Part 2 of 3: Lessons from my 12-Week MBA Course on Marketing & Strategic Intelligence
In Part 1 of this trilogy, I argued that marketing only earns its keep when it changes a decision. That was the frame of reference. The question underneath almost every piece of marketing work. Which decision does this change, and who is making it?
But that frame leaves something unresolved.
Lots of work claims to change decisions. Strategies, positioning statements, brand purposes, segmentation models, value propositions. They all dress themselves in the language of consequence. Most of them don’t actually carry any.
So we need a sharper test. A way to separate a real strategic decision from a theatrical one.
This is the test.
If it doesn’t cost you something, it probably isn’t a strategy.
A strategy without sacrifice is usually just preference dressed up as conviction. A position that doesn’t make some customers walk away isn’t much of a position. A brand purpose without a price tag attached is decoration. A segmentation that doesn’t force you to say no to revenue is just categorisation.
Sacrifice is the test of seriousness. It sits beneath almost every meaningful marketing strategy, and it also explains why so much strategic work collapses under pressure.
Once you start looking for the sacrifice test, you can’t really stop seeing it.
It shows up at every layer of the marketing stack.
In segmentation, sacrifice means picking a hill. You cannot serve everyone equally well, and the moment you try, you usually stop serving anyone particularly well. The classic tests of effective segmentation, refined over decades in the marketing literature from Philip Kotler onwards, are that segments must be identifiable, reachable, profitable, and actionable. None of those conditions is meaningfully satisfied by “everyone aged 25–54 with disposable income.”
That isn’t a segment. It’s a population.
The hard part of segmentation isn’t the analysis. It’s accepting that some customers are, by definition, no longer yours. Some of those customers will make money for someone else. That’s uncomfortable, but that’s also the point.
In positioning, sacrifice means accepting that you cannot be different everywhere. Only where it matters. Most positioning fails not because it is wrong, but because it is too broad, too safe, and too inclusive. It tries to mean something to everyone and ends up meaning very little to anyone.
Al Ries and Jack Trout made this argument decades ago, and Mark Ritson continues to make it now. A real position excludes. It says “this, not that.” And once you choose “this,” you have to accept that “not that” is now closed to you, at least while the position holds.
In pricing and product strategy, sacrifice means choosing whether to compete on value or price, and recognising how difficult it is to sustain both simultaneously. This is Michael Porter’s “stuck in the middle” problem in practice. The middle feels commercially safe because it avoids hard choices, but it is also where pricing power erodes, and differentiation disappears. Premium brands that constantly discount eventually train customers not to believe the premium. Low-cost brands that overcomplicate their offer lose the efficiency advantage that made them competitive in the first place.
The middle is often where organisations drift when they want the benefits of multiple positions without paying the cost of committing to one.
In branding, sacrifice is what separates real purpose from poetic language. Bob Hoffman has made this point more consistently than almost anyone over the last decade. Purpose only means something when the organisation is prepared to pay for it. That payment may come in the form of lost revenue, declined partnerships, rejected opportunities, or positions that alienate parts of the market.
The line I gave the MBA cohort built on that thinking.
Purpose is proven in sacrifice.
If it costs nothing, it usually communicates nothing.
Most brand purpose statements fail this test because they commit the organisation to nothing difficult. They take no meaningful position, create no tension, and could often be lifted directly into a competitor’s deck without changing a word. That isn’t purpose. It’s wallpaper.
In objectives and measurement, sacrifice means setting goals that carry real risk. Safe goals produce safe behaviour and, usually, safe results. Les Binet and Peter Field’s work on long-term effectiveness only functions inside organisations willing to tolerate short-term discomfort in pursuit of long-term advantage. Brand-building investments often require accepting lower short-term efficiency metrics in exchange for stronger long-term demand generation.
That trade-off is the sacrifice.
If the team can comfortably hit every target without changing how they think or operate, the targets are probably expectations rather than strategic objectives.
And in communications, sacrifice means choosing one idea and committing to it long enough for it to compound. Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk’s work on distinctive brand assets makes this case empirically. Consistency builds memory structures, while endless reinvention weakens them.
But committing to one idea means rejecting others. It means saying no to the campaign everyone internally finds exciting this quarter because it doesn’t reinforce the long-term strategic memory structure the brand is trying to build.
Again, the discomfort is the point.
Across segmentation, positioning, pricing, branding, objectives, and communications, the same pattern repeats.
Strategy is largely the accumulated consequence of what an organisation is willing to give up.
If sacrifice sits at the centre of meaningful strategy, why is so much strategic work sacrifice-free?
The answer is mostly organisational rather than intellectual.
The first reason is consensus.
Most strategy is built by committee, and committees instinctively smooth off sharp edges. Every executive in the room has a customer group, market, region, channel, or product category they are trying to protect. The path of least resistance is to produce a strategy broad enough that nobody feels threatened by it.
The result is usually a document that says yes to everything.
Which is another way of saying no to strategy.
The second reason is risk aversion masquerading as rigour.
“We need more research” often sounds responsible. Sometimes it is responsible. But just as often, it is an organisation deferring a choice it already suspects it needs to make.
I pushed this point hard during Week 4 of the course.
Leaders play the ball early.
Marketing decisions are always made in the face of uncertainty. The question is rarely whether you have perfect information. The question is whether you have enough clarity and conviction to move before certainty arrives.
Most organisations wait too long because certainty feels safer than judgement.
The third reason is that sacrifice carries real commercial consequences, at least in the short term.
Walking away from a segment means walking away from revenue. Holding a premium price means losing some volume. Refusing work that dilutes the brand means saying no to money. Choosing long-term brand investment over short-term activation can make quarterly numbers look worse before they look better.
These are not theoretical costs. They appear in real P&Ls.
And because organisations are structurally designed to avoid short-term pain, many strategies collapse the moment the sacrifice becomes tangible.
This is also one reason founder-led businesses often sustain clearer strategic positions than committee-led corporations. Founders can absorb short-term discomfort in the service of a long-term belief in ways committees often cannot.
One exercise I’ve found increasingly useful is what I’d call a sacrifice audit.
Take your current strategy document, whatever form it takes. A positioning statement, a brand strategy, a campaign platform, a segmentation model, a growth plan. And ask the same question repeatedly.
What does this commit us to giving up?
Not what does it commit us to doing. Doing is easy. Most organisations are very good at adding things.
The real test is what the strategy prevents.
What customers does it walk away from? What revenue does it deprioritise? What products does it tell us not to build? What channels does it rule out? What partnerships should we refuse? What messages can we no longer credibly say? What shortcuts does it stop us from taking?
If the honest answer to most of those questions is “nothing,” then the strategy probably isn’t constraining behaviour in any meaningful way.
It may still look like a strategy. It may have been beautifully written, carefully socialised, and presented confidently at the offsite. But if it doesn’t meaningfully narrow the organisation’s choices, it is functioning more like a strategy-shaped object than a strategy itself.
The discomfort you feel while running this audit is usually the signal.
Where the organisation flinches, the real strategic tension often lies.
It’s easy to make sacrifice sound abstract or philosophical. In practice, it usually appears through fairly ordinary business behaviour.
A genuinely premium brand charges premium prices even when discounting would increase short-term volume. It accepts lower volume in exchange for stronger margins, stronger positioning, and stronger long-term pricing power. The premium is not the slogan. It is the behaviour.
A challenger brand refuses to play the incumbent’s game on the incumbent’s terms. Adam Morgan’s challenger brand thinking is built on this idea. Real challengers attract customers by amplifying tensions the market leader has created, not by trying to outspend the market leader at its own strategy.
That usually means targeting a smaller, sharper opportunity rather than chasing the entire category.
A segmentation strategy that genuinely operates tells the sales team which deals not to pursue. If every lead is equally attractive across all segments, then the segmentation is probably decorative rather than operational.
A meaningful brand purpose costs the organisation something when tested. Most purpose statements survive precisely because they are never forced into conflict with commercial incentives. The organisations whose purpose claims feel credible are usually those willing to absorb some cost to maintain alignment with them.
And a pricing strategy only becomes real when the pressure arrives. It is easy to claim premium positioning during strong quarters. The real test comes when targets are missed, competitors discount aggressively, or retailers apply pressure.
As I told the cohort in Week 7.
If you can’t sustain pricing power, you are probably more replaceable than you think.
In almost every case, strategy becomes visible through refusal.
The refusal is often the strategy.
The important caveat
There is an important caveat here. Not every refusal is strategic.
Sometimes “we don’t do that” is just another way of saying “we can’t.” Sometimes “premium” is simply expensive, not valuable. Sometimes inflexibility gets mistaken for conviction.
Sacrifice alone is not enough.
The discipline is not to refuse things randomly. The discipline is to deliberately refuse the right things, in service of a coherent position that customers actually value.
A brand that walks away from price-sensitive customers by choosing a premium position is making a strategic sacrifice. A brand that walks away from those customers because it simply cannot compete on price is rationalising weakness.
The difference matters enormously.
The real question is not simply: what does this cost us?
The question is: is the cost worth paying for the position it secures?
What does this change in practice
There are three practical implications that follow from this way of thinking.
First, stop producing a strategy that doesn’t impose any constraints.
If the output describes virtues nobody could reasonably disagree with, it probably hasn’t made a meaningful strategic choice.
A strategy without trade-offs is usually just an aspiration.
Second, build sacrifice into the brief itself.
Before major strategic work begins, agree explicitly not only on what the work should enable, but also on what it should rule out.
The “what we are saying no to” section is often more valuable than the “what we are doing” section.
And third, hold the sacrifice when pressure arrives.
This is the hardest part.
Most strategies do not fail in design. They fail in execution because the organisation abandons the sacrifice the moment it becomes commercially uncomfortable.
The retailer demands discounting. The customer wants a custom exception. The sales team objects to the lost volume. The board becomes nervous about the quarter.
And in each case, the strategic answer is fundamentally the same. Yes, this is what the strategy costs.
We knew. We chose it. We are holding it.
A strategy that collapses the first time the sacrifice becomes real was never really a strategy at all. It was a preference that had not yet been tested.
Part 3 gets practical
Part 1 established the meta-frame. Marketing earns its keep when it changes a decision.
Part 2 introduced the test. Real strategic decisions usually involve sacrifice.
Part 3 becomes the practical payoff.
It explores the distinction between distinctiveness and differentiation, two ideas that are often confused despite serving very different functions. One earns recall. The other earns preference.
The strongest brands understand both and deliberately invest in both.
That’s where the trilogy goes next.
For now, the test is enough.
Look at your strategy and ask:
What does this cost us?
If the honest answer is “not much,” there is probably more work to do.
