. Real strategy means making deliberate choices about where you will compete and where you will not, then building everything else around those choices.

The frameworks exist. The books have been written. Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley laid it out clearly in “Playing to Win”: strategy is a set of integrated choices, not a vision statement or a slide deck. The problem is that most marketing teams know the theory and skip the hard part, which is the choosing.

Early in my career I sat in a lot of rooms where strategy was whatever the most senior person said it was. It took years of running agencies, managing P&Ls, and watching well-funded campaigns produce nothing to understand that the absence of real strategic choice is the single most common reason marketing underperforms. Not budget. Not creative. Not channel mix. The absence of choice.

What Does “Playing to Win” Actually Mean in Practice?

The Playing to Win framework, developed by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley during Lafley’s tenure at Procter and Gamble, reduces strategy to five cascading choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, what capabilities are required, and what management systems need to support those capabilities. Every choice informs the next. Pull one out and the whole thing loses coherence.

What makes this framework useful is not its elegance. It is the discipline it forces. You cannot answer “where to play” without first being honest about your winning aspiration, which means being honest about what winning actually looks like for your business, not your marketing department. And you cannot answer “how to win” without being specific about the advantage you genuinely hold, not the one you wish you had.

I have seen this play out in agency pitches more times than I can count. A brand would come to us with a brief that said something like “we want to be the number one choice for young professionals.” That is not a winning aspiration. It is a wish. A winning aspiration names the specific arena you intend to lead and the specific customer whose preference you are competing for. Without that precision, every downstream choice becomes a guess.

If you are thinking about how this connects to broader go-to-market thinking, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full landscape, from market entry to commercial transformation, and is worth reading alongside this piece.

Why Most Marketing Teams Skip the Hard Choices

The reason most strategy work produces plans rather than choices is simple: choices have consequences. If you decide to play in the premium segment, you are deciding not to compete on price. If you decide to focus on a specific vertical, you are deciding to deprioritise others. Those decisions make people uncomfortable, particularly in organisations where consensus is the default mode of operation.

I spent several years turning around a loss-making agency. When I joined, the business was trying to be everything to everyone: digital, traditional, social, PR, events, all of it, for clients across a dozen sectors with no real depth in any of them. The team was talented. The positioning was just absent. The first thing we did was not a rebrand or a new service line. It was a conversation about what we were genuinely better at than anyone else in our competitive set, and who specifically needed that. That conversation was uncomfortable. It meant acknowledging what we were not good at, and letting go of work that felt safe because it was familiar.

The discomfort of choosing is exactly why so many strategies end up as lists. A list does not commit you to anything. A genuine strategic choice does.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation makes a similar point: the companies that grow fastest are not the ones with the most activities. They are the ones with the clearest view of where they are competing and the discipline to align their resources accordingly.

Where to Play: The Most Underrated Strategic Question

“Where to play” sounds obvious. In practice, it is the question most marketing teams answer too broadly, too quickly, or not at all.

Where to play means: which customers, which geographies, which segments, which channels, which price points. It means being specific enough that the answer actually excludes something. If your answer to “where to play” includes everyone who might conceivably buy your product, you have not answered the question.

I judged the Effie Awards a few years ago, and one of the things that struck me reviewing submissions was how often the most effective campaigns were built on a brutally narrow brief. Not narrow in terms of ambition, but narrow in terms of audience definition. The campaigns that tried to reach everyone tended to resonate with no one in a meaningful way. The ones that were built around a specific, well-understood person, with a specific problem, in a specific context, tended to outperform on every commercial metric.

This connects directly to how market penetration strategy works in practice. Penetration is not about reaching more people indiscriminately. It is about reaching more of the right people, in the right context, with a proposition that is genuinely relevant to them. The where-to-play decision is what makes that possible.

How to Win: Advantage Is Not a Tagline

“How to win” is where strategy gets honest, or does not. It requires you to name the specific advantage you hold in the arena you have chosen to compete in. That advantage has to be real, meaning it has to be something your target customer values, something you can actually deliver, and something your competitors cannot easily replicate.

The mistake most marketing teams make here is confusing brand positioning with competitive advantage. Positioning is how you want to be perceived. Advantage is why you actually win. The two should align, but they are not the same thing. You can position yourself as the most innovative provider in your category and still lose if your product development cycle is slower than your competitors, or if your sales team cannot articulate the innovation in a way that matters to a buyer.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, the how-to-win question was something we revisited constantly. At 20 people, our advantage was agility and senior attention: clients got direct access to the people who were actually thinking about their business. At 100 people, that advantage was at risk. We had to build new ones, around data capability, around sector depth, around the quality of our planning function. The strategy had to evolve because the context had changed. That is not inconsistency. That is how strategy is supposed to work.

The Performance Marketing Trap: Capturing Demand Is Not the Same as Creating It

One of the biggest strategic errors I see in marketing today is the conflation of demand capture with demand creation. Performance marketing is very good at capturing demand that already exists: people who are searching for your category, comparing options, ready to buy. It is much less good at creating demand among people who were not already looking.

Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance metrics. The numbers looked good. Cost per acquisition was efficient. Return on ad spend was strong. But when I looked more carefully at who we were actually reaching, it was largely people who were already in the market. We were capturing intent, not building it. A significant portion of what we were attributing to performance marketing was going to happen anyway. We just happened to be there when it did.

Think about it like a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. But if you only invest in the fitting room experience and nothing in the window display or the street presence, you eventually run out of people coming through the door. Growth requires reaching people who were not already looking for you. That means investing upstream, in awareness, in category education, in brand. It means accepting that some of that investment will not show up cleanly in your attribution model.

Go-to-market execution feels harder now than it did five years ago, and part of the reason is that the easy performance gains have been competed away. The brands that are growing are the ones that have made a deliberate strategic choice to invest in both ends of the funnel, not because it is fashionable, but because the commercial logic demands it.

Strategy Requires Honest Assessment of Capabilities

The fourth element of the Playing to Win framework is capabilities: what you need to be genuinely good at in order to execute your where-to-play and how-to-win choices. This is where a lot of strategy work falls apart, because it is done in isolation from the people who would actually have to deliver it.

I have sat in strategy sessions where the agreed direction required capabilities the organisation demonstrably did not have, and where no one in the room said so. The strategy looked coherent on paper. The implementation was a mess because the gap between aspiration and capability had never been honestly assessed.

Capability assessment is not pessimism. It is the thing that makes strategy executable rather than decorative. If your how-to-win choice depends on superior data analytics and your data infrastructure is three years behind your competitors, that is not a reason to abandon the strategy. It is a reason to make capability investment an explicit part of the plan, with timelines and resource commitments attached.

Forrester’s intelligent growth model frames this well: sustainable growth comes from aligning your market choices with your organisational capabilities, not from chasing the next trend with whatever you happen to have available.

Management Systems: The Part Everyone Ignores

The fifth element of the framework is management systems: the processes, metrics, and structures that reinforce your strategic choices over time. This is the least glamorous part of strategy and the most important for making it stick.

A strategy that is not reflected in how you measure performance will not survive contact with a quarterly review. If your stated strategy is to build long-term brand equity but every internal conversation is about this month’s lead volume, the strategy is not really the strategy. The metrics are.

I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across multiple agencies and dozens of categories. The single most reliable predictor of whether a strategy actually gets executed is whether the measurement framework is aligned with the strategic intent. When it is not, short-term metrics win every time. The quarterly number is immediate and visible. The brand equity investment is diffuse and slow. Without a management system that explicitly protects the long-term choices, they get eroded by short-term pressure.

This is not a new observation. BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy in B2B markets has consistently shown that the gap between strategy and execution is most often a measurement and incentive problem, not a capability or creativity problem. You get what you measure. If you measure the wrong things, you execute the wrong strategy.

Growth Hacking Is Not a Strategy Substitute

There is a version of growth thinking that treats strategy as an obstacle: move fast, test everything, optimise toward whatever works. Growth hacking has produced some genuinely impressive results for early-stage businesses, and the examples are well documented. But it is not a substitute for strategic choice. It is a set of tactics that works best when you already know where you are competing and why you should win there.

The mistake is applying a growth hacking mindset to a business that needs a strategy. Testing 40 variations of a landing page headline will not tell you whether you are competing in the right market. Optimising your email open rate will not resolve a fundamental positioning problem. Tactics can improve performance within a strategic frame. They cannot replace the frame.

I have watched brands spend significant budget on optimisation programs while the underlying strategic question, specifically whether they were in the right market with the right proposition, went unasked. The optimisation made the numbers incrementally better. The strategic question, when it was finally asked, revealed that the whole effort was pointed in the wrong direction.

How to Know If You Actually Have a Strategy

There is a simple test I use. Can you explain your strategy to a non-marketer in two minutes, without using any jargon, in a way that makes the choices clear? If you can, you probably have a strategy. If the explanation requires slides, or if it collapses into a list of activities when pressed, you have a plan.

A strategy should be able to answer three questions directly. First: who specifically are you trying to win with? Second: what specifically is your advantage over the alternatives available to that person? Third: what are you choosing not to do in order to focus on this? If any of those answers is vague, the strategy needs more work.

The first week I was at Cybercom, there was a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But the exercise of standing at that whiteboard and having to articulate a clear strategic direction, in real time, in front of a room full of people who were watching to see if I could do it, was one of the most clarifying professional experiences I have had. Strategy is not something you can perform. Either the thinking is there or it is not. A whiteboard has a way of making that obvious very quickly.

The broader point is that strategic clarity is something you earn through hard thinking, not something you produce through a process. The frameworks help. The cascade of choices in Playing to Win is genuinely useful. But the frameworks only work if you are willing to make real choices and live with the consequences of them.

If you want to go deeper on how strategy connects to execution across the full go-to-market cycle, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub brings together the thinking on market entry, audience selection, commercial planning, and growth model design in one place.

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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