Alexander Schulze · Manager · Vivaldi Group
Alexander Schulze has worked across agency, corporate, and consultancy roles, seeing marketing from every angle. At Vivaldi Group, he helps CMOs do something that sounds simple but is organisationally hard: connect marketing activity to real business impact across the full marketing mix, not just promotion. This playbook captures his practical framework for repositioning marketing as a strategic business function.
Marketing lost its seat at the strategy table by becoming a promotion department. Getting it back requires evidence, not announcements.
The headline principles from the episode. The full step-by-step framework follows below.
The Playbook
Marketing's strategic power lies in providing market-oriented insights that shape product, pricing, and go-to-market strategy — not just promotion. When marketing integrates those insights across the business, it gains credibility and becomes indispensable.
Why it's overlooked: Most CMOs default to communication management because it is visible and measurable. Strategic market-orientation work is harder to quantify and requires organisational influence beyond the marketing department.
The Playbook
You cannot reposition marketing overnight. Instead, create high-impact initiatives that solve real business problems using market knowledge. Document the wins and make them visible internally. Change minds through proof, not promises.
Why it's overlooked: It feels slower than making a grand announcement. But it changes culture permanently rather than briefly.
The Playbook
Before any campaign or strategy: analyse customer behaviour, competitive landscape, industry trends, and cultural context. Tailor the insight to the specific question each internal stakeholder needs answered — not a generic market study.
Why it's overlooked: Most teams skip this to reach execution faster. It requires patience, intellectual discipline, and the willingness to deliver uncomfortable findings.
Most marketing departments spend the vast majority of their time executing communication. Managing campaigns, producing content, optimising channels. Meanwhile, the other three P's — product, price, place — have drifted into other departments. Corporate strategy teams are now doing market segmentation. Finance teams are owning pricing strategy. Marketing has become a subset of itself.
The diagnosis starts with an honest map: what does marketing actually do all day, versus what market-oriented strategy should include? The gap between those two is the opportunity. And it is usually larger than most CMOs want to admit.
A professor at the University of Hohenheim documented this drift: as marketing narrowed to promotion, companies began creating entirely new departments — growth teams, innovation labs, new business units — to fulfil the functions that marketing used to own. Marketing created the vacuum. Other functions filled it.
Track how your marketing team spends its hours for one week. Categorise each activity as customer insight, market analysis, product input, pricing input, distribution strategy, or promotion execution. The breakdown will show you where the imbalance is.
The fastest path to a seat at the strategy table is to become indispensable through insight. When marketing holds the most accurate and actionable understanding of what drives customer decisions, other functions need you in the room.
This does not require a large research budget. It requires systematic conversations with customers, a method for translating those conversations into decision-relevant findings, and the discipline to do it continuously. Not only when a campaign is planned.
Vivaldi worked with a global sports nutrition company entering Germany's Gen Z market. What started as a research brief became a full repositioning: new value propositions, new sales programmes, new incentive structures. All driven by understanding how German Gen Z was genuinely different from the company's other markets. The market insight was the engine. Everything else followed.
Run five customer interviews this month with the specific goal of generating insight for one non-marketing decision — a product roadmap choice, a pricing question, a distribution decision. Present the findings in a format that makes the case for including marketing in that decision.
Market orientation requires tracking four areas simultaneously. Customer behaviour and needs, including the decision-making process and buying triggers. Competitive landscape — who is doing what, how they are positioning, what is working for them. Industry trends — regulatory changes, technology shifts, category dynamics. Cultural context — what values and social shifts are affecting category perception.
The most useful insight comes from connecting all four. Any single dimension alone gives you a partial picture you will be tempted to act on too confidently.
"A persona for a sales department is very different than a persona for a product development department." — Alexander Schulze. The same underlying research serves multiple internal audiences. The customer insight that helps product decide which features to build is different from the insight that helps sales handle objections. Tailor the delivery. Keep the source consistent.
Choose one internal stakeholder group — product, sales, finance, or leadership. Identify the most pressing question they are currently trying to answer about your market. Deliver specific, actionable insight on that question, framed in their language.
Repositioning marketing internally is not done through announcements or internal presentations. It is done through demonstrated impact.
A lighthouse project is a high-visibility initiative where marketing applies its market knowledge to solve a real business problem. Improving conversion rates for sales using customer insight. Reducing churn through insight-driven retention messaging. Modelling the revenue opportunity in a new segment.
The key is to make the result visible and attribute it clearly to market-oriented thinking. Over time, a track record of lighthouse wins changes how the rest of the organisation perceives marketing.
"You create lighthouse initiatives, lobby for your work, and then make the impact seen across the company. It takes time. It is almost like a repositioning — an internal brand activation for the marketing department." — Alexander Schulze
Identify one current business problem in another department that market knowledge could help solve. Propose a three-week sprint where marketing applies customer insight to that problem. Document the result and share it with leadership as a case study.
Expanding marketing's strategic role requires navigating existing power structures and legacy role definitions. Alex's framing: this is not politics in a negative sense. It is relationship-building.
Understanding what each internal stakeholder values, what questions they are trying to answer, and how you can help them succeed creates a web of mutual usefulness. Every conversation where you provide genuine value to another function is a vote for marketing's expanded role in future decisions.
The three-step process: understand your current situation. Build an insight base. Execute and make the impact visible. In that order.
"If you have those insights, everyone loves to have you in the discussion — because the moment you can provide the rest of the team with insights from the actual customer, you will almost automatically gain relevance internally." — Alexander Schulze
Map your three most important internal stakeholders. For each, write one sentence describing: what they are measured on, what their biggest current challenge is, and how market knowledge could help. Schedule a conversation to offer that help specifically.
The playbook is derived from the conversation. The nuance and the reasoning behind every principle are in the episode itself.
"Marketing that only promotes doesn't build a business."
Episode 007 · Feb 2025