Strategy Is a Commodity. Experience Is Not.

Gary Vaynerchuk made the rounds recently with a characteristically blunt take: brand strategy is a commodity. His argument is that everyone has access to the same brand frameworks, the same positioning exercises, the same archetype models. The differentiation, he argues, is in relevance strategy — understanding culture, context, and timing well enough to actually connect with people where they are.

He's not wrong. But he's also not saying enough. The commodity problem in marketing runs deeper than brand strategy versus relevance strategy. The entire category of strategy delivery — the deck, the workshop, the roadmap, the framework — has been democratized to the point of near-worthlessness. What has not been democratized, and cannot be, is the judgment that comes from executing that strategy under real conditions across a variety of clients, industries, and constraints over a meaningful period of time.

What Actually Got Commoditized

The commoditization of strategy didn't happen overnight. It happened because the inputs to strategy — competitive analysis, audience research, messaging frameworks, positioning models — became widely available and increasingly automated. A decade ago, a brand strategist's value was partly informational: they brought frameworks and methodologies the client didn't have access to. That informational advantage is gone. The frameworks are in every business school curriculum, every marketing blog, and every AI assistant trained on the last fifty years of marketing literature.

What this means practically is that the market is now saturated with strategy documents that are technically correct and operationally useless. The positioning statement is tight. The brand architecture is sound. The messaging hierarchy makes logical sense. And twelve months later, none of it has been implemented because the strategy never accounted for how the organization actually works, what the team can realistically execute, what the technology stack can support, or what happens when the plan meets the first obstacle.

Relevance strategy, as Gary Vee describes it, is a more honest framing of the problem. The question is not whether your brand has a clear identity — it is whether that identity lands with real people in real cultural moments. That requires judgment about timing, channel, format, and voice that goes well beyond a positioning workshop. But here is where his framing still falls short: relevance strategy is also learnable. It is also teachable. It is also, in the hands of someone who learned it from a book last month, also a commodity.

The Thing That Doesn't Commoditize

Pattern recognition built from execution across years and industries does not commoditize. It cannot be downloaded, templated, or generated. It accumulates slowly, through exposure to problems that look similar on the surface and diverge completely in practice.

Consider what actually happens when you work on a marketing technology activation problem for a manufacturer versus a financial services firm versus a regional retailer. The strategy phase of each engagement looks roughly the same: audit the current state, identify the gap between capability and utilization, map the path from here to where the business needs to be. The documents look similar. The frameworks overlap. But the execution of each is completely different — because the organizational dynamics are different, the technology constraints are different, the compliance requirements are different, the team's comfort with change is different, and the definition of success is different.

What makes the difference between a strategy that gets implemented and a strategy that sits on a shelf is not the quality of the framework. It is the advisor's ability to anticipate where the organization will resist, where the technology will fall short, where the team will lose confidence, and where the original plan needs to flex without losing its strategic integrity. That ability does not come from being smart. It comes from having navigated those specific failure modes before — in enough different contexts that the pattern is visible before the problem surfaces.

Why Industry Variety Matters More Than Depth

There is a conventional argument that deep industry specialization is the mark of a serious advisor. Go deep in one vertical, learn it completely, become the expert others can't replicate. That argument has merit for some problems. It has significant blind spots for marketing strategy and execution.

The most useful transfers of insight in marketing come across industry lines. A personalization approach that became standard practice in hospitality five years ago is often completely novel to a B2B manufacturer today. A content operations model that scaled for a regional retailer translates directly to a professional services firm trying to build editorial infrastructure for the first time. A measurement framework built for a financial services compliance environment turns out to be exactly what a healthcare marketer needs to track campaigns within HIPAA constraints.

The advisor who has only ever worked in one industry sees these problems as unique. The advisor who has worked across manufacturing, financial services, retail, and technology sees the underlying pattern immediately — and can tell you in the first conversation which approaches have worked and which have failed in analogous situations. That cross-industry exposure is not just breadth for its own sake. It is a compression of learning. It means a client with a genuinely difficult problem gets the benefit of every similar problem solved before theirs, regardless of whether those problems came from their industry.

The Judgment Gap

Here is what the commodity critique of strategy misses: the frameworks were never the product. They were always the scaffolding. The real product is judgment — the ability to look at a specific organization's specific situation and make a call that is right for that context, that accounts for the human and technical realities the framework cannot see, and that holds up when the plan runs into friction.

Judgment is built through accumulation. It requires having been in rooms where the strategy was right and the execution failed — and understanding why. It requires having watched the same mistake happen in three different industries and recognizing it as a pattern rather than a one-off. It requires having made the call that felt risky, seen it work, and updated the model. It requires having made the opposite call, seen it fail, and updated the model again.

None of this is available in a framework document. None of it is transferable through a workshop. It is not something a client can purchase by subscribing to a strategy methodology. It is earned through exposure, and the only way to get it is time.

• —Frameworks are inputs — available to anyone with a library card or an AI subscription
• —Relevance is judgment applied to culture and timing — learnable in principle, but thin without experience of what has and hasn't worked
• —Cross-industry exposure compresses learning curves — a problem that looks novel in one vertical is often a solved problem from another
• —Execution experience creates pattern recognition that frameworks cannot encode — the instinct for where a plan will break before it breaks
• —Years matter because failure is the teacher — and failure across varied contexts is the curriculum that can't be replicated

What This Means When You're Choosing Who to Work With

If strategy is a commodity, the evaluation criteria for who you work with changes. You are not buying a framework. You are not buying a methodology. You are not buying a deliverable. You are buying accumulated judgment and the willingness to be in the room when the plan hits reality.

That means the right questions when evaluating a strategy partner are not about which frameworks they use. They are about where the frameworks have been applied, what happened when they were, and what the advisor learned when the outcome diverged from the plan. It means asking whether the person who did the work across similar organizations will be the person doing your work — or whether you are paying for a brand name that deploys junior talent against your problem.

It means asking whether the strategy delivery model is designed to produce a document or to produce an outcome. Those are not the same thing, and most strategy engagements are designed to produce the former while promising the latter. The gap between them is not filled by a better framework. It is filled by the kind of execution partnership that knows where the plan will need to flex and is present to do the flexing.

Gary Vee is right that brand strategy as a category has been democratized to near-irrelevance as a differentiator. The insight is sharp and worth taking seriously. But the response to that commoditization is not simply to adopt a different strategy label. It is to recognize that what marketing leaders need is not a more current framework — it is a partner whose experience with real organizations across real industries has built the judgment to know where any framework will hold and where it needs to give way to something harder to name and impossible to template.