Strategy or Tactic? Sorting a Real Marketing Plan Document
Objective: Given a draft marketing plan with statements labeled STRATEGY or TACTIC, find the statements that are mislabeled, tactics disguised as strategy, and correct them.
You're a junior strategist at Adyen, the Dutch payments platform, reviewing a draft marketing plan for an SMB payments push before it goes to leadership next week.
Read the numbered statements. Some genuinely describe strategy. Some are tactics wearing a STRATEGY label because they sound important. Find the mislabeled ones.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, no account friction, comment threads work well for showing reasoning next to each line
The process
Specimens to review
Sort each numbered statement into STRATEGY or TACTIC. Flag any statement labeled STRATEGY that is actually a tactic in disguise, and explain the tell.
DRAFT MARKETING PLAN, Adyen SMB Payments Push, Q1 Draft 1. STRATEGY: Win small and mid-sized e-commerce merchants by being the payments platform that never forces an upsell into enterprise-only features. 2. STRATEGY: Run a LinkedIn ad campaign targeting Shopify store owners. 3. TACTIC: Publish three case studies of merchants who switched from a legacy processor. 4. STRATEGY: Have a booth at NRF and Money20/20. 5. TACTIC: Cut integration time from two weeks to two days with a self-serve API sandbox. 6. STRATEGY: Position Adyen as the platform SMBs 'graduate into' as they grow, not something they later have to leave. 7. STRATEGY: Send a monthly newsletter to signed-up merchants. 8. TACTIC: Offer a 90-day fee waiver for merchants switching from a named competitor.
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
Final deliverable
A corrected copy of the plan with each statement re-labeled STRATEGY or TACTIC, plus a short note explaining why the 3 mislabeled statements caused confusion in the original draft.
See a reference example
Wise SMB expansion plan, corrected labels (excerpt) STRATEGY - Win freelancers and small agencies who bill overseas clients by making multi-currency invoicing the easiest part of getting paid, not an integration project. TACTIC (was mislabeled STRATEGY) - Sponsor two fintech newsletters read by freelance operators. - Exhibit at a regional freelancer conference. TACTIC - Publish a comparison page against a competitor's cross-border fees.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Correctly re-labels all 3 mislabeled statements as tactics
- Explains in plain language why each was a tactic, not a strategy
- Does not flag any of the correctly-labeled strategy statements as tactics