How to get unstuck: 5 marketing planning thought experiments
An atypical set of prompts to help you shake up your marketing thinking
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This past week I’ve been spinning on newsletter topics. Staring at a list of ideas, starting to write, backtracking, scrapping paragraphs, rewriting them again. Nothing felt quite right.
And honestly, that feels like the default state of marketing right now.
We’re all scrambling to break the mold and stand out. We’re overwhelmed by everything we could do, yet underwhelmed by the results of what we are getting.
Then it hit me: The best follow-up to my recent annual planning newsletter isn’t more prioritization frameworks or more structure. It’s the opposite. Whenever I’m advising marketers, the biggest breakthroughs come from thought experiments: hypothetical exercises with a few intentional constraints. These conversations force new ideas to the surface and bend your brain just enough to reveal ideas that might actually work.
So this newsletter shares 5 of my go-to thought experiments. Simple, occasionally uncomfortable prompts to jolt you out of the rut and help you rethink your 2025 strategy with a fresh, more creative brain.
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In this newsletter:
5 thought experiments and how to run them:
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Thought experiment newsletter
Use these when you’re stuck, overwhelmed, or circling the same ideas during planning. Thought experiments work because they drop you into a constraint that forces new thinking. Pick a prompt, treat the constraint as real, and follow it through with hypothetical examples to see where the discussion goes. The goal isn’t to “solve” anything; it’s to shake you out of your defaults, surface blind spots, and make you see things from a new angle.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT 1
No new content
To start, here’s one of my favorite questions to ask startup marketing teams to get them out of their comfort zones. I first shared this thought experiment in a series on my own content strategy.
The prompt
What if you weren’t allowed to create any net-new content for the next quarter, or even six months? In this hypothetical, you can reuse things you have and modify things slightly for new channels, but you must grow by distributing existing assets. What would you do? Do you think this would help or hurt your ability to hit your KPIs?
Why this experiment
If you are over-indexing on creating “fuel” and under-indexing on building an “engine” to distribute, this thought experiment will help you recalibrate.
Teams default to creating new things instead of deepening and compounding what already works. They set content goals around volume (i.e. “15 new pieces of content a month”), but never meaningfully distribute that content.
The best ideas may just be extensions of things you’ve already created. More ROI may come from redistributing things you already have (aka getting more mileage). This experiment exposes how much growth is trapped inside your existing content.
Consider this..
What would happen if distribution—not creation—became your focus for a whole quarter?
Which pieces of existing content have never been fully distributed?
What would happen if you “franchised” your best ideas? What could become a series or workshop?
What content is outdated but fixable?
What 5–10 existing pieces, if improved, would outperform anything net-new?
Which assets should have driven a key KPI but didn’t? Would distributing or repackaging help?
What content types perform best channel by channel, and could these be extended or tweaked to serve other ICPs and/or work on other channels?