Most marketing leaders pride themselves on discipline: detailed calendars, tightly defined KPIs, and precisely allocated budgets. These are signs of a well-oiled machine. But what if that very structure is what’s holding your business back?
The danger is subtle but real: over-optimized marketing plans are slowly suffocating innovation. Rather than acting as launchpads for growth, many plans become rigid scripts, focused on predictability, not potential.
In emerging and mature markets alike, this risk is growing. In Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, this tendency has earned a name: “sigurista marketing“, a mindset of minimizing risk, favoring tried-and-tested tactics, and doubling down on the familiar, the usual cut-and-paste routine.
But in a landscape where consumer behaviors, technologies, and channels are shifting at breakneck speed, “playing it safe” is anything but safe.
The R.I.S.K. Factors: How Marketing Plans Kill Innovation
To understand how marketing plans can stifle innovation, consider the R.I.S.K. framework, with four common traps that lead to strategic stagnation:
- Rigidity: Annual plans often lock decisions months in advance. Budgets are fixed, and teams are evaluated based on execution, not adaptation. This rigidity discourages the kind of flexibility needed to respond to market shifts or test new ideas in real time.
- Incrementalism: Most plans chase marginal gains, optimizing ad performance, refining messaging, repeating last year’s campaigns. While these efforts are valid, they rarely move the needle or unlock new growth.
- Shortsightedness: Traditional KPIs emphasize immediate ROI: conversions, cost-per-click, monthly sales spikes. These metrics rarely reward experimentation or long-term value creation.
- Knowledge Blindspots: Marketing teams often lean heavily on historical data from existing users, ignoring emerging trends, unmet needs, and non-user insights, the very sources that fuel market creation.
The result? Brands become trapped in comfort zones, slowly losing relevance while more agile competitors seize the opportunity to lead.
What the Data Tells Us
According to PwC’s Voice of the Consumer 2025 report, the Filipino consumer, representative of a broader regional trend, is evolving quickly:
- 45% now prefer value or budget brands.
- 56% are buying in bulk to reduce waste and save money.
- Even fast-moving categories like snacks and beverages are being deprioritized in favor of more essential goods.
These trends reflect a deeper, values-driven change in behavior. And yet, many brands continue to build plans for a market that no longer exists, still relying on legacy playbooks while new challengers experiment, iterate, and scale fast.
If your marketing plan doesn’t reflect this shift, you’re not just at risk of underperformance, you’re planning for yesterday’s customer.
Reframing the Role of Marketing Plans
To move beyond R.I.S.K., marketing leaders must rethink how plans are structured. One useful tool is the Marketing Innovation Impact Grid, a framework that categorizes marketing activities by their strategic value and execution difficulty:
Many marketers waste time on what’s easy but low-impact: tweaking campaigns, polishing reports, chasing metrics. It feels productive, but rarely changes consumer behavior or grows the category.
Real innovation happens when you create new value, not just new promotions. It means challenging norms, leading cross-functional change, and shifting from market-driven to market-driving strategies.
The hardest work isn’t always about technical complexity. It’s about alignment, and prioritizing what truly matters.
Innovation doesn’t fail for lack of ideas. It fails when teams lack permission or priority to pursue what truly matters.
Five Strategic Shifts to Rebuild Innovation into Marketing Plans
Here’s how to make your marketing plan enable, not stifle, innovation:
1. Redefine KPIs to Include Innovation Outcomes
If teams aren’t measured on innovation, they won’t prioritize it. Introduce shared KPIs across marketing, product, and innovation teams, such as:
- Number of pilots launched
- Time to validated customer insight
- Share of budget allocated to non-core initiatives
- Non-user engagement metrics
2. Adopt Agile Budgeting Models
Rigid annual allocations block agility. Consider the 70-20-10 model to preserve flexibility without sacrificing control.:
- 70% for core, proven activities
- 20% for strategic bets dependent on mid-year performance
- 10% for experimentation, pilots, and emergent opportunities
3. Create Cross-Functional Innovation Squads
Break down organizational silos. Innovation shouldn’t live only in R&D. Form agile teams with marketing, product, insights, sales, and even customer service, all empowered to co-own new initiatives from ideation to execution.
4. Upskill Marketers as Strategic Architects
The future of marketing requires more than campaign management. Train teams to:
- Extract hidden demand and unmet needs from non-traditional data sources
- Design market-driving value propositions
- Collaborate in business model designÂ
5. Treat the Plan as a Living Document
Replace the “set-and-forget” mindset with continuous iteration. Embed mechanisms to challenge assumptions, test new directions, and evolve the plan based on new data, not just performance metrics, but emerging cultural signals and competitor moves.
A Call to Courage, Not Just Control
The future of marketing is not just about communicating value, it’s about creating it. In this context, the role of the marketing plan must evolve from a control tool to a contribution engine.
Leaders should ask themselves:
- Are we designing our marketing plan to maintain the status quo, or to explore new growth frontiers?
- Do we allocate real resources to untested ideas?
- Are non-users and future customers part of our strategy?
- Are we willing, and equipped, to pivot when market signals demand it?
Ultimately, comfort in being better is often the biggest enemy of being different. True innovation cannot thrive without courage.
From Sigurista to Strategic
“Sigurista marketing” may have once been prudent, especially in risk-averse cultures or uncertain economies. But the companies that thrive now, and in the next five years, will be those who plan not just to protect their current market share, but to create new ones.
It’s time for marketing leaders to stop playing it safe and start playing to win.
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Josiah Go is the Chair and Chief Innovation Strategist of Mansmith and Fielders, Inc. Josiah will lead a session on uncovering hidden demand at the 2nd Annual Marketing Plan Nationwide Webinar, happening September 23–24, 2025. For inquiries, email info@mansmith.net.
