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 chat.)
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
A strategy is a simple, flexible plan to use available resources to meet a specific goal.
In chess, a strategy takes the form of a simple statement, like advance your pieces or control the center of the board, in service of the goal of checkmating your opponent.
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.
Most corporate "strategies", though, have no bearing on this definition. They're rigid and hyper-specific, rooted in the present state, and disconnected from plausibility. They multiply and multiply, as people fail to use them and try to start over again.
Every strategy project needs to grapple with these three questions: What are our shared goals? And how can we marshal our resources towards them?
Setting Goals
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:
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.
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?
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.
Making Plans
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: make 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.
