It starts and ends with people
PB² GOST³ starts with People, the customer, and ends with Team, the people doing the work. That is intentional. A plan is only as good as the people who carry it out.
Execution is the only part customers see
Until someone makes something and puts it in front of buyers, a strategy is just a document. Brad has watched a client’s chief marketing officer receive months of transformation work and file it in a cabinet, never to be opened again. It happens all the time.
Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher said it best: “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” Big ideas are common. An idea is only as good as its execution, so the teams that win make things, ship them, learn and refine.
Built for a VUCA world
VUCA is a military term: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It is the most accurate description of marketing today. Building a marketing plan now is like drawing blueprints during a hurricane.
We used to say marketing had changed more in ten years than in the previous hundred. Then it was five years. With AI, a single new model can change it in a week. A team designed for a stable world, with long approvals and fixed roles, can’t keep up.
The plan picks the team
Decide what the plan needs first, then staff it: your own people, agencies, freelancers and AI. Most companies do it backwards. They start with the team they already have and build a plan around what that team knows how to do.
Brad started his career in New York as a digital project manager, where every idea had to answer what it would take, what it would cost and when it was due. Those constraints made him a better strategist. A brilliant idea with no owner, budget or deadline isn’t a plan.
The roles every program needs
Whether it’s one person or forty, digital marketing needs these jobs covered:
- Strategy: the decisions in PB²-GOST³.
- Implementation: someone who builds and launches the work.
- Creative: words, design, video.
- Technology: the website, the tools and the tracking that has to fire.
- Media: buying and managing paid placements, and earning the unpaid ones.
- Analytics: someone who reads the data and says what it means.
- Project management: keeping it on time and on budget.
In smaller companies, one person often wears most of these hats. That’s fine, as long as everyone knows which hats exist. Increasingly, some of them are AI agents doing work under human direction.
A strategy is a game plan
Marketing is a team sport: people with different skills have to work together to get something done. Strategy is what lets them. It’s the coach in the fourth quarter saying, “We’re down ten, here’s what we’re going to do.” Without that shared plan, each specialist optimizes their own piece and nobody wins the game.
Basketball, not football
Most companies are built like football teams. The structure is hierarchical, every player has one narrow job, the game stops and starts, and only a few people ever touch the ball.
Marketing now needs basketball teams. The structure is flatter, everyone handles the ball and plays both ends of the court, and the game never stops. People read what is happening and adjust in the moment instead of waiting for the next play to be called.
Break the silos
Paid, owned and earned are useful definitions, and they also create silos: a paid team, a social team, a web team, an ad agency and a PR agency, each optimizing its own piece. Buyers and AI tools don’t see departments. They see one brand. The team has to work like one.
A name on every step
Every step in the funnel needs an owner, including the ones nobody thinks of as marketing. If the ad works and the phone rings at six o’clock and nobody answers, the campaign failed. That is the O-Ring again: one unowned step zeroes the chain.
Agile beats waterfall
The waterfall model, where each phase waits for the one before it, works when the world is stable. It isn’t. You only find out a waterfall plan was wrong at the end. Agile marketing works in short cycles: launch, get the data, see what’s working, iterate and go again. Performance improves with every pass.
Hybrid teams with AI
The modern marketing team is hybrid: internal people plus agencies and freelancers, with AI built into production and decisions wherever it helps. The plan decides the mix. The test is always the same: does every step have a name, and does that person know it?