Insight before tactics: the four questions that decide your strategy

Most marketing starts in the wrong place: with a tactic. Someone decides to "do more on TikTok" or "spend more on Google" before anyone has answered whether the market even rewards it. We start one step earlier — with insight — using four lenses borrowed from strategy, not advertising.

1. Is the environment right? (PEST)

The macro picture — political, economic, social, technological — decides whether the tide is with you or against you. A business riding a technology shift (say, AI-mediated search) plays a different game than one fighting a structural decline. PEST tells you which one you're in, now and next.

2. Where's the room to win? (Five Forces)

Porter's Five Forces maps the industry: suppliers, buyers, new entrants, substitutes and rivalry. It shows where margin lives and where it gets competed away — and, crucially, who your future competitor is. Many businesses lose to a rival that wasn't on the radar when they set their plan.

3. How do we beat them? (SWOT)

Only once you understand the field do strengths and weaknesses mean anything. SWOT, done against specific competitors rather than in the abstract, shows how to lead with what you have and attack where they're soft.

4. Who exactly are we for? (Persona)

Finally, the customer — not a demographic, a person. A real persona makes every later decision concrete: the words, the channels, the objections, the offer. Vague audiences produce vague marketing.

Why the order matters

Skip these and you get activity without direction: campaigns that "perform" on their own metrics while the business goes nowhere. Run them first and the tactics almost choose themselves — because you finally know what you're trying to win, and where the opening is.

Insight isn't the slow part before the real work. It is the work that makes everything after it pay off. It's why the Leader OS method starts here, every time.