Marketing Strategy Consulting

Marketing strategy consulting is the work of deciding which demand a company intends to own, what it has the right to win there, and how the marketing budget is split so that money follows those decisions. Channel choice comes last, not first. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, for companies including Generali and Renault UK.

• Since 1999demand, brand and marketing strategy
• Más de 200estudios de caso publicados
• 10 oficinasen cuatro continentes
• 5x«Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation» de WirtschaftsWoche
• 3.7 pointsannual S&P 500 outperformance by strong brands, our 2026 study

Cuando las empresas nos contratan

Marketing strategy work starts when the plan can no longer explain itself to the people who fund it.

• The budget has to be defended to a CFO next quarter and the current argument is expressed in reach, impressions and channel efficiency
• The plan changes every year and the results do not, which usually means the plan was never a strategy
• Marketing is treated as a service function to sales and product rather than as a driver of where the company competes
• A repositioning, a new segment or a new market is coming and nobody can say which demand it is aimed at
• Spend is spread across channels, regions and brands with no line that names the demand the money is meant to create

Why the channel-first marketing plan does not work

Open a typical marketing plan and the money is divided by channel, by funnel stage, by region and by brand. Nowhere is it divided by the demand it is meant to create or capture. That absence is why the plan reads as a media schedule with a strategy section attached, and why it loses the argument in the capital allocation meeting. Channels describe how you reach people. They say nothing about what you are reaching for, and a board cannot allocate against reach.

There is a reasonable defense of the channel-first plan. For fifty years the marketing plan was an attention plan, because attention was scarce, purchasable and reasonably correlated with sales. All three conditions have weakened. What is scarce now is intention: the moment someone is actually trying to get something done and is open to a different answer. That shift is the subject of our argument that the attention internet is ending and the intent internet is taking over.

Demand spaces describe those moments. Not who the customer is, but what they are trying to achieve, in what context and under what constraint. The valuable ones cut across the categories incumbents organize around, which is why incumbents are slow to see them. A category describes what a company sells. A demand space describes what a customer is trying to do, and the customer never agreed to respect your category boundary.

What our marketing strategy consulting services include

Five bodies of work, produced in this order. A plan that starts at the fourth is a media schedule.

1. A demand architecture

A view of where demand pools today, where it is moving, how large each space is and what it would take to win it, built through the 4C lens of consumers, category and culture, competitors and company. The output is not a segmentation deck. It is three decisions a CFO can act on: which spaces you already own and should defend, which you can credibly win and should fund, and which you are paying to compete in with no right to win, where the honest move is to stop. That third decision is usually worth more than the other two, and a channel plan can never surface it. If the demand view itself has to be built first, that is demand landscape work. If the question is which customers inside a space to go after, that is segmentation and targeting.

2. A field of play

The territory the brand can credibly operate across. It sets the boundary for extension, for partnership and for what to refuse, which is the part most strategies leave unwritten and later regret. A field of play is what makes the word no defensible in a planning meeting, because the exclusion is written down before anyone has a campaign to defend.

3. Two budgets with two tests

Most marketing budgets are a single pot judged by a single measure, which guarantees the money drifts toward whatever reports fastest inside the quarter. We split it. Building investment creates preference, the reason a customer chooses you before price is discussed. Activating investment converts preference that already exists. Different horizons, different mechanisms, different tests, held separately in the plan and in the profit and loss account. Where the activating side is the binding constraint, the execution work sits with performance marketing and customer acquisition.

4. A measurement chain finance can read

A chain running from the preference premium through price and share to the spread between return on invested capital and the cost of capital, so finance can allocate against it rather than take it on trust. The evidence that the chain is real is not a marketing claim. Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data, covering 2001 to 2024, found that strong global brands beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year, and that a dollar invested in them became $15.85 against $7.03 in the index.

5. A planning framework the marketing team can run

The strategy has to survive contact with the operating calendar, which means a planning framework, a messaging architecture and a clear hierarchy of campaign goals, owned by the marketing team rather than by us. This is the part that decides whether the work compounds or expires. It is also what turns marketing from a silo into a function other parts of the business plan around.

How a marketing strategy engagement works

1. Diagnose. Leadership interviews across functions, customer and non-customer research, and a review of how the budget is currently split and judged. At Generali we interviewed more than 20 senior management executives across all business functions to get an honest snapshot before proposing anything.
2. Decide. The demand architecture and the field of play, stress-tested with finance rather than presented to it. The output is a ranked set of spaces to defend, to fund and to exit, with the exclusions written down.
3. Allocate. Building and activating budgets separated, each with its own test, plus the measurement chain that connects them to price, share and the return on capital spread.
4. Embed. The planning framework, the messaging architecture and the campaign hierarchy handed to the marketing team, so the allocation is rerun when demand moves rather than when the fiscal year does.

Marketing strategy results

Generali Switzerland: a marketing function that could argue its own case

Generali, one of the largest insurance companies worldwide, asked Vivaldi to develop a marketing communication strategy, redefine Generali Switzerland’s brand values and build demand for its Mobility and Life products. Structural changes in 2015 had realigned the Swiss business with headquarters in Trieste, and the CMO wanted marketing to act as a driver of strategic projects rather than as a service desk. We interviewed more than 20 senior management executives across all business functions, assessed team capabilities, the market environment, NPS scores, customer profiles and touchpoints, then defined a marketing planning framework, a cohesive communication strategy and the guiding principles to drive the business. In an initially silo-driven environment, the marketing communication team was able to increase its influence cross-functionally. Within just 3 months of starting the work, the strategy and its product campaign concept were handed to a major global ad agency, and the campaign launched in Switzerland in April 2016. Read the Generali story.

Renault UK: a strategy written down before any media was bought

Renault had been a well-loved icon in the UK automotive market and had spent more than a decade in decline, with consideration well below its previous levels. Vivaldi defined and activated its digital, social and content marketing strategy using our proprietary Six Pillar strategic planning framework, which set the key audiences, the tone of voice, the channel priorities, the content themes, the distribution approach and the measurement framework. All of it was captured in a Playbook shared with every stakeholder, so the strategy governed the communications that followed rather than being reconstructed from them. Read the Renault UK story.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for marketing strategy

We are a strategy firm that works on demand, not an agency that works on output. That has three consequences worth knowing before you shortlist us.

The first is that the deliverable is a set of decisions with exclusions attached, including things you are currently funding that we will recommend you stop funding. Firms whose next engagement depends on execution volume are poorly placed to make that recommendation. The second is that the argument is built to be read by finance. A marketing strategy that can only be defended in marketing measures stays vulnerable in every planning round, whatever its quality. The third is that we hand over the planning framework. The test of this work is whether your team reruns the allocation without us when demand moves.

Vivaldi has worked on demand, brand and marketing strategy since 1999, from 10 offices on four continents, with 200+ published case studies and five WirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting awards for strategy and innovation.

How to evaluate a marketing strategy consultant

Vale la pena preguntárselo a cualquier empresa de tu lista de finalistas, incluida la nuestra.

• Ask what the strategy will tell you to stop doing. A strategy that only adds is a plan. If the work cannot name a space you should exit, it has not made a choice.
• Ask how the argument reaches the CFO. If the deliverable stays inside marketing measures, the budget stays vulnerable in the next planning round.
• Ask who runs it between planning cycles. An annual document ages. If the answer to who keeps the demand view current is the consultancy, you have bought a document rather than a capability.
• Ask whether building and activating budgets are judged separately. A firm that proposes one pot and one measure will over-fund whichever side reports fastest, every quarter, without ever deciding to.
• Ask what the firm earns after the strategy ships. If the answer is execution volume in the channels the strategy recommends, read the recommendation accordingly.

Marketing strategy consultancy vs media agency vs large management consultancy?

Trabajos relacionados

Marketing strategy decides the allocation. Seven neighboring services execute against it, and most engagements touch two or three.

• Segmentation and targeting if the question is which customers inside a demand space to pursue and in what order.
• Go-to-market strategy if a specific product, market or launch needs a route to revenue rather than a portfolio-wide allocation.
• Campaign development if the strategy exists and now has to become a campaign.
• Brand activation if the gap is between what the brand says and what people actually experience.
• Social and digital marketing if the pressure sits in the digital and social channels themselves.
• Performance marketing if the activating budget is the binding constraint.
• Customer acquisition if the cost of winning a new customer is the number under scrutiny.

All seven sit inside our brand acceleration practice at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field.

Marketing strategy consulting in the US and worldwide

We work from 10 offices on four continents, which matters here for a specific reason. A demand architecture that holds in one market rarely transfers unchanged to another, because the context and the constraint around the same job to be done differ. The Generali work was Swiss, the Renault work was British, and in both the strategy was built on local evidence rather than translated from a headquarters deck.

Most engagements run from New York or from our European offices, with research in the markets that matter to the allocation. If the plan has to hold across regions, the useful first question is whether the regions are competing for the same demand or for different demand that happens to share a category name.