“Slow Down. You’re Moving to Fast.”
“Where do you want to get to?”
Lewis Carroll posed this question in 1865, through a Cheshire Cat perched in a tree.
Alice, lost in Wonderland, asks which way she ought to go. The Cat's response is immediate: "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." Alice says she doesn't care much where, as long as she gets somewhere. "Oh, you're sure to do that," the Cat says, "if you only walk long enough."
Or fast enough, I might add.
If you were lost on a road trip, what would you do? Hit the accelerator to get “wherever” faster? Or would you slow down? Perhaps stop entirely. Ask a local for directions. Consult the GPS. Figure out first where you’re going, know the best way to get there, then proceed with confidence, right?
Unfortunately, what I see most companies and marketing teams doing today, now that they have access to AI, is precisely the opposite. They are chasing Alice’s folly.
“We don’t know where we’re going or how to get there, but let’s hit the gas and get there faster!”
The Map is the Source of Truth, Not Your “Impeccable Sense of Direction”
“Where do we want to get to?”
Most marketing plans never ask—or answer—the most important question.
Not "What's our budget?"
Not "Which channels are we using?"
Not "What does the content calendar look like?"
Those are real questions, and they get answered early and often. But the question that precedes all of them—the one the whole plan depends on—frequently gets skipped, dressed up in vague performative language, or deferred entirely until the next planning cycle.
It's easy to read the Cat as clever and Alice as naïve. The more uncomfortable reading is that the Cat isn't being sarcastic. He's being precise. If you have no destination, then any road is a valid pathway. The logic is airtight. The problem is that it describes the marketing strategy of most businesses operating in the modern marketing ecosystem.
Measuring Miles Per Hour, Not Progress
Here is what happens when a marketing plan begins without a destination: it fills the gap with measurement.
Activity gets tracked. Clicks, impressions, open rates, follower counts, cost-per-lead. The reporting gets more sophisticated over time. Dashboards proliferate. Somebody books a quarterly review to go through the numbers.
And every quarter, the answer to, "Is this working?" is the same: Compared to what?
Marketing measurement is only meaningful when it's calibrated against a destination. Without one, you're measuring the speed of the car, not whether you’re getting closer to your desired endpoint. You're covering ground—impressions are up, traffic is healthy, the content calendar is running on schedule—but you have no way to know if any of it is moving you anywhere useful. You only know you're moving.
This isn't a technology problem. It's a direction problem. And it cannot be solved with better reporting.
Strategy Is Not a Synonym for Planning
The word "strategy" does a lot of impersonation work in marketing. Plans get called strategies. Tactics get called strategies. Calendars get called a strategy. A documented list of channels with associated budgets gets called a strategy.
A strategy is a theory of how you win. It requires a definition of winning. Without that definition, you don't have a strategy; you have a plan with no objective attached to it. Rigorously executed, admirably formatted, and functionally directionless.
The Cheshire Cat's logic is pitiless on this point. If you haven't defined where you want to get to, you cannot evaluate whether the road you're on is a good one, let alone the right one. Every path looks equally valid. Every tactic is a reasonable idea. Every new channel is worth exploring. The plan expands to fill the available budget, the team stays busy, and the question of whether any of it is working remains permanently deferred. The car is speeding ahead, after all.
This is not a failure of execution. It is a failure that precedes execution by several months.
The Destination Has to Be Defined and Definitive
Here's where the parable gets instructive, rather than just diagnostic.
Alice's mistake wasn't that she didn't know where she was going. She was lost in Wonderland. That's a reasonable state. Her mistake was accepting that not caring about the destination was fine, as long as she eventually got somewhere.
Most marketing “plans” make the same concession. The objective gets written in a form that sounds directional but isn't:
"Increase brand awareness."
"Build our online presence."
"Grow our audience."
“Generate leads.”
These are descriptions of motion, not destinations. They're Alice saying, "Any road will do."
A real destination is specific enough that you'll know when you've arrived…and specific enough that you'll know if you're heading the wrong way.
Not "increase brand awareness" but, "Within 18 months, increase our marketing efficiency ratio from X to Y, resulting in an X% increase in sales (or profit margin)." That's a destination. You can look at what you're doing and ask whether it points in that direction.
The Cheshire Cat would have nothing to add in such a scenario. There's nothing left to ask. The cat’s own tongue would be “got,” for once.
Walk Long Enough, in Any Direction, and You’ll Get There
There's one more line in the Carroll exchange worth sitting with. After Alice argues that she wants to get somewhere, the Cat says she's sure to manage that, if she only walks long enough.
It's the most devastating part of the passage, and the most misread. People take it as a kind of optimism. Eventually, you'll arrive somewhere.
It's not optimism. It's a description of what businesses without a destination actually do: they walk. Long enough that they accumulate real mileage, real spending, real effort. They build up an impressive body of activity. And they land, eventually, in a place they didn't choose and couldn't have predicted. Because they never decided where they were going.
That’s Marketing Drift in action.
The irony is that the destination itself is rarely the hard part. Businesses usually know, in broad terms, what success looks like. The harder thing is stating it plainly, committing to it in writing, and then holding every marketing decision up against it.
Before the next planning cycle starts—before the channel mix, the content calendar, the budget allocation—answer the Cat's question.
“Where do you want to get to?”
The rest of the plan only makes sense once you have that answer.
Another all-time great, Yogi Berra, put it plainly: "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up somewhere else."
And that, friends, is the real danger.