Strategy

According to LinkedIn, there are 1,100,000 people with the word "Strategist" in their profile. I've worked with quite a few of them, and found that they produce a dizzying array of ideas, all too frequently taking the form of a forty-page PowerPoint document with a name like "Brand Definition Model". If you've ever read such a document and wondered, "Is this the strategy? What slide is the strategy on?", then boy are you in the right place. (If you currently have such a question, let’s talk.)

I’m gonna talk about what strategies are, how brands and consultancies use and misuse them, how to make one (and make it useful), and how I can help.

DEFINING STRATEGY

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DEFINING STRATEGY ~

An excellent place to start with any question of definition is the free encyclopedia:

A general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty [1].

I like to put it a little more simply:

A flexible plan to use available resources to meet a specific goal.

This definition is useful because it is general enough to encompass many of the ideas you likely associate with strategy, but gives them clarity and focus. At the end of the day, strategy work is not about agreeing on an idea, it’s about meeting a goal.

This definition also hints at why the role of the strategist can be so vast: defining a goal, gathering the information needed to form a plan, and undertaking the vast social enterprise of persuading others to follow that plan, are all part and parcel of creating and implementing a strategy.

The key questions behind an strategic project, then are: what is my goal? What resources are available to me? And how can I deploy them to meet it?

To give an example, a freelance brand strategist might have a goal of attracting more clients. At his disposal, he might have a deep understanding of complex branding topics, and a simple but dryly humorous writing style. His brand strategy might be:

Attract more clients by becoming known for engaging simplicity.

An important note is that strategies cascade. In this example, attract more clients is itself a sub-goal of something like make more money. Meanwhile, in considering his digital marketing strategy, our hypothetical brand strategy freelancer might use become known for engaging simplicity as the goal that his strategy supports, with something like by writing and promoting accessible educational content on owned and social media.

USING STRATEGY

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MISUSING STRATEGY

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USING STRATEGY ~ MISUSING STRATEGY ~

In an ideal world,

strategies are given to employees as tools. Digital marketers, sales teams, and product managers alike are united in a common end goal, and given specific plans to further that goal using the resources of their disciplines. In this utopia, brand strategies are distributed as reputational goals: marketers are told what talk to talk, and product managers, how better to walk it. When they work together, they’re naturally in unison because of their aligned purposes.

But we know how it really is.

Really, ‘strategies’ rarely contain a goal at all, much less a plan or set of tools and limitations. Most things called ‘strategy’ in companies today consist of a framework of vaguely-titled statements, either so vague or so over-engineered as to be meaningless. Far from an orderly cascade of corporate to brand to marketing strategies, each division reinvents its own wheel.

These documents land on teams’ desks out of the ether, and while some may mechanically paste the slide at the start of their decks with the headline ‘Strategy Recap,’ most will simply drag them into the recycle bin. Oftentimes, even the creators of the strategy aren’t really sure what it’s for, or how to decide if someone is following it or not.

Chaos reigns.

MAKING STRATEGY

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STRATEGIZING

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MAKING STRATEGY ~ STRATEGIZING ~

The key to strategy is simplicity. Complex goals require simple answers, but getting to those simple answers can be hard work.

Much of my own work hinges on crisply defining a worthy goal, a reputational goal that will help my clients sell more of their offerings. To find that goal, I apply three universal branding criteria to the findings of research and materials review:

Relevant

To drive choice among customers (or whatever audience action you might be looking to encourage), you need to be relevant to their motivations. What are their own goals, and what might help them meet them?

Authentic

If you want to be known for something, it had better be true, and lastingly, believably so. If it’s an overpromise today, customers will get whiplash or even feel betrayed. And if it changes in the future, you’ll have wasted your investment building a reputation for it.

Unique

Driving choice is a matter of making yourself look more attractive than the alternatives. To do that, you have to be different from the alternatives; claiming the same thing, or to be blandly ‘better’, won’t cut it.

For an example, let’s return to our plucky brand strategy freelancer, and his reputational goal of ‘engaging simplicity.’

Is he engagingly simple? He certainly thinks so, and his clients have said as much, at least when he’s around.

Do brand leaders and agency strategists want that? From what he’s seen, it’s vital—complex ideas fail to sink in, and dull ones fail to motivate, preventing strategies from achieving the change they need to.

And does that stand out? He thinks so: in a sea of strategists either steeped in the rigor but verbosity of the MBA world, or in the slapdash hurry of the creative world, it’s hard to find someone who can be simple, engaging, and also right.

Of course, finding an authentic, relevant, and unique reputation to work towards is only half the battle. The other half—the hard part, and the fun part—is getting people on board. With an authentic, relevant, and unique reputational goal established, you’ve got the foundation you need to persuade the people at your company to play their part in building that perception.

I follow a simple maxim in this pursuit: tools, not rules. When implementing a brand strategy (or making a derivative like brand architecture, brand voice, messaging strategy, or naming system), I think about what my audience wants to do, and how I can persuade them what I want them to do will align with that. How will building the right reputation improve a salesperson’s lead pipeline, or a product manager’s user satisfaction? How can you explain it in their language?

If you give a carpenter a hammer, you don’t need to forbid her from driving nails with a wrench anymore.

Setting Goals

Making Plans

Let's build together.

Building and implementing strategies is hard, but it’s fun. It’s how you get people moving, and make dreams real.

So, what are you dreaming of?