Everyone wants to deliver marketing strategies that succeed, yet to many coming up with marketing strategies is either a daunting prospect, or an irrelevance as they jump straight into execution. Effective strategy development is a precursor to great marketing. Without strategic consideration, marketing activities are ill-guided, ill-conceived, and ill-equipped to bring about the necessary shifts in consumer beliefs and behaviours required to drive growth in today's hyper-dynamic and competitive environments. Strategy, however, isn't an up-front, laboured process done by executives in an ivory tower. It's an ongoing, iterative process that uses insights, experimentation, and feedback loops to guide and hone thinking and deliver strategies that are more relevant and attuned to audiences with ever increasing demands.

In this post I'll cover:

You look at stats like the ones above – and there are many more – and you can’t help but come to the conclusion that devising strategies has become a lost art. Too often we forget strategies altogether and jump straight into the doing, into executing tactics, without due consideration of really what activities we should be focussing on and, fundamentally, why?

We’ve become so busy getting to grips with all the new tactical elements – distribution channels and platforms, content formats, technology, automation, etc – that they’ve become all that matters for marketers. Developing upfront strategy has either been neglected, ignored, or forgotten completely.

The old adage is “I’d rather have a good strategy and great execution than vice versa.” Yet the former begets the latter. Great strategy creates the conditions for successful implementation. People need to know what they have to do differently, understand how and why they should do it, and have the necessary resources in place to make it happen.

Strategy connects today with the future state that we’re looking to achieve, our goals. When we invest the time and effort to develop more thoughtful and thorough strategies, we not only increase the odds of building a winning marketing program, but also a focus, simplicity, and conviction to get things done.

A strategy is the approach you take to achieve a goal. It defines the methods that you’ll apply to achieve success, to ‘win’ in the context of your overall aim.

Strategies are long-term. They are the course that you’ll take over the duration to get to where you want to be. They can adjust to accommodate environmental changes, but they always point to how you’ll get to your ultimate goal.

Your strategies are the pillars around which your marketing plan will be created.

Many people (and businesses) get confused between strategies and tactics, and how they differ. As I highlight above, many dive straight into tactical execution, and eschew strategy. Yet tactics are the manifestation of your strategy; they are the activities that you implement to deliver your strategies in the pursuit of your marketing goals. Without considering your strategy upfront, your tactics will be ill-guided at best, and irrelevant at worst.

Strategies are the methods chosen to bring about the achievement of your marketing goals, whilst tactics are the means by which those strategies are carried out to move from one milestone to another towards those goals. By definition, strategies are directing and leading, whilst tactics are the organising and implementation of your activities. Strategies are structural versus tactics that are operational.

Strategies explain the what and why; tactics are the who and how. Strategies outline how you’ll marshal your resources for their most efficient and effective use; whilst tactics are the execution of those resources.

This forms a logical progression that we can use to formulate our marketing strategies:

People make strategy much harder than it needs to be.

In today’s always-on, fast-changing environment, the pressure is unrelenting. As a result, two-thirds of 200 executives surveyed by McKinsey reported that they felt rushed to provide outputs from their strategic-planning processes. This was especially the case in scenarios where it wasn’t immediately obvious what factors would determine the success or failure of a strategic change. Too often, what passes for strategy development consists of hurried efforts to deliver results that skip one or more essential building blocks; resulting in flawed strategies from the start.

It’s also easy, though, to go too far in the other direction and make the creation of strategy a rigid, box-checking exercise. A formula-driven approach might be appealing, but the reality is that strategic development is a non-linear, iterative, and often messy process. The cascade structure outlined above should therefore be thought of as a framework where you jump back and forth from one box to another, rather than a rigid progression.

Effective strategy relies on messy thinking. It is born of a curiosity that’s woefully lacking in most strategic-planning processes. McKinsey further found that nearly eight in ten executives said that the processes of their companies were more geared to confirming existing hypotheses than to testing new ones. There is an inherent cultural and hierarchical inertia in organisations that throttles back strategic advancement. Formulating good strategies involves revisiting fundamental and deeply held beliefs. Getting executives to grapple with and break these can become very personal as people tend not to shift their views without a fight. This creates tensions and frictions that are often eschewed by leadership; yet these frictions are essential to make better strategic decisions. Constructive grappling and debate are the cornerstones for creating progressive strategies that move the needle, and to avoid ending up rubber-stamping flawed strategies that become exposed when implemented, or afterwards by your competitors.

These incumbent beliefs also create biases that lead to overconfidence in strategic planning resulting in inadequate diligence in confirming and challenging assumptions. Getting teams to engage, debate, and constructively collaborate on strategic development thereby leads to more rigorous deliberation, less biased decisions, and broader buy-in from stakeholders; which in turn reduces the time spent on politicking and building alliances, whilst increasing the focus on the strategy itself.

Strategy implementation should be an iterative process. Traditional strategic planning processes are ill-equipped to deal with the dynamism and pace of change in today’s consumers, markets, and businesses. Creating strategy in today’s environment of complexity, ever-changing priorities, and conflicting agendas requires constant monitoring and feedback loops to create winning strategies that will beat the market.

While it may seem daunting, iterating actually makes strategy easier. It saves time spent doing excessive analysis, “big thinking”, and visioning, and allows strategy to be crafted in relatively small, manageable chunks that can be tested and honed. By answering the five cascade questions through iteration - going back and forth to test your thinking and assumptions - it will ultimately give you a better strategy with much less pain and wasted time.

Let me know what techniques you're using for devising strategies, and how they're working for you?