by Bogosi Motshegwa (@Thinkerneur) Gone are the days when a strategist’s role was to meander through hundreds of slides, only to land on ‘positioning’ or ‘the strategic platform’ and to be criticised over a typo in the positioning statement or, worst-case scenario, to be told that what’s been presented isn’t a strategy. (The audacity — but that’s a story for another day.)
Not about the last slide
There’s more to strategy than just holding your breath until the last slide is presented. It’s disheartening that all that creatives care about is that three-to-four-word phrase that’s meant to encapsulate and capture the essence of the other 20-30 slides.
This approach used to work for a long time — and it still does — but, in today’s world, positioning statements and strategic platforms alone no longer cut it. I view this as a shortcut and a somewhat lazy approach to what strategy should be.
I use “lazy” and “shortcut” cautiously as a lot of work goes into strategic thinking or planning. We probe, we test, we put together, we pull apart, and we flip inside out in order to get to a rich, and hopefully uncharted, territory that may be the catalyst for compelling great work which pushes brand-building forward.
Defining & designing
Strategy today is about defining future business and designing future human behaviour. For businesses to thrive today, they need to plan for the future, as strategy isn’t and shouldn’t be about reacting to market conditions but instead shaping them. That’s what being a true market leader is: not having the bigger share of the market but rather a bigger share of the future.
While strategic platforms or positioning statements do have a role to play, that has shrunk and therefore a need for thinking and planning for future impact has become paramount.
I believe that any strategy presentation that truly has the business’s best interest at heart should at least initiate a conversation towards designing a brand narrative based on the future; the best way to do that is to ask: “What does the future brand ‘x’ look like?”
And the future is not 2–3 years from now; it’s 10–30 years from now. Gone are the days when we planned for the former. We need to think deeper and establish conversations that aren’t predicated on what’s happening but rather what could, and what should, happen.
Strategists’ role
Strategists are meant to shape and drive the future. As a strategist, you need to have conversations beyond ‘messaging’, and start engaging clients and internal people around possibilities and what lies ahead.
Strategists are underused in ad agencies. It isn’t surprising to see consultancy firms entering our territory with more authority and credibility, and that’s because they’re having completely different conversations with our clients. While agencies are obsessed with awards, consultancies are toiling with the concept of rewards for business.
Perhaps instead of doing competitor reviews, we should be doing ‘future reviews’. This would be a fundamental shift in mindset because what it means is that, instead of concentrating on what our competitors have done in the past, we now focus our energy and zone in on what we should be doing in the future.
We’ll never arrive where we never planned to go. Even if we arrive there, we won’t know that we are there because it was never conceived in our minds.
Bogosi Motshegwa (@Thinkerneur) truly believes that advertising can really change the world. He believes that brands, marketers and ad agencies can do even better branding building and advertising. He shares his thoughts on the industry and sometimes has unconventional views. A former committee member of AMASA, an Advisory Council member, a guest speaker and lecturer at Vega, Rosebank College and Red & Yellow, he also does speaker management at TEDxJohannesburg. He is currently a freelance strategist and has founded Thinkerneur, a brand consultancy firm, and is also the co-founder of Melanoid Éclat (for finding black entrepreneurs). He contributes the monthly column, “Adnalysis”, which analyses adland from a strategist’s point of view, to MarkLives.com.
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A strategist’s role is to set out a plan to reach an objective. Sometimes that plan is based in comms, sometimes it’s based in positioning, and sometimes it’s based on platforms and tactics.
There has never been an expectation to trawl through hundreds of slides, there’s an expectation to tell the story of how you reached your conclusion. And you should tell it well. And telling it well could be 1 page, it could be 1 image.
We need to use tolls to get there, and sometimes those include competitor reviews (the ones where we test thinking and ask critical questions).
Don’t forget the purpose of the work, otherwise you’ll get stuck in the process & minutia of how to get there.
I’m not disputing the challenged role of strat in agencies – but I will dispute the fact that we have been bound by specific expectations and rules around what we do.
Well said, Marc – absolutely agree with you. I guess the POV that I’m coming from is based on the role of strategy inside ad agencies. The innate role is bigger than just comms and positioning. I agree with Mark below that the role of a strategist is bigger, but unfortunately it is stifled by the ad agency model.
I’ve tried to do strategy work that will enable the agency and brand to reach business objectives, but the solutions was not in conformity to how agencies make their money, therefore, by default, my solution was discarded. That unfortunately, meant that my thinking was meant to be bound by certain expectations and rules, meaning that my solution needed to lead to a TVC idea or execution.
Problem is, agencies aren’t prepared to employ strategists with the capabilities to do what you are saying as they aren’t prepared to pay what’s required to a large degree.
Strategists are bound by the roles and responsibilities that agencies allow them to have … and by that I mean tell us what competitors are doing, help us sell creative work to client that doesn’t match the strategic positioning or communication strategy and plan.
Strategy has such a greater role to play … thing is, in it’s current guise, it is unable to really provide it.
Good day, Mark!
I totally agree with you. It is sad, because you are right, strategy does have a bigger role to play, but it is unfortunately left to play second fiddle to creative output.
We’ve launched a strategy association called, South African Strategy Association, part of the objective and mission is to empower strategists with tools that will help them (I mean us – me included) become better planners of the future, thereby being able to provide solutions beyond ‘creative rationale’.