Strategy Shouldn’t Suck
“I don’t like stuff that sucks” - Butt-Head
Strategy is all about making choices, and unfortunately, making choices is hard.
Cat or dog? Rent or own? Taylor or Beyonce? Green juice or donut? The list goes on forever. No one wants to make tough decisions, but these decisions guide your life just like they will guide your brand. So you need a strategy that communicates the critical choices you’ve made on behalf of your brand. Unfortunately, a lot of times these strategies end up not being the best they could be. Sometimes, candidly, they suck. They populate a slide perfectly but that’s where they stay. In my years in the brand game, I’ve observed that there are two primary reasons your strategy could suck:
1) The final product isn’t the BEST it could be. It was done, but not done well. It could be chock full of marketing buzzwords. It could have been developed with the wrong insights. It could be all about your brand and not about your customer. But, perhaps most importantly, your strategy doesn’t inspire ideas or cause people to take action. If your strategy just ends up sitting there in a slide deck and doesn’t become a blood-curdling rallying cry that builds full-fledged brand lunatics chomping at the bit to execute, then sorry, but that sucks.
2) The process of developing it wasn’t AWESOME. Sometimes a strategy can say all the right things and perfectly communicate your brand’s plan for categorical domination. You’re pleased with what it says and ultimately what it will do. But what you’re not happy about is how you got there. With a partner or process that you just didn’t enjoy. With workshops that didn’t make people think or laugh or lean forward. Your team deserves to be wildly engaged in the strategic process. If they aren’t, even if you got to a great place, then that sucks.
So that’s really all I have to say about. Now it’s time to get back to watching clips of Bevis and ButtHead that are quite a bit more violent than I recalled and hopefully never make it on to my kid’s playlists.
