The one thing strategy does not deliver

The first piece in this (unplanned) sequence - No really, who are you? - argued that brands need to rediscover who they really are, if they truly want to exploit the growth-driving potential of brand. The second - Brand Infrastructure: The Challenge And The Opportunity - argued that when that work is done properly, the answer to the question functions as infrastructure and governance: not as communications decoration, but as the shared framework through which an organisation makes consistent decisions, allocates resources, and holds its shape under pressure.

Both described what clarity looks like. Strategy clarifies. It prioritises choices. It organises. It governs. It delivers coherence and consistency. But it cannot guarantee.

In an impatient world in which time horizons are shrinking, in a cultural environment full to the gills with results-guaranteed hacks for improving our health, wealth, and happiness, where tech prophets and platform builders would have us believe that human behaviour is a system to be optimised and uncertainty a bug to be fixed - in that world, this feels like an inconvenient truth. But it is the truth. And the industry’s long habit of pretending otherwise - of selling certainty it does not have, in environments that do not permit it - is costing clients more than most of them realise.

Certainty is not available for purchase

Certainty is the elimination of risk. The pull is understandable. The operating environment is legitimately hostile - boards demanding attributable numbers, quarterly cycles that turn long-term investment into a liability, and an industry-wide collapse of the kind of institutional experience that used to make judgement feel like a reasonable substitute for data.

But certainty, as a goal, is not available for purchase. And the reason it isn’t was most famously set out by the economist Frank Knight in 1921. In Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Knight drew a distinction the marketing industry ignores at its peril. Risk, he argued, applies to situations where you don’t know the outcome but can accurately measure the odds - the domain of actuaries and insurers, where past frequency predicts future probability. 

Uncertainty is something quite different. It applies to situations where we cannot know all the information needed to set accurate odds in the first place. The future competitive environment. What customers will want in three years. Whether the culture will have moved. Geopolitical volatility. These are not risks to be modelled. They are genuine uncertainties - Knight’s word was unknowable - and no amount of data will move them into the other category.

Marketers in the grip of certainty-seeking reach for more research, based on the fallacy that this next round of findings will settle things for good. It never does - which is how brand teams end up with so much superfluous data in the first place. The data accumulates not because it is answering questions but because it is deferring the commitment that clarity would require.

The deeper problem

The demand for certainty doesn't just fail because of cognitive bias or inadequate data. It fails because markets by their very nature are not the kind of thing that produces certainty. Dave Snowden, whose Cynefin framework has become a widely used tool for thinking about decision-making under uncertainty, draws a fundamental distinction between ordered environments - where cause and effect are knowable, whether immediately or through expert analysis, and the same inputs reliably produce the same outputs - and complex ones, where cause and effect can only be understood in retrospect, and where the same inputs cannot be relied upon to produce the same outcomes.

Markets are complex, adaptive, non-linear systems. Brands operate within them. The relationship between a marketing action and a market outcome is not linear, not stable, and not predictable in the way certainty-seeking assumes. Better data and more sophisticated modelling can improve our understanding of what has happened, and sharpen our judgement about what might happen, but they cannot eliminate the underlying uncertainty. The environment itself is structured in a way that prevents clean, repeatable cause-and-effect relationships from being established in advance. Markets are not controlled; they are intervened in and influenced. And the appropriate relationship to a complex system is not prediction and control, but orientation and navigation - precisely what clarity provides, and certainty never can.

The certainty trap

The certainty preference does not stay at the level of strategy. It shapes budget allocation, and the consequences there are measurable and severe.

The rise of performance marketing is in significant part a structural expression of the desire for certainty at the investment level. It addresses people who have already provided signals that they are in the market. Directing marketing efforts towards them is, in Knightian terms, the closest thing to calculable risk that marketing can find - because much of the uncertainty has already been eliminated. It feels like certainty.

Brand building however, feels (understandably) like the opposite. It reaches people not currently in the market, on the assumption that when they eventually enter it - in six months, two years, a decade - they will be more likely to think of, trust, and choose you. The feedback loop is long, diffuse, and resistant to clean attribution. In Knightian terms, this is genuine uncertainty. So it is perhaps understandable that organisations systematically over-invest in performance and under-invest in brand - not because the evidence suggests this produces better long-term results (it doesn't) but because it produces more certain results. 

The consequences compound. The more organisations over-invest in performance, the more they hollow out the brand, which means the performance channels have to work harder to convert the shrinking pool of people who still recognise and trust them, which increases the pressure to prove ROI, which pushes more budget toward performance. Efficiency rising. Effectiveness eroding.

Performance marketing captures the projected future: existing demand, people already in the market, fruit already on the tree. Brand building by contrast, shapes the preferable future - being in the consideration set when new customers enter the market. The organisation that only harvests existing intent is not navigating toward its preferred future. It is consuming the conditions that make one possible. At some point, there is no fruit left to pick.

What clarity does

Clarity is not certainty stripped of its more extravagant claims. It is a different thing entirely. Roger Martin - who spent decades advising P&G, Ford, and Lego and was ranked the world’s foremost management thinker in 2017 - is direct on this point. What good strategy actually does is raise the signal-to-noise ratio of feedback from the market. It tells you what to watch. What matters. What signal to separate from noise. That is not prediction - it is orientation.

Between 1,000 BCE and 1,200 CE, Polynesian peoples settled virtually every habitable island across the Pacific Ocean - an area covering more than a third of the Earth's surface. They reached Hawaii from the Marquesas, New Zealand from central Polynesia, and Easter Island from somewhere further west. It is among the most extraordinary feats of navigation ever recorded - and they accomplished it without charts or compasses. They did not know exactly where the island was, but they felt read what signals would tell them they were getting closer - the behaviour of deep ocean swells that could be be felt through the hull of the canoe, the rising and setting points of stars across the full celestial calendar; the species of birds whose flight paths indicated land within a certain radius; the temperature and colour of water; the cloud formations that tended to accumulate above islands below the visible horizon. They were reading the environment and extracting from it sufficient orientation to act. They did not know exactly where the island was, but they knew what signals would tell them they were getting closer. They held their heading, watched what the environment around them was telling them, and corrected when the signals required it. No certainty. Just extraordinary clarity. And they found the island. And another thousand of them.

What clarity provides then is not the knowledge of what will happen. It gives you the knowledge of what you are doing and why, and in pursuit of that, what signals matter to you. A brand properly articulated is a clarity instrument. A strategy worth having is a clarity instrument. They do not predict the future. They make it possible to act coherently inside an unpredictable environment.

Consider what that means at the level of a specific decision. When a new competitor enters the market at a lower price point, an organisation with genuine clarity about what it is and who it is for knows immediately whether to respond - because the brand’s identity tells the organisation whether price is the game you are playing. But organisation operating on certainty-seeking has no such governor. It commissions research to find out what customers think, waits for the data to tell it what to do, and arrives late at a decision it makes anxiously rather than confidently. The difference is not intelligence or resources but whether the organisation has done the prior work of knowing what it stands for.

The internal consequences of clarity are as significant as the external ones, and considerably more immediate. An organisation that knows what it stands for makes faster decisions - not because it has more information but because it has fewer genuinely open questions. The brief is easier to write because the territory is already defined. The agency comes back with fewer wrong answers because the zone of right-ness has already been defined and constrained. The regional market that would otherwise interpret the brand through its own local logic and subjectivity has a clear and intelligible governing framework before it goes to market. The leadership team that would otherwise re-litigate the brand’s fundamental purpose in every strategy meeting has already answered that question, and can spend the meeting on the decisions that actually remain open.

Clarity reduces the wastage that nobody tracks because it never appears on a budget line: the off-brand execution, the campaigns that don’t accumulate, the line extension that doesn’t fit, the partnership that made sense to one part of the business and bewildered everyone else. The time spent in endless meetings re-litigating the value proposition. The unforeseen cultural moment that went undetected, and unexploited.

These are not trivial costs. In organisations of any scale, the friction generated by the absence of a shared governing account of what the brand is and who it is for is enormous - it just never appears as a line item, so it never gets treated as a problem strategy can solve.

Without clarity, organisations cannot hold their shape (or nerve) under pressure. Every new dataset becomes a potential course correction. Every campaign that underperforms its immediate target becomes a crisis of direction. Every incoming CMO reshuffles the brand because there is no governing account of the brand robust enough to survive a personnel change. This pattern repeats consistently, across organisations of different sizes, sectors, and apparent sophistication. The mechanism is identical: the absence of clarity has been papered over with the performance of certainty.

Certainty is the search for a guarantee before the commitment - but clarity is what makes the commitment possible. The search for certainty is, in this sense, a form of strategic delay dressed up as rigour.

What strategy actually delivers (and does not)

Which brings us to the question that most strategy decks and gurus conspicuously avoid: what is the nature of the thing that strategists are actually supposed to be delivering?

Futures studies offers a useful distinction. Between the projected future - the linear extrapolation of current trends, business as usual - and the range of futures that open out from any present moment as time extends and uncertainty compounds: the probable, the plausible, the possible. The cone of potential futures widens the further out you look, because the variables multiply and interact in ways that make any single outcome increasingly unlikely. There is no single predetermined future. There are just many potential ones.

The category that matters most for strategy is the preferable. A preferable future is not a prediction or a probability estimate. It is an expression of intent - a description of the future an organisation is actively working to bring about, by making choices in the present. Strategy, properly understood, is the work of identifying that preferred future with enough clarity to govern present decisions, and then navigating toward it as conditions shift around you.

Strategy then is not a blueprint but a compass bearing. Its job is not to predict but to help the organisation identify their preferred future with sufficient clarity that they can hold their course, read the signals that actually matter, and make coherent decisions towards that future as the world multiplies around them. And that requires client organisations to accept that the work is never finished - that clarity is a governing instrument, not a destination, and that maintaining it under pressure is an ongoing practice rather than a problem to be solved once and filed.

What a brand strategy actually delivers - when the work is done with rigour and without self-deception or false promises - is clarity on four things.

First, who the organisation or brand is. A question as foundational as it is neglected,

Second, what the organisation is trying to bring about: the preferred future - not a prediction, not a guarantee, but a specific and committed account of the direction of travel, defined with enough precision to govern the decisions that will be made on the way there.

Third, what those decisions actually are: the choices that will either move the organisation toward its preferred future or away from it, made visible and legible so that the people who need to make them can make them coherently, consistently, and without re-litigating the foundational questions every time the quarterly wind changes direction.

And fourth, what signals actually matter: the indicators that will tell the organisation whether it is moving toward its preferred future or away from it, and which data, trends, and noise it can safely ignore. In a complex system, the ability to distinguish signal from noise is not a measurement problem. It is a clarity problem. Without a clear account of who you are and where you are trying to go, everything looks equally relevant and important.

That is not certainty. It will never be certainty. The market will move in ways that were not anticipated. Competitors will do things the model did not predict. Customers will want things nobody saw coming. Insurgent brands will arrive unannounced. The activist shareholder will flex their influence or power. Distribution will be disrupted by a partner reprioritising their own margins. A single product flaw will surface at scale and travel faster than any response. The budget will get a severe haircut. A throwaway comment will become a headline. A niche opinion will become a movement. Platforms will change their rules, their algorithms, or their economics overnight. A category will be redefined by an adjacent player nobody was tracking. Pricing assumptions will collapse under pressure from a competitor willing to behave irrationally. Partners or influencers will do something embarrassing in public. The weather will be hotter or colder than was predicted. Policy makers and regulators will introduce or dismantle requirements and limitations the organisation has no control over. Whistle blowers will find the courage of their convictions. Geopolitics will shred forecasts and supply chains. Technology will evolve faster - or slower - than predicted. The cone of possible futures will keep widening, and no amount of research or analytical rigour will narrow it back to a single point.

But an organisation with genuine clarity about who it is, where it is trying to go, and what decisions will get it there is not defenceless against that uncertainty. It is oriented inside it. It knows what signals to watch and which ones to ignore. It knows what a good decision looks like even when the data is ambiguous. It knows when to hold its course and when the signals that matter are strong enough to warrant a change of direction. It can move faster, waste less, and hold its shape under pressure in ways that organisations chasing certainty - commissioning the next round of research, waiting for the model to tell them what to do - simply cannot.

That is the job. It was always the job. It is the only honest account of what strategy can actually deliver. The work is not to make the uncertainty disappear. It never does.

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Sources

Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia, 1994 

Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, 1921

David Lewis, We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific, 1972 

Roger Martin,‘Why Bother Doing Strategy?’ The Conference Board Review, Summer 2013

Polynesian Voyaging Society, ‘Polynesian Wayfinding’, 2024

David Snowden, ‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making’ – Harvard Business Review, 2007

Martin Weigel is a brand strategist, former Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, and founder of EMDUB. He helps companies find their superpower- and turn it into action.