Cover Your Basics: Defining Strategy
Knowing what strategy isn’t is just as important as knowing what strategy is when it comes to building a brand.
As we continue to confront the challenges that come with establishing, growing, and developing impactful brands, we’re consistently in the market for an effective strategy to help us do so successfully. More often than not, however, our desperation for a magic bullet solution to these challenges leads us to settle for facades that mask themselves as an effective strategy but in reality, are far from it. We’re told to be more ambitious, to have a clear vision, and to “throw things at the wall because something has to stick, and when it does!” we’ll be set up for failure because with all that effort we never implemented a strategy. Whether it’s brandishing a new mission statement, making a fancy new list of goals, or tasking others around us, we mistake these actions for effective strategies and then blame the market, the platform, or worse, the customer for less than desired returns on our efforts.
Defining Strategy
“In reality strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” Jack Welch
Unfortunately, we’ve all encountered a form of this definition of strategy throughout our professional careers. The common misconception surrounding strategy because of this approach is that it’s as simple as identifying a direction and running towards it. In reality, the best strategies are less about a target destination as much as they are a direct response to a specific challenge. Better put, an effective strategy is a set of coordinating actions focused on addressing a specific challenge. What’s not a strategy at all is a vague depiction of the desired outcome or a list of action items with no cause to measure their effectiveness. It’s more than just identifying the how, a strategy, especially an effective one, addresses the who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Avoiding the tasking and goal-setting trap.
One of the main facades that fool us all into believing it’s an effective strategy is tasking and goal-setting. One reason is that it’s the easiest thing to do when you’re confronted with a challenge. You rely on your emotions, a knee-jerk response, and then you begin identifying where you would rather be in your business than where you are now. You begin feeling better, feeling like you overcame that challenge because you’ve clearly identified what you desire instead. These very same feelings convince us we now have a clear path ahead and unfortunately all we did was create a highlight reel of our time playing make-believe. Is there value in identifying the desired outcome, absolutely, however that is no substitute for an effective strategy to address the challenge at hand. Too many businesses and brands fall into this trap and have all the goals to show with no policy or actions to back them up. Simply putting forward fantasies surrounded by big words and a mission statement won’t pass as an effective strategy and it definitely won’t solve the challenge they’re meant to address.
Why does a Mission Statement miss the point?
A personal mission statement becomes the DNA for every other decision we make. — Stephen Covey
One of the best ways to not get caught using your mission statement in place of an effective strategy is to remember what a mission statement is. Your mission statement defines your rules of engagement as a business and a brand, providing all those who read it with the intentions behind every action put forth (ideally). The problem with substituting this with an effective strategy is that your focus is too macro to have a clear challenge to address. Take for example the influencer looking to scale their audience growth and build their following on a different platform. Simply defining what their brand is about or what makes them unique is not going to help them solve the challenges that come with migrating an established audience, coherently connecting content between platforms, or creating the content that performs best on the new platform. The purpose of an effective strategy is to respond to very clearly identified challenges, a mission statement simply presents a set of values that address a reason for existing.
As more information gets shared across the internet and more ways to define things rise up, it’s important to also become very clear on what things are not. Ambiguity and vague descriptions only handicap us as we continue moving forward. Strategy, especially effective ones, often go unclaimed and unfounded because they’re replaced by imposters that come in when we’re most desperate for a solution. A strategy is not a mission statement. A strategy is not a list of goals and desired outcomes. A strategy is not a combination of the two in the hopes of establishing one. A strategy is a set of coordinating actions focused on addressing a specific challenge. The more clearly we’re able to distinguish what a strategy is from what a strategy isn’t, the easier it becomes to create the ones we need and reap the rewards from our diligence.
