Strategy

Most brands do not have an idea problem. They have a sequencing problem: the positioning was argued in a meeting, the pricing was copied from a competitor, and the launch date was set before anyone had looked at who was actually buying.

Strategy is the work of putting those three decisions in the right order, and being able to say why.

What this actually involves

We start where the evidence is, not where the opinion is. That means reading the category properly, understanding who the buyer really is — which is often not who the brand assumes — and being honest about what the competition is doing better.

From there it is a series of decisions: what this brand is for, who it is not for, what it should charge, where it should be sold, and what has to be true for the numbers to work. Each one is defensible on its own and they have to be defensible together.

The output is a roadmap with milestones, a budget that reflects it, and a set of measures that tell you whether it is working. Not a deck that gets admired and filed.

Where it goes wrong

The common failure is treating strategy as a separate phase that happens before the real work. In practice the market research that should have shaped the brand idea gets commissioned six weeks after the identity is signed off, and the two discover they disagree.

We would rather be involved early and be wrong cheaply than be brought in late to justify a decision that was already made.

deliverables:

• title: Market & category research text: Category structure, demand drivers and where the category is actually growing. icon: ri:search-eye-line
• title: Consumer personas text: Built from what people say and do, not from what the brand assumes about them. icon: ri:user-search-line
• title: Competitive landscape text: Who the real alternatives are, including the ones nobody is tracking. icon: ri:bar-chart-box-line
• title: Business planning & modelling text: Revenue, cost and scenario modelling that survives contact with a retailer. icon: ri:file-chart-line
• title: Go-to-market strategy text: The route to market, chosen rather than inherited, with the trade-offs named. icon: ri:route-line
• title: Product & launch roadmaps text: Sequenced milestones with the dependencies between them made explicit. icon: ri:road-map-line
• title: Pricing & channel strategy text: Price architecture and channel mix that hold together across markets. icon: ri:price-tag-3-line

process:

• title: Diagnose text: Read the category, the numbers and the existing brand equity before proposing anything.
• title: Define text: Agree the position, the audience and the commercial ambition in one document.
• title: Model text: Build the business case and stress it against the scenarios that would hurt.
• title: Plan text: Turn the position into a sequenced roadmap with owners, budgets and measures.

outcomes:

• title: A position the whole business can repeat metric: One agreed sentence
• title: A roadmap that survives a change of plan metric: Milestones, not intentions
• title: Fewer expensive surprises metric: Risks named before they are costs

faqs:

• q: How is this different from the brand work? a: >- Strategy decides what the brand should be for and whether the numbers work. Brand work decides how it looks and sounds. They are run together here because a position nobody can express is not a position.
• q: What do you need from us to start? a: >- Access to whoever made the original decisions, the sales or export figures if they exist, and honesty about which parts of the current plan are already fixed. That last one saves more time than anything else.
• q: How long does a strategy engagement take? a: >- Typically six to ten weeks for a market entry, depending on how much primary research the category needs. A retainer covers the ongoing version of the same work.