The Full “Make Money, Darling!” Planning Series
Most brands rinse and repeat last year’s annual plan, with some minor tweaks: Last year’s channels. Last year’s consumer logic. Last year’s constraints.
This 2026 Marketing Planning Series exists to break that pattern.
It’s designed to help CPG founders and operators step back before decisions harden—so strategy reflects reality, not momentum.
How to Use This Series
Read it in order if you’re planning 2026 now
Revisit individual pieces as planning decisions come up
Use it to pressure-test assumptions before budgets, headcount, or roadmaps lock
This is the thinking work that makes everything else easier.
If you want each piece delivered weekly as it’s published, subscribe to “Make Money, Darling!” here.
1. Macro Forces: The Context Your Strategy Must Reflect
Economic pressure, AI-driven discovery, attention fragmentation, retailer expectations, category saturation.
This piece sets the external context your 2026 plan has to operate within—whether you acknowledge it or not. These forces don’t show up neatly in dashboards, but they quietly shape what works, what costs more, and where growth breaks.
If your plan ignores this layer, everything downstream gets harder.
2. Consumer Questions Every 2026 Plan Should Answer
Most brands are still using a version of the consumer that no longer exists.
This piece breaks down how consumer behavior is shifting—and why last year’s insights often fail when reused without pressure-testing. Not a trends list. A reframing of how decisions actually get made now.
3. Category & Competition: How to See the Landscape Clearly
This comes after the consumer work, intentionally.
Here we look at how to understand your competitive set without anchoring your strategy to retailer expectations, category norms, or what competitors are doing louder or faster.
The goal isn’t differentiation for its own sake. It’s clarity on the real game you’re playing.
4. Audit 2025: What Managing a Declining Brand Taught Me About Audits
Most annual audits create activity, not learning.
This piece introduces a behavioral audit—focused on what actually worked, what didn’t, and why—so you stop guessing and start extracting signal from the year you just lived through.
Especially useful if growth slowed, stalled, or felt inconsistent.
5. Your 2026 Business Challenge: This Is Where Plans Live or Die
This is the step 95% of brands skip.
Not goals. Not tactics. The actual business challenge your plan must solve for anything else to matter.
Get this wrong, and even strong execution won’t save you.
6. OGS(P)T for Scaling Brands: The Only Framework With a Spine
Most plans collapse under the weight of too many priorities.
This piece walks through how to use OGS(P)T (Objective, Goal, Strategy, Pillars, Tactics) to force real tradeoffs—so you don’t end up with a 28-line strategy that no one can execute against.
7. Big Bets, Risks & Opportunities
Not everything deserves equal investment.
This piece focuses on how to choose the few bets that actually matter, how to acknowledge risk without paralysis, and how to measure progress without letting short-term efficiency rewrite strategy.
8. Measurement: When the Data Moves, What Changes?
Metrics don’t just measure strategy. They shape it.
This piece breaks down how to design a measurement plan that supports long-term decisions—rather than quietly pulling spend back to what looks best in the short term.
9. What Now? How Challenger Brands Can Win (Launching 11/18)
The close of the series pulls it all together.
What this all means for challenger brands operating with limited resources, rising costs, and increasing pressure to “just be more efficient”—and where real advantage still exists.
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If you want each piece delivered weekly as it’s published, subscribe to “Make Money, Darling!” here.
