Two bosses, one plan

A regional marketing plan usually has to pass two people who do not sit in the same building and are not measured on the same thing.

One is the country manager, who carries this quarter's number and knows which weeks it has to come from. The other is a brand lead somewhere else, who carries the same brand across a dozen markets and is judged on whether it still looks like itself in five years.

Neither of them is wrong. From either desk, the other one is asking for the thing that will cost you your year.

So the plan gets written to clear both. I have written these and I have approved them. The sentence that survives is the one each reader can take as their own. Build the brand while driving conversion. Premium positioning with a sharp local offer. Consistent globally, adapted locally. Every phrase is defensible, nothing in it is refused, and both signatures arrive inside the week.

Now look one level down, at whoever has to turn it into a media buy by Sunday. They are holding a document with two instructions in it, no way to tell which of them is the priority, and a booking deadline on Tuesday. So they build the version that cannot be criticised by either boss, which is the vague one, because the vague one is the only version anybody approved.

Both bosses assume the ambiguity gets resolved further down, by people closer to the market. Further down, nobody has the authority to resolve it, and the only safe move is to quote the document back.

Ambiguity is not the price of the agreement. It is the plan. It goes into the market exactly as written, and the market reads it the way the junior did.