The Uneasy Relationship Between Theory and Execution
There is a fairly common tension in the professional world — especially in areas such as marketing, strategy, or business development — between conceptual rigor and immediate applicability.
This is not a new discussion, but it is a recurring one, and probably an inevitable one. Over the years I have seen this friction appear again and again in companies of different sizes and industries, usually under slightly different forms but with the same underlying question: to what extent theory brings real value to the business, and when it starts becoming an obstacle because it drifts away from real-world applicability.
Theory serves an important purpose. Especially when experience is still limited, conceptual frameworks allow us to organize reality, apply a methodology, and build at least a minimally structured line of reasoning. They help us avoid basic mistakes and prevent us from relying exclusively on intuition.
The problem begins when we lose sight of the fact that this methodological rigor is not the outcome the company expects to receive. It is only the path that should lead us to better decisions and more effective actions.
Conceptual frameworks disconnected from the business
“It is relatively common to come across conceptually flawless work that generates no meaningful impact on the business.”
Well-structured documents, sound analyses and carefully prepared presentations that, nevertheless, do not translate into different decisions or concrete actions.
From the perspective of the people who produced them, the work may appear solid; from the organization’s perspective, the perception is often different: everything seems reasonably well thought through, but it is not clear what should be done differently from that point onward.
Companies do not expect theory — they expect movement that leads to results. What they understand is the bottom line. Everything else must find its place in relation to it. It’s as simple as that.
Strategic marketing and commercial reality
This tension becomes particularly visible in the machinery — often imperfect — formed by marketing and sales. In theory, they should operate as a coordinated system that starts from defined corporate objectives and unfolds across the entire funnel, from positioning to closed deals. In practice, however, each area tends to move according to partially different logics.
Strategic marketing naturally relies on conceptual models: segmentation, positioning, market analysis, value proposition design, or customer journey development. All of this is necessary and brings clarity, but it also places the work on a level that remains relatively far from day-to-day commercial activity.
Sales, on the other hand, operates in a much more immediate environment, where conversations revolve around the pipeline, open opportunities, conversion ratios, and average deal size.
It is a space where the relationship between action and outcome is far more visible, and where the usefulness of any initiative is almost automatically measured in terms of economic impact.
This is why, in certain contexts, strategic marketing is perceived as a somewhat abstract activity. Not because it lacks value, but because that value does not always translate clearly into business generation.
Theory as part of the process
“Theory should be present in the way we analyze problems and structure decisions, but not necessarily in the way we present results.”
The value does not lie in the model itself, but in the conclusions it allows us to reach. A well-applied framework should help decisions become more coherent and actions more effective, but the real merit is not in having applied the framework correctly — it is in having improved the final outcome.
When the model ends up occupying the center of the conversation and the work is evaluated based on its conceptual sophistication, the process stops being a means and becomes the implicit objective. This is difficult to sustain in business environments where time and resources are limited and where priorities are defined according to economic impact.
Buyer Personas: Strategic analysis or anthropological exercise?
Few tools illustrate the tension between theory and execution better than the Buyer Persona. Conceptually, it is a valuable tool to structure knowledge about the customer and align marketing and sales. At the same time, it is also one of the areas where it is easiest to drift into abstraction.
For a Buyer Persona to be useful, it must be strictly limited to the variables that shape the purchasing decision and therefore generate value:
- Real pain points: What problems keep them awake at night? What frictions exist?
- Decision dynamics: Who approves the budget? How are alternatives evaluated?
- Success criteria: What metrics are used to justify the investment?
- Adoption barriers: Why would they say “no”?
The problem begins when, in an attempt to “go deeper,” we start adding layers of information that may be descriptively interesting but operationally sterile.
For a Buyer Persona to be a business tool rather than an academic exercise, each attribute should be filtered through a critical question: Does this information influence our ability to sell or the way we communicate our value proposition?
- In consumer, cultural or lifestyle-driven industries, cultural consumption habits, the series people watch, or lifestyle preferences can be critical business variables. If the product connects emotionally or integrates into the customer’s leisure time, those data points are the foundation of segmentation and copywriting.
- In highly specialized or B2B industries, however, those same elements often become harmless layers. If we sell industrial cybersecurity software, knowing what series our customer watches does not help overcome a price objection, understand the buying cycle, or align the message with their profit-and-loss objectives.
“A Buyer Persona does not exist to describe an ideal customer with encyclopedic precision; it exists so the organization knows exactly which levers to activate in order to sell better.”
From that point onward, however, more and more peripheral information tends to be added until the level of detail provides very little operational value. It simply got out of hand.
Understanding what theory is for
None of this means that strategic marketing is dispensable or that theory should be pushed into the background. Without that prior work, decisions tend to fragment and lose coherence, and the organization ends up moving according to short-term urgencies instead of following a clear direction.
The problem arises when the terms are reversed and theoretical work stops being oriented toward execution. Theory should help us think better and act better, not build increasingly sophisticated models that barely change what happens in practice.
