Why your marketing plan keeps starting fights

[Read me if you've ever built Ikea furniture with someone and nearly ended the relationship over step 4.]

Two people, one Ikea PAX wardrobe, one Saturday. The first opens the instruction booklet and reads it front to back before touching a single panel. (Ikea booklets have almost no words in them, which you'd think would make this quicker. It doesn't.) The second tips every box onto the living-room floor, lays every part out in rows and counts the cam locks, because you can't build anything until you know what you've actually got.

Both of them will finish the wardrobe. Both methods work, and both have a way of going wrong. The booklet reader gets forty minutes in before finding out the fittings bag is a dowel short. The floor sorter builds half the frame back to front because step 4 looked optional. The fight that happens mid-afternoon, the one that ends with somebody going for a walk, is over who decides what happens first.

Now give the same two people the same marketing brief. Build our first content programme. The first one wants the plan. Who's the audience, what's the budget, what does the calendar look like and how will we measure it. The second wants an inventory. What can I do myself this week, what do we already have lying around, and what's the cheapest way to get everything else. I found both of them in the 13 marketing leaders I interviewed for my thesis.

If you recognised yourself in either of those two, congratulations, you have a default starting point. Most of us don't notice ours until we're sharing a project with somebody whose default is different.

There's a line I use with founders in Gossamer pitches that disarms their first pushback. "We'll work on the strategy, but the last thing you want is for me to appear busy from a distance for a month before anything gets started. So the strategy will take a bit longer, while we get started on the low-hanging initiatives." They smile. Finally, someone who gets how early-stage growth works. You build the plane while deciding where you're going to fly it. As for which of these two people you need as your marketing leader, the answer is, unsurprisingly, yes.

In plain English, the Cognitive Heterogeneity pillar says marketing leaders don't all think the same way, and the differences aren't random. Seven of the 13 leaders I spoke to built their careers predominantly in startups, and they tend to start from their means, which is what they can do, who they know and what they can afford to lose. Five came in from corporates, and they tend to start from structure, with the budget and the plan in place before the action. The thirteenth, an advisor who had worked in corporate marketing teams of seven and ten before moving into advisory work, sits somewhere in between, and we'll get to them.

The important word there is "tend". The data suggests these patterns come from where people learned the job, not from who they are. Think of it less as a personality type and more as a habit you picked up at work, and definitely not a ranking. My data can't tell you which approach produces better outcomes, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who says theirs can.

Here's what the sorting looks like up close. One startup-side leader was working at a company of about 15 people with a marketing budget they put closer to zero than anything else. Their first move was to take stock of themselves, working out what they could reasonably do alone and what the cheapest route was for everything else. So they'd been teaching themselves web development with ChatGPT's help and had brought in a contractor for link building on a project scoped at around $1,000. They also paid a developer for a one-off job to speed the site up and teach them how not to break it. They were honest that there were no results to point to yet. That's parts on the floor, and before anyone calls it reckless, it's an inventory with a $1,000 line in it.

Then there's the advisor I promised, the only one in my sample. They described working with a scale-up that was entering a new market with a marketing budget of exactly zero, because the money was going into building the tech. So they started with research, qualitative and quantitative, some of it paid for and some of it done at a desk (with a bit of help from AI), and used it to work out which customer segments mattered, which channels those customers used and what story to tell each one. The proof points grew, and only then did a budget arrive to test and learn with. Research first, like the booklet. Zero budget and proof points, like the floor. Booklet in one hand, parts in the other.

Now the complication, because the pillar describes tendencies. Another leader, also on the startup side of the sample, is the CEO of a company that's been building for ten years, with two or three people in marketing. You'd expect parts on the floor. When I asked how they choose channels, the answer was historical data, their own. They're not at a stage where experimenting pays off, they told me, and for a company their size, good independent external data is a pain or expensive to get. This is also the leader who, when an opportunity came up earlier that year with no budget attached, went through the books, pulled money together from buckets that had already been set aside and settled on a figure they were willing to lose. That's about as startup a move as exists. One person, both methods, depending on the problem. Booklet for picking channels, parts on the floor whenever something new needs money nobody budgeted for, which they told me is a daily problem.

Here's where I'd push, and it's my view rather than what the research shows. I think a lot of the rows between founders and marketing leaders about "the plan" aren't about the plan at all. They're two starting points that nobody has named. Picture a founder who built the company from parts on the floor, working alongside a marketing lead who arrived with a 40-slide 90-day plan. Within a month each of them thinks the other is either reckless or slow. Neither is. They opened the same box from opposite ends, and each of them is holding a different step 1.

So here's something small to try. This one's practice, not data, and it takes about four minutes, which is less time than step 4 took. Next time a new problem lands, before anyone discusses it, everybody writes down their first move. One line each. Then look at what you've got. Did people reach for what you already have, or for a framework? If the whole team clustered on one side, that's your blind spot, and it's better to find it now than halfway through the build. If you split, congratulations again. Now agree who does which step, and nobody has to win. Somebody reads the booklet. Somebody lays out the parts.

There's one kind of team that never has this argument, and it's usually a worse sign. It's the team where every process, reader or sorter, still needs the same person in the room to run it. That's next week.

The full pillar, including the five places the two starting points diverge and what it means for how you set up a team around them, lives at Cognitive Heterogeneity in Marketing Leadership on gossamergrowth.com.

The wardrobe got built, for the record. It stands in a bedroom somewhere with one spare dowel in the bottom drawer, the same dowel the booklet reader swore was missing and the floor sorter swore they'd counted. Nobody has asked where it came from.