While the term strategy is invoked routinely in marketing plans, in truth, actual strategy is often missing, misapplied, or simply misunderstood. Here we clear the air on building the right foundation to think and plan, guided by strategies that drive your unique brand purpose and mission.
It will be the difference maker in securing more successful business outcomes!
To begin, set your ambitions at a high level, striving to create the brand standard that other companies benchmark against.
- The brand consumers talk about
- The well-known innovator
- The one referenced in best practice case studies
However, in the absence of a strong strategic platform, a business will inevitably drift, often due to a near constant state of uncertainty because all marketing “bets” are regularly hedged. Competition is fierce and without a real strategic compass, companies usually relegate themselves to pursuing what they already know – tactics. Often including endless rounds of profit sapping price promotion to meet volume targets. Tactics can masquerade as strategies.
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Thus, tactically driven brands…
- End up living with brand positioning confusion
- Struggle to stand out, resulting in higher levels of media spend
- Realize uninspiring profit margins
- Users that aren’t all that invested in the brand value proposition
- Hence switching on deal is rampant as adjacent brands are seen as interchangeable
It’s all too common – authentic strategy creation will consistently demand more of us.
What Is Sound Strategy?
Strategy describes what you do differently. It is instruction and a guide intended to separate and elevate your business, ideally within a new category you’ve created while authoring your own rules to govern relevant brand and category behavior.
You’ll recognize sound strategy because it –
- Enables bravery
- Commands an emotional response
- Delivers clarity and passion
- It is grounded in a sense of conviction
- Focuses on where you are going and builds from your brand “why”
- Provides hard evidence of how you are different
- Informs every action you take and decision you make
Higher Purpose And Mission Can Help Clear A Path To Real Differentiation
We are advocates of deeper brand meaning, values and purpose, for the very reason it provides a solid, bank-able roadmap to improved strategy. After all, what is business but a system designed to deliver value. To increase the value you collect, you increase the value you give. It must be a unique value that consumers aren’t getting from anywhere else.
Our preferred role as strategic guide and coach can help you define or refine what that “why” is while pushing outward on the edges of (radical) differentiation. Strategy is creating “different” in response to your systemic and always present enemy — sameness.
Let’s dispel the myths that often surround the definition of sound strategy…
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Myth #1: Strategy Is (Never) About Being Better Than Brand X
In truth brands with a strong strategic foundation operate differently because…
They don’t compete.
They don’t compare.
They don’t define their bona fides against another brand’s offering.
You shouldn’t pursue the same customers with a similar product and a similar story, which is a recipe for declining profit over time due to the growing pressures of commoditization. As we’ve said, better strategy is about creating difference. Better isn’t different. Better is the same, “but we try harder.” This is not a sustainable model and creates a slippery slope to comparisons and, yes, similarity. Instead, your goal is to provide value that competing brands don’t or won’t offer.
Myth #2: Sound Strategy Must Be Complicated, Sophisticated And Data Driven
Strategy is NOT a cold-blooded scientific download.
Some believe the path to improved strategy is served through dense technical analysis in an attempt to “manufacture” rightness. Great strategy is steeped in meaning, passion and conviction. This is the fuel that pushes great brands to go further, harder, deeper and braver than others. Their unrelenting goal: always over-deliver on your core brand promise.
Myth #3: Strategy Is Lurking In Improved Marketing Communication
There’s a tendency in the marketing field to conflate strategy with messaging, tag lines and ads. Strategy isn’t just a message. Rather it’s guidance and a statement of what the business does differently, why and how. Communicating a similar offering more creatively isn’t a lasting proposition and will force media spending levels upward to maintain baseline awareness over time.
On the other hand, “different with a strong why” is naturally alluring, captivating and automatically attractive.
- A great strategic platform will inspire meaning, belief, membership and advocacy. In the end it is a blueprint for how the business operates top to bottom – springing from your “why” – founded in deeper meaning and differentiation. This will help you better define the right product mix and inform a powerful and compelling brand narrative.
Data Graphs Can’t Replace Imagination
Strong strategic ideas are more like life in general; they reward boldness and distinctive concepts over reductive reasoning. Here’s a connect the dots moment: ultimately, people are the consumers of your strategic concept. Just remember all humans are irrational. Our decisions are never made based on consideration of analytical, fact-based arguments.
That’s why you want to pursue a strategy that gets your heart racing. It will impact what you do, how you organize the business while informing communication that engages and inspires others to join you on the adventure. If your approach seems sensible, it’s probably wrong.
You Are Looking For The Unique Value Only You Can Deliver.
The Path To Sound Strategy
Asking better questions leads to improved thinking about strategy and its cousin, brand mission.
Here are ten examples we use in planning:
- What do you stand for?
- How relevant and differentiating is it?
- How compelling and credible is it?
- What promise are you making?
- Do you have the right products to deliver on that promise?
- How are they positioned to deliver on your promise?
- Are corporate goals and objectives aligned with the mission?
- How does this impact your most important sources of business growth?
- Based on this, who are your most valuable customers?
- What should customers believe to help you achieve your goals?
Here’s a way to visualize it:
The strategic game plan has shifted completely from command and control (persuasion around overt feature/benefit selling) to the Relationship Era.
Consumers are your strategic compass:
Because the world and culture has changed, the consumer relationship with brands they care about is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to another person.
Here’s The Magic…
Relationships built on trust create the amazing opportunity for transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” your brand as members, not merely users. Knowing this we have a responsibility to push added meaning, trust and belief to the forefront of the brand-to-consumer relationship. This is the foundation on which improved strategy is built.
Consider The Value Only You Can Offer, Then Go Large:
Sound strategy doesn’t ask questions, it answers them. Your ability to define difference springs from a refined sense of your mission that pushes your value proposition in new directions. Audacious goals and ambitions inhabit sound strategy. Our best advice overall: think big. It should make you feel a little uncomfortable.
Guidance On Crafting A Strong Strategy Statement:
While the real work resides in determining what your brand will be and become, there is a template you can use to craft a strategy statement that will anchor your work on the right trajectory. This approach helps you ask the right questions, so you’re better equipped to determine the right answers.
Strategy statement Ingredients:
- We are the only (your company type that exclusively provides something of value)
- Who offer (something people want but can’t get from anyone else. Your entire business exists in fulfillment of this promise)
- By doing (the hard facts and evidence of a differentiating product/service/capability that will enable the promises you have made)
Use this template to help center your thinking on what your brand should become that is unique, different and own-able.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education
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