Three simple questions for marketing success

The reason I ask is since I left big corporate nearly 4 years ago, I've worked with smaller businesses on their marketing strategies and the experience feels less of an intellectual exercise and more of a genuine desire to let insight guide their business decisions. When you have giant pots of cash to spend on strategy, and you involve high end international consultancy firms, they start throwing around terms like SWOT analysis, PEST analysis, Boston Grids, the Ansoff Matrix and good old Mazlow's hierarchy of needs.  All good tried and tested exercises, they've formed the foundation o...