Strategic thinking skills force you to look your brand’s core strength, the tightness of the bond you have with your consumers, the level of competitive rivalry, and the business situation your brand is facing. The reality is that you need to be a strong strategic thinker to go beyond the manager level. You will be held back if your ideas are not strategic enough. Yet in my 20 years of brand management, no one ever talked to me about what it means to be strategic or how being strategic shows up in the job. It always feels like judgment without explanation.
To illustrate, click on the diagram to zoom in.
Too many marketers are so busy they do not have time to think. The best marketers do the necessary critical strategic thinking to find ways to win in the market. Strategic thinking is essential, forcing marketers to ask big questions that challenge and focus brand decisions. I will push you to simplify how you look at strategy. Stop thinking of it as an intellectual exercise and be more street-smart to cascade it down throughout the organization. Everyone has to know their role in delivering that strategy.
When I ask senior leaders what it means to be strategic, the answers I get back are somewhat cliché. I hear “they see big picture” or “operating at 30,000 feet” or “playing chess instead of checkers.” These clichés don’t add value to the discussion. It suggests that strategic leaders don’t get stuck in the details, but why doesn’t it take details to think strategically? If senior leaders can’t explain the strategy, no wonder there is confusion.
Strategic Thinking
Strategy thinking is about making the choice in what to do and what not to do
Strategy thinking starts with a vision of an ideal state of what you want to achieve. Dig in to truly understand the circumstances and situation your brand faces. Slow down your brain to match the complexity of the issues that reside beneath the surface. Ask the right questions that uncover the issues in the way of you achieving your vision. What is happening in the market with consumers and competitors and your brand? Whether your project will take two years to complete or two days, or two hours, the smart strategic thinkers can visualize an ideal end state and know-how that helps their brand.
Naturally, your mind will spin with endless possibilities for what you want to do, but you can’t do everything you wish. Focus by limiting your choices to match up to the limited resources you can deploy. While your mind may not be limited, you are limited by the amount of money, people, time, and partnerships that are available to you. When you hear “you’re not strategic enough,” the person is saying that they like your ability to generate ideas but are concerned that you can’t limit yourself to those ideas, that you can’t or won’t stay focused.
Flawed leaders try to do too much, do everything, be everywhere, and say everything. If you try to be everything to anyone, you end up nothing to everyone. If you try to be on every channel or every shelf, you will have so little impact on any media channel or shelf that no one will see you. This is a business strategy, not just marketing. It is fundamentally sound to spend against the best choices you know will pay back, with both short and long-term options.
You are not strategic if you come to a set of options and choose to do both.
A little of both will always be worse than focusing on the best. Don’t spread your resources. If you do, you will deplete the power of the impact.
Narrow your choices down to what you see as an identified opportunity for your brand to win. Is there a changing dynamic that opens a door for you? Do you see a change in the marketplace with consumers or how they shop? Are there new competitors or the struggles of current competitors? Do you see changes due to political, economic, social, or technology change?
Sort through the possibilities to narrow in on choices that will have the most significant market impact. Your brand needs a breakthrough to create a tipping point that adds more power. Make sure your strategy moves consumers along their journey in ways that tighten their bond with your brand.
The market impact bounces back to create a performance result for the company, with a positional power that drives increased sales and added profitability. The best leaders can see the final result and envision what it does for the brand. With short-term options, a transactional approach drives profits now to ward off a competitive attack or take advantage of a short-term window. With longer-term options, you might gain the power now as stored energy for your brand to be used in the future to be unleashed at the right moment.
Our Strategic ThinkBox and Marketing PlayBox
Our Strategic ThinkBox and Marketing PlayBox
I am introducing you to my ThinkBox and PlayBox concepts, which I have borrowed from sports. To start, the ThinkBox forces you to consider everything you face and develop your shot strategy before taking the shot. Consider the ThinkBox as the strategic pause to clarify the problem before you play the shot.
For instance, in golf, you need to look at any lakes or sand bunkers in the way, the wind conditions, or how well you are playing that day, and then decide on your shot strategy. Then, as you move to a PlayBox during the execution, you must visualize the ideal shot, think and feel your way through the mechanics of your swing, and trust that you are making the right shot. Athletes must avoid overthinking the strategy during the execution.
When managing your brand, utilize our Strategic ThinkBox to gain a 360-degree view of the brand’s situation before taking action.
It forces you to examine four specific areas: your brand’s core strength, your bond with consumers, your brand’s competitive position, and your brand’s business situation. The four areas of the Strategic ThinkBox are designed to challenge and trigger new thinking and get you to debate with your team.
Once you have completed your thinking, use the Marketing PlayBox to keep your marketing execution focused on the target, fit with the brand, deliver the brand message, and execute the strategy.
The Marketing PlayBox allows you to use your instincts to find the best execution ideas and to think, feel, and trust your way through the execution. More on the Marketing PlayBox later in the execution section of this book.
The four questions in our Strategic ThinkBox
As I created the Strategic ThinkBox, I designed it so that each of the four questions uses a forced-choice format, where you must focus on one possible answer for each question.
- What is the core strength that will help your brand win?
- How tightly connected is your consumer to your brand?
- What is your current competitive position?
- What is the current business situation your brand faces?
Start with your brand’s core strength.
Think of your core strength as your brand’s superpower or secret sauce that separates you from other brands. Is it your product, brand story, consumer experience, or price? Your core strength steers your entire strategy, including the brand messages and the focus of your investment.
Next, you need to review your consumer strategy.
Start by determining where your brand currently stands on the brand love curve, whether it is unknown, indifferent, liked, loved, or at the beloved stage. The goal is to tighten the bond with your consumer and move them from one stage to the next.
Regarding the competitive strategy, you must choose from one of four competitive situations in which your brand operates.
The dominant leader in the category is the power players, who take a competitive defensive stance. Challenger brands have gained sufficient power to compete head-to-head with the market leader. Disruptor brands have found a space so distinct that they can draw consumers away from the significant category players. Craft brands aggressively target niche markets with niche consumer benefits. They are small and stay far away from the market leaders. Each competitive situation leads to different strategy choices.
A brand must examine its situational strategy, which begins with understanding its brand health by considering both internal and external factors.
Choose one of four potential situations: whether you keep the momentum going, face a business turnaround situation, realign everyone behind a strategy, or your brand is a start-up. Each situation leads to distinct strategies and leadership styles to deploy.
Examples of how our Strategic ThinkBox works
Coke
Coke’s core strength lies in its brand story, as told over the past hundred years. It links the Coke brand to the virtues of enjoying life, utilizing brand stories built around refreshing, happiness, and the real thing. Coke even invented our current visualization of the modern-day Santa. The brand has a long-standing and tight connection with consumers.
Even with recent sales declines, Coke remains a beloved brand with a loyal following of brand fans. Concerning the cola market, Coke remains the power player brand over Pepsi. However, Original Coke faces a complicated situation because the sugar version of the cola market is rapidly declining as consumers shift to healthier beverage alternatives.
Coke needs to realign and make some tough choices.
The original Coke is no longer the hero of the portfolio, with declining sales for the past few years. Their growth now comes from Coke Zero Sugar, Diet Coke, or other beverages that Coca-Cola now owns. I love Coke’s new advertising strategy, suggesting that “Coke Zero may be the best Coke ever,” making a competitive claim against itself.
Can Coca-Cola grow Coke Zero faster than the original Coke’s declines?
Coke Zero Sugar now uses the look and feel of the classic font of the original Coke and even advertises itself as “The best Coke ever.” The original Coke brand should face the reality of the decline and become the ultimate cash cow role. The combination products with coffee or alcohol brands can stretch out the sales runway, but the reality is that it will need a soft landing over the next 10 to 20 years.
Tide
Tide is a product-led brand that should continue pushing its “superior clean” message to consumers. That’s the main category benefit, but as the dominant power-player brand in the laundry category, they can use their power to own it. They have successfully neutralized competitive attacks regarding fresh scents, the secondary category benefit. On top of that, P&G uses the Gain brand as a flanker brand to own scent. This gives P&G two strong brands helping them to exert their power against competitors and retailers.
Tide has a strong bond with consumers, even though it is not the most outwardly emotional brand.
Tide has earned a long history of consumer trust. The 2018 Super Bowl’s “It must be a Tide ad” was remarkable. It is my first time wanting to see another Tide ad. Regarding current business situation, Tide needs to keep the momentum going.
The National Football League (NFL)
The NFL needs to step back and refuel the brand love to keep the consumer bond strong.
