Growth window planning

Annual planning is a ritual. It’s predictable, political, and increasingly unfit for purpose. Marketers are tasked with making bets, orchestrating resources, and BUILDING within complex and evolving environment, but most corporate management systems are built on quarterly or annual time horizons that do not match market's dynamics. Five- and ten-year plans are too disconnected from current realities to let people act with confidence. Businesses, and their marketing leaders in particular, need to push for a better frame - a planning horizon built around how growth actually happens.

Growth Window Planning.

Think of it as a strategic arc that spans roughly three years. It’s not a rigid roadmap, but a deliberate window where brand platforms, product roadmaps, seasonal moments, and category insight and behavior can align to create compound impact.

Three years matters for a few reasons.

First, it’s how long most CMOs last. That tenure should be treated as a strategic design brief: what can you make happen in your time here? It’s long enough to build something real, short enough to demand urgency. You can hire, find partners, and build a culture for a three year window.

Second, it gives strategies room to breathe. Not everything pays off in Q1. Strong creative platforms take time to land. Brand equity compounds slowly, but meaningfully. Measurement systems, tech stacks, and media mix changes take quarters—sometimes years—to show returns. If you’re always planning in 12-month cycles, you’re building from the middle of the runway.

Third, Growth Windows focus attention on the right inputs. Instead of reacting to the nearest media opportunity, you can stage your biggest bets around meaningful external events: category seasonality, cultural spikes, even macroeconomic shifts. Experiments have time to mature, but you cannot waste time on frivolities, meaningful bets matter. If 2025 is the a growth year for your category, or a major innovation year, that should shape what you do to bet big and capitalize now - not just what you budget later.

This also helps escape what WARC’s Multiplier Effect calls the “doom loop” - a cycle where underperformance leads to more short-term spending, which erodes brand equity, which further weakens performance. A three-year Growth Window lets you design your way out: investing in creative platforms, attention-rich media, and full-funnel measurement that builds future demand, not just harvests current intent.

Most importantly, Growth Window Planning allows for fluidity, not rigidity. You’re not locking in tactics for 36 months. You’re defining a north star and building the systems - media, measurement, creative, capability - that can evolve within it. You can adapt to new platforms without being trapped by them. You can experiment with control. You can pursue scale without defaulting to vanity metrics.

This is a better model for modern marketing leadership. It integrates product, brand, media, and audience behavior into one strategic time horizon. It aligns the ambition of marketing with the actual rhythms of consumer demand. It gives your team a longer arc to prove what works - and to move on from what doesn’t.

Growth isn’t a quarterly outcome. It’s a compound result. Plan for it that way.