Strategy Was Never the Problem, We Just Turned Humans Into Strategies.

“Strategy” has become one of the emptiest words in business. It gets thrown around like confetti, used to sell courses, pad resumes, and prop up marketing campaigns that promise certainty in an uncertain world.

But strategy was never the problem. The problem is that we hollowed it out, stretched it thin, and bent it into something it was never meant to be. We stopped using strategy as a way to honor human connection, and instead we used it as a way to control humans themselves.

The word has always carried weight. It comes from the Greek strategos; the art of the general, the orchestration of collective effort, the ability to move with foresight and purpose. When business borrowed it, the intention was direction. Guidance. A way to bring clarity in the midst of chaos. But somewhere between the rise of corporate models, the obsession with competition, and the hyper-optimization of the digital age, strategy became less about alignment and more about extraction. We stopped asking what people actually needed, and we started asking how they could be leveraged. Employees became productivity metrics. Customers became conversion rates. Humans became funnels.

The problem with this reduction is that humans resist it. We always have. Psychology and neuroscience tell us why. Our nervous systems are not designed to thrive in environments where we are flattened into numbers. According to polyvagal theory, the body is always scanning for cues of safety or danger, constantly asking: “Am I safe here?” Marketing built on manipulation; scarcity tactics, urgency hacks, pushy funnels, triggers that system. It creates short-term compliance, but long-term distrust. People may click once, but they rarely stay.

And this is why so much of what passes as “strategy” today feels hollow. It is not that the frameworks or funnels are inherently broken. It is that they forgot who they were supposed to serve. Strategy should never have been about controlling people. It should have been about understanding them, about creating connection, coherence, and trust. When you reduce people to avatars or segment them into charts, you aren’t making strategy stronger. You’re stripping it of its humanity.

Think of the campaigns that collapsed under their own weight. The tone-deaf ads that sparked backlash. The scarcity-driven launches that left people feeling manipulated. The influencers who burned through followers by treating them as targets instead of community. In each case, it wasn’t the absence of strategy that caused the failure. It was the absence of humanity. Contrast that with the rare brands that resonate deeply. Patagonia telling people not to buy their jacket. Dove running campaigns that spoke to women’s lived experiences instead of airbrushed ideals. These weren’t gimmicks. They were examples of strategy used as a bridge, not a weapon. They honored the intelligence of the audience. They remembered that people aren’t numbers. They are complex, contradictory, emotional, and deeply human.

The future of marketing doesn’t require abandoning strategy. It requires reclaiming it. It asks us to return to the root of the word, to see strategy once again as the art of alignment. Alignment between what a business stands for and what its audience longs for. Alignment between the nervous system of the entrepreneur and the nervous systems of the people they serve. Alignment between growth and integrity, so that expansion doesn’t mean exploitation.

At Wondervine Studios, this is the work. Strategy is not dead, but the way it has been practiced is. The industry has mistaken templates for truth and hacks for wisdom, and in doing so, it has eroded the very thing that makes strategy worth having: resonance. Strategy that honors humans as complex beings—filled with stories, contradictions, and nervous systems that crave safety, will always outlast the shortcuts that treat them like numbers on a spreadsheet.

What the industry calls “innovation” is often just repackaged manipulation. What people are actually craving is not another tactic but something far rarer: truth. To build businesses that matter, to craft marketing that resonates, we have to stop turning humans into strategies and start turning strategy back into a way of honoring humans.

Strategy was never the problem. The problem is that we forgot what it was meant to serve.

The work now is not to abandon it, but to remember.