The FY26 marketing plan landed in my inbox as sixty-one slides on Monday morning, roughly one slide for every working day between now and the end of the first quarter. It had a vision statement, four pillars, a channel mix, a campaign calendar, a slide called Ways of Working and an appendix nobody will ever open.
I read the whole thing twice. Nowhere did it say what we were going to stop doing.
This is not a shot at the person who built it. I have built this deck. I have presented this deck to leadership in the first week of January with total conviction and no idea whatsoever which of the four pillars I would sacrifice in May when something inevitably had to go.
Which is exactly the problem.
A plan that never names what the brand will stop doing is not a plan, it is a budget with adjectives, and the real strategy ends up getting made in a hallway in May by whoever happens to be most tired.
Three tests before you present. One, search the document for a sentence that starts with we will no longer. If there is not one, the plan has not made a single choice yet, it has only made promises. Two, count the audiences. If there are more than two, the plan is a wish list wearing a segmentation slide. Three, pull up last year's plan and find the initiative that quietly did not happen. Nobody killed it. It starved, slowly, while everyone was polite about it.
The brands that read as coherent from the outside are the ones that got comfortable subtracting. Patagonia has spent years actively telling people not to buy things. Liquid Death sells one joke in a can and has stubbornly refused to sell a second one. Salt & Straw will run a genuinely bizarre flavor for a single month and then let it disappear rather than roll it out nationally, which any spreadsheet would tell them to do. Every one of those is a stop, not a start, and every one of them cost somebody an argument.
Subtraction is miserable to present, because nobody in the history of marketing has been promoted for the thing they cancelled. But your leadership team will remember two numbers and one sentence from that deck by March. The honest work of January is deciding which two and which one, and then writing down what you are giving up to protect them.
If there are more than two, the plan is a wish list wearing a segmentation slide.
First karaoke of the year is Thursday. The host who calls everyone baby has a standing rule for newcomers, which is pick one song and commit to it rather than queue up four and lose your nerve halfway through the second. I have not heard better planning advice from anyone holding a budget.