I start doing a little bit of research into brand marketing playbooks. You can’t hide from the algorithms, so in recent weeks I have been offered a playbook for almost every marketing challenge imaginable. Brand playbooks. Digital revenue growth playbooks. Social media playbooks. Corporate communications playbooks. Strategic marketing playbooks.
I’m not here to criticise them, and none of them are necessarily poor. Most are sensible, well-intentioned, and built on some form of experience. But taken together, they point to a wider problem.
Marketing is messy. So it’s understandable to hope that enough process can substitute for thinking. That if we can just find the right framework, template, checklist, or downloadable guide, we can bring order to complexity and accelerate our way to better outcomes.
Leaders want clarity and teams want direction. Smaller businesses often need structure quickly. But there is a difference between building a useful foundation and designing a process for all eventualities.
Playbooks matter
This is not an argument against playbooks. Quite the opposite.
Playbooks are often exactly what a less mature marketing function needs. They create structure where there was none. They bring rhythm, consistency, shared language, and a practical baseline for getting work done. For teams still building capability, that is often the difference between scattered activity (cost to the business) and organised execution (investment in marketing).
A good playbook helps a team get from zero to one.
It can clarify process, codify best practice, support onboarding, reduce waste, and improve confidence. In the right setting, that is hugely valuable.
Playbooks work best when the work is relatively repeatable and the team needs a clear process. When consistency matters more than improvisation and the goal is to establish a standard and avoid chaos.
Once a business starts to scale, once decisions become more commercial, more nuanced, and more uncertain, the playbook cannot be treated as the definitive route to the answer. The danger is that at this point, organisations stop thinking hard enough Best practice is only ever best practice until somebody improves it.
Principles matter too
As organisations grow, marketing gets harder, more stakeholders appear, more channels interact, more trade-offs emerge and more reputational, commercial, and operational factors start moving at once. At that point, playbooks won’t carry the full weight of leadership.
That is where principles come in. By principles, I do not mean vague values framed on a wall or lifted from a corporate handbook. I mean a deeper set of operating beliefs and behaviours that help leadership teams decide what kind of business they are trying to build, how they want to act, and what they will not compromise on.
Principles are what allow a management team to say, “people like us do things like this”. Just as importantly, they help the business say, people like us do not do things like that.
Commercial marketing decisions involve ambiguity and trade-offs. They involve decisions under pressure, with incomplete information, and often with consequences that extend beyond the campaign itself. Principles create room for judgment when there is no script to follow.
In companies that lack strategic marketing depth, this kind of principle-led thinking often has to be brought in from outside. That is not a criticism. It is simply the reality that some organisations have strong execution capability but less experience making good decisions under ambiguity.
And then there are powwows
If playbooks give you process, and principles give you judgment, powwows help you deal with reality. By powwows (I think Archie Norman used to call them ‘saunas’, I mean the live conversations, working sessions, and challenge forums where leaders come together to interpret what is changing and decide what to do next.
In larger or more complex organisations, these decision spaces matter because no static document can fully account for the interaction between brand, marketing, communications, reputation, customer expectation, and commercial pressure in real time. Markets move, competitors reposition, products evolve, issues flare up and conditions change.
Marketing leaders then need to challenge playbook assumptions, test interpretation, and respond with speed and clarity. No playbook can fully manage that moment and no principle document can answer every live question; leadership simply has to get in the room and work it through.
A mistake is trying to use one of these for everything. Don’t over-rely on playbooks and become rigid, or talk about principles in abstract terms but never translate them into real decisions or they hold endless meetings that generate activity but not action.
All three have a role.
· playbooks to build consistency.
· principles to guide judgment.
· powwows to respond when the market moves faster than the manual.
That mix changes depending on the maturity of the organisation and the conditions around it. Less mature functions often benefit disproportionately from playbooks because they need structure, rhythm, consistency, and a shared baseline.
Companies without strategic marketing experience will often need principles brought in from outside because they do not yet have the internal experience to make good decisions under ambiguity.
Larger or more complex organisations have live review mechanisms because multiple reputational, commercial, and operational factors move at once, and no static document can manage that in real time.
So, start with the playbook but don’t stop there.
If you are a CEO looking to improve marketing performance, bring in the right experience and marketing resource to design a playbook for your business. Do not just buy them off the internet and assume they will do the thinking for you, or be surprised if they conflict with each other. Serious marketing functions need more than playbook processes, they need principles for decision-making and powwows, to challenge, review, and adapt decision-making, when conditions move faster than process can keep up.
Marketing is never really finished. The world turns around the business. Markets change. Innovations happen. Products come and go. People come and go. Competitors enter with new propositions. The best marketing teams understand this and they know the marketing function should always be in ‘beta’.
