Strategy, is All About Choice.
At SOCIALDEVIANT we obsess about strategy.So much so, that we've unbundled the word, and developed 4 discrete service offerings around strategy:
1. Business Strategy: product/service focus, growth strategy, 3 year plan, distribution and pricing
2. Brand Strategy: purpose, personality, tone/voice, VisId
3. Marketing Strategy: target analysis (priority targets, need states, etc), segments of growth/sources of volume, resource and spend allocations, intended impact/behaviors to measure success
4. Content Strategy: content types, platforms, cadence/frequency, organic vs. paid
Of course, these are not all encompassing summaries, but, in the main, we like to think about strategy in these 4 interrelated buckets.
And we have a few core thoughts that guide our work for clients:
Source of Volume: We obsess about the question, “How is the brand going to grow?”.
Drive incremental volume from current core?
Steal share from competitors?
Drive new category users?
Needs We Solve: We focus on defining true consumer need states, which can be both emotional (connection, joy, solace, meaning, reward) and functional (faster, better, cheaper). And, where possible, we prefer tapping into existing needs, vs. unmet needs. The latter is very cool when we can find it, but needs people know they have, that can be solved in a better more relevant way, are amazing creative fodder.
Mine for Benefits: We always work to translate product/service attributes into relevant benefits for the target audience. Why does it matter to you, and why should you care?
Reduction of Choice: Fundamentally, strategy is the reduction of choice. We force ourselves to pick a direction, then challenge it with more data and research to validate. Keeping all strategic options open, really isn't strategy at all.
Be Hypothesis-Driven / Have a Point of View: We avoid boiling the ocean to reduce both time and cost. As soon as we get a brief / challenge from a client, we take a beat, examine the landscape, and discuss our initial hypotheses. As Malcolm Gladwell said in his amazing book Blink, our immediate instincts are informed by all of our prior experiences. As seasoned brand marketers, we love to grok it around a bit, develop hypotheses, and THEN test them to accept/reject the hypotheses.
A Tight, POV-Driven Brief: Once we define a clear brand point of view and flag driven by all of the above, the creative briefs are tight and specific. We live by the famous words “Give me the freedom of a tight brief”. Because the more specific the brief is, the sharper, deeper, and more relevant and interesting the ideas become. That’s what drives success.
And that’s the whole point.