- Strategy is an investment, not a cost: Better thinking leads to better decisions and stronger marketing outcomes.
- Not all hours deliver equal value: Strategic insight can have far greater impact than time spent on execution.
- Cutting strategy can be costly: Poor thinking can lead to wasted budgets, wrong audiences and missed opportunities.
- AI increases the value of strategy: As AI speeds up execution, human judgement and better decision-making become key differentiators.
- Measure strategic value, not just efficiency: Marketing must recognise how strategy improves campaigns, investment and results. *
Every business understands the difference between cost and investment.
Research and development is not judged by the hours it consumes, but by the innovation it creates. Leadership development is valued because it builds future capability. Cybersecurity is funded because its value lies in preventing risks that may never materialise.
Yet strategic thinking is often treated differently.
Despite being one of the few activities capable of improving every decision that follows, it is frequently evaluated through the lens of cost rather than value. We scrutinise the hours invested in workshops, planning sessions and discovery. We question the time spent thinking before we consider the cost of not thinking.
Perhaps we have been measuring the wrong thing.
Today’s CMOs operate under immense commercial pressure. Budgets are tighter, expectations are higher and every investment must demonstrate return. It is entirely reasonable that marketing leaders are looking for greater efficiency, faster delivery and better productivity.
Agencies, in turn, are expected to deliver increasingly sophisticated thinking within increasingly compressed timelines.
Not every hour creates the same value
Technology has helped. Artificial intelligence is transforming execution by reducing the time required to analyse information, generate content and automate repetitive tasks. But while execution can be accelerated, strategic thinking cannot simply be compressed without consequence.
The reason is simple: not every hour creates the same value.
An hour spent producing a presentation is not equal to an hour spent reframing a business problem. An hour spent refining a media schedule is not equal to an hour spent uncovering the insight that changes the direction of an entire campaign. One improves execution. The other improves every decision that follows.
Strategy is valuable precisely because it happens before significant investment is made. It is the process of challenging assumptions, understanding people, weighing alternatives and making deliberate choices before organisations commit resources to execution. Done well, it prevents costly mistakes, identifies opportunities others overlook and ensures that marketing budgets are invested in solving the right problem.
‘Skip the thinking’
Ironically, the value of strategic thinking is often invisible because it is expressed through outcomes rather than activities. We can calculate the hours spent developing a strategy, but we rarely calculate the cost of pursuing the wrong opportunity, targeting the wrong audience or executing brilliantly against flawed assumptions.
Those costs appear much later, by which time they are attributed to campaign performance rather than the quality of the thinking that shaped it.
In practice, the pressure to cut corners rarely arrives as “skip the thinking.” It arrives as “can we move faster” – and the time that goes first is almost always the thinking time, because it’s the least visible part of the process and the easiest to compress without anyone noticing until much later.
As organisations continue to pursue efficiency, this distinction becomes increasingly important. Thinking time shouldn’t be eliminated – low-value activity should, so that more attention goes where it matters most. Curiosity, judgement, strategic choice and a deep understanding of people are not luxuries in the marketing process; they sharpen every decision an agency makes on a client’s behalf.
Challenge conventional thinking
This is particularly relevant in an era where AI is making execution faster than ever before. As technology assumes more of the operational workload, the competitive advantage will not lie in producing more content or faster campaigns. It will lie in making better decisions. And better decisions still require thoughtful questions, informed judgement and the willingness to challenge conventional thinking.
The marketing industry has become exceptionally good at measuring efficiency. Perhaps it is time we became equally good at recognising the value of strategic thinking.
Because strategy is not simply another cost to be managed. It is an investment that improves every decision, every campaign and every result that follows.
The question, then, is not how much strategic thinking costs.
It is whether we can afford to invest any less in it.
The CMO Summit takes place in Johannesburg on 3 September.
Founder & CEO Ana Carrapichano founded Mediology in 2006 and brings more than 30 years of experience across media, marketing and communications. She recently founded the Mediology Academy.
