A premium seafood distributor — its own brand plus private label for the country's main retail chains — was marketing on activity: posts on a calendar, with no link to the sales forecast and no model of where next year's growth would come from. The work was to rebuild the plan from the value proposition down to the warehouse.
The P&L line by line — real and projected — as the base the plan is built on.
Own brand and private label carry different economics; the plan keeps them separate.
Lead times, reorder points and days of stock by origin — the planning reality of seafood.
Base, innovations and customer development — in dollars and pounds, not intentions.
The company was doing the visible work — content, campaigns, retail presence — but the marketing bore no relationship to the number the business had to hit. Nobody could say which activities moved sales, what next year's growth was composed of, or how much stock to hold by origin given real lead times. The plan existed as a calendar, not as a commercial instrument.
Define what the brand actually sells — own brand and private label — before deciding what to say about it.
Real and projected economics by product line, so every decision has a margin consequence attached.
A Building Blocks structure (Unilever method) that splits the goal into base, innovations and customer development — each quantified monthly.
Lead times per origin country, reorder points and days of stock — because in seafood the supply chain is the plan.
Content and communications anchored to commercial milestones instead of impressions.
A 2026 plan rooted in the P&L, not in a media calendar.
Base, innovations and customer development, each quantified monthly and owned.
S&OP with real lead times, reorder points and stock coverage by origin.
Every marketing action traceable to a commercial milestone.
Marketing that cannot point to the number it moves is the most common failure in the function — and the most expensive, because it is invisible. Rebuilding a plan from the value proposition down to the P&L is the discipline that fixes it, whether the company sells seafood, software or insurance. It is also what lets a marketing leader sit credibly at a table where the language is margin and cash.
Product line economics, a growth model and a baseline every action can be traced to.
Budget defended with margin and forecast, not with impressions.
Work that never had a commercial milestone attached to it.