NICOLE'S FIELD MAP ｜ INTRODUCTION
At my son's school sports day not long ago, a group of kids gathered around me. My son loves telling his friends "My mom uses AI and makes videos," and he wants to be a YouTuber himself. One child told me: "I've watched all those tutorial videos. I already know how."
I told him: "Knowing it and being able to do it are two different things."
That sentence sums up what a decade-plus in marketing has taught me. You think you understand every process, but until you've done it yourself, you don't know which steps will trip you up, where the pitfalls are, or what problems it will create. With AI it's even more obvious: change one line of code and everything after it can fall like dominoes.
I'm Nicole Chen, a marketing strategy consultant. I'm not a theorist; I learned by doing. So I decided to write down how I make decisions at each step and turn it into "Nicole's Field Map."
Marketing strategy planning means deciding what to do, what to do first and what not to do with limited resources, in a way the team can execute and track. It isn't a pretty slide deck. It's a set of decision rules that tells the team what to do next.
Every plan I make comes back to three goals:
Figure 1｜The three goals of marketing strategy planning
Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, in The Knowing-Doing Gap (2000, Harvard Business School Press), call this the "knowing-doing gap": organizations often know what to do but don't do it. They found many companies mistake discussing, meeting and writing reports for action.
SMEs need to face this in particular, because SMEs are the backbone of Taiwan's economy:
Figure 2｜Why SMEs matter in Taiwan (2024)
Most of these SMEs have no strategy department. The owner is the decision-maker, the salesperson and the final executor all at once, so sound judgment matters more than any tool.
You think you're deciding about A, but B, C and D need to be considered too. Making life easier upstream while creating problems downstream is one of the most common hidden costs in an SME.
I've wanted to do this for a while. Since last year I've been integrating everything, at home and overseas, and a lot of things overlap: the tools I actually use, my knowledge base, my standards for judging things, and the customer relationship management work I want to share.
This year, as people got comfortable with AI, I connected my workflows too. Repetitive work now takes about a tenth of the time it used to, which finally gave me room to put all this together.
If you ask whether I do marketing, branding, e-commerce or business, my answer is that they're all intertwined. This map is the decision library in my head, and every part of it can be used at every step.
In 2025 AI hit a peak and AI video had just arrived. Quite a few senior business owners brought me scripts, and even novels they had written, hoping to turn them into AI videos.
I advised them to wait a little. My judgment was that once the technology matured, costs would fall and efficiency would rise. That goes back to the three goals: resource integration, resource allocation and cost control. Sometimes the best strategy is to watch for a while.
Knowing and doing are two different things. This map isn't about knowing more. It's about seeing the pitfalls before you start.
The map has three parts. Start wherever you are now, or read them in order:
| Part | What it covers | Read first if you're |
|---|---|---|
| ① Positioning, strategy and blind spots | Escaping your own blind spots; putting SWOT, STP, 7P and 7C into practice; judging trends and avoiding traps | About to start a business, or feel you're "doing a lot that doesn't work" |
| ② Operations, traffic and going digital | Turning content and know-how into digital assets; omnichannel; reading the conversion funnel and telling real data from noise | A brand with products and customers whose growth has stalled |
| ③ Teamwork and standardization with limited resources | Making the most of limited resources; working and communicating with your team; standardizing projects; balancing short-, mid- and long-term goals | An owner who has led a team for a while and wants the business to run without them |
Figure 3｜Suggested reading order by stage
Including this introduction there are 21 articles in total, each with a matching podcast episode that adds cases and details the articles don't have room for.
It's a series of 21 articles and podcast episodes (20 topics plus an introduction) by marketing strategy consultant Nicole Chen, covering 18 years of decision-making in e-commerce, branding and SME marketing in three parts: positioning and blind spots, operations and traffic, and teamwork and standardization.
Nicole sums them up as three: resource integration, resource allocation and cost control. In other words, deciding what to do, what to do first and what not to do with limited resources.
The knowing-doing gap is a concept introduced by Pfeffer and Sutton in 2000: organizations know what to do but don't do it. SMEs often mistake meetings and discussion for action, which is a common cause.
First-time founders, owners who have led a team for some time, and traditional businesses with decades of know-how that haven't gone digital yet.
Further reading
Not sure where you're stuck?
I won't tell you what to do. I'll tell you what you're missing.