The five elements of strategic thinking

Slow down and organize our strategic thoughts with our five elements of strategic thinking, including the vision, investment in solidifying capabilities, focused opportunity, market impact, and performance result.

1. Set a vision of what you want: Set an aspirational stretch goal for the future. Your next move must be framed by your current situation and circumstances.?Ask questions to define the issues in the way of your vision.?
2. Invest in capabilities to deliver the strategy: Invest in strategic programs behind the brand’s core strength, build the consumer relationship, battle competitors on positioning, increase engagement or address situational opportunities.?
3. Focused accelerator to propel strategy: Focus your limited resources on a distinct opportunity you have identified based on a potential change in market dynamics such as consumer trends, influencer opinions, competitors, new technology or channels.
4. The market impact that creates a tipping point: Turn an early breakthrough win into a shift in momentum, positional power, or tipping point in the marketplace. Move consumers along their purchase journey, drive a brand’s reputation,?or tighten the bond with consumers.
5. Performance result that pays back: The shift in positional power moves toward the vision, drives business results, and creates a future pathway to a tighter consumer bond, brand power, and brand profitability.

This creates a flywheel with the vision anchoring the strategy you keep investing behind to keep fuelling more power and profit.?

A vision acts as a magnet to pull the organization towards your ideal future

A vision sets aspirational stretch goals for the future, linked to a clear result or purpose. It should steer everyone who works on the brand to focus on finding ways to create a bond with your consumers that will lead to power and profit beyond what the product alone could achieve.

Imagine it is five or 10 years from now and you wake up in the most fantastic mood. Visualize a perfect future and write down the most critical milestones you need to achieve. Even think about words that will inspire, lead, and steer your team towards your vision.

If the vision is too close to your current situation, it will have no impact. If the vision is considered too far from possibility, it will be no real pull.

The key issues define what is in the way of achieving your aspirations.?

Brands need to look at the gap between the current trajectory and the aspiring vision they have set.

We use interruptive questions that frame the issues regarding what is in the way of getting what you want to achieve. By raising those issues early on, you can focus the team on the significant problems that need to be solved on the pathway to the stated vision.??

A. Invest in building capabilities to deliver the brand strategy

invest your limited resources—money, people, time, partnerships—in strategic programs that will build the capabilities to help close the gap between your current projection and the aspirational vision. From a brand viewpoint, align your investment to reinforce the brand promise, communicate the brand story, close the deal?at the purchase moment, launch new product?innovation, or create an ideal consumer experience.?

These investments line up to deliver a brand’s consumer touchpoints so that you will tighten the bond with consumers. The result of the investment will be a?more powerful, faster-growing, and profitable brand.

1. Consumer Knowledge. Know your consumer better than your competitors know them. Focus on those who are most motivated by what you offer. Use?moments of accelerated needs, enemies, and insights. Leverage data to understand what it takes to move consumers along their purchase journey.???
2. Brand Promise. Build brand positioning around your brand’s core strength, whether you lead with the product, story, consumer experience, or price. Combine the ideal functional and emotional benefits to create a brand idea that is unique, simple, ownable, inspiring to employees, and motivating for consumers. Use the brand idea to organize everything you do.
3. Brand Communications. Use creative communications to capture attention, link to the brand, communicate the message and stick with consumers. Invest in media to attract, inform, close, service, and delight consumers when they are most open to moving along their purchase journey.??
4. Purchase moment. Use skilled salespeople to inform, close, and service consumers. Close gaps in regions, channels, and with important customers. Match your brand strategy to their business strategy. Optimize the customer’s tools to achieve a competitive advantage at the purchase moment.??
5. Innovation. Invest in continuous exploration of new products and services to stay fresh with consumers and differentiate your brand. Inspire ideas, test, and deliver product extensions, improvements, new formats, brand stretching, game-changing technology, and blue ocean exploration.?
6. Consumer Experience. Alignment of the brand story that creates consumer desire with your employees’ delivery of a consumer experience that exceeds the consumer’s expectation. Operations, sales, and innovation must work together, and each understands their specific role in bringing the brand idea to life.?
7. Operations strengths. Use operations to create a competitive advantage that beats competitors based on speed, flexibility, cost, and simplicity through the production process, ingredients, quality, sourcing, forecasting, supply, shipping, servicing, tracking, financial management, and measurement.?
8. Brand culture. An internal rallying cry that reflects your brand’s purpose, values, and motivations to inspire, challenge, and guide your people to provide their greatness on behalf of the brand. The quality of your people drives the success of your brand.

B. Who will you focus on and what accelerator is in the market that will propel your investment?

Focus your limited resources on a distinct opportunity you have identified based on a potential change in the market, including changes to consumers, competitive situations, technology, or sales channels.?

In today’s data-driven world, everyone has access to the equivalent information and in turn, can see the same opportunities. Use speed to seize the opportunity before others can take action and before that opportunity is gone. The best brand leaders never divide and conquer. They force themselves to focus and win.?

The smartest brand leaders use the word “or” more often than they use the word “and.”?If you come to a decision point, and you try to rationalize doing a little of both, you are not strategic. Force yourself to make choices.

C. Leverage the breakthrough market impact to create a tipping point

A smart strategy turns an early breakthrough win into a shift in momentum, positional power, or tipping point where you begin to achieve more in the marketplace than the resources you put in.

Many underestimate the need for an early win. I see this as a crucial breakthrough point where you start to look at a small shift in momentum toward your vision. While there will always be doubters to every strategy, the results of the early win provide compelling proof to show everyone the plan will work. You can change the minds of the doubters—or at least keep them quiet—so everyone can stay focused on the breakthrough point.?

The magic of strategy happens through leverage, where you can use the early win as an opening or a tipping point where you start to see a transformational power that allows you to make an impact and achieve results in the marketplace. A smart strategy should trigger the consumer to move along the buying journey from awareness to buying and onto loyalty, and it can help tighten the consumer’s bond with the brand.?

D. To be seen as an investment, explain the performance result that pays back, either driving power or profit

The shift in positional power in the marketplace moves your brand toward your vision and creates a future pathway to building a consumer bond, brand power, and brand profitability. A brand can become powerful compared to the consumers they serve, the competitors they battle, the channels they sell through, the suppliers who make the products or ingredients, the influencers in the market, any media choices, and the employees who work for the brand. We explored these eight sources of power in the opening chapter.?

You can drive profit through premium pricing, trading consumers up on price, finding a lower cost of goods, using lower sales and marketing costs, stealing competitive users, getting loyal users to use more, entering new markets or finding new uses for the brand. We explored these eight ways a brand can add to its profitability in the opening chapter. For a strategy to work, what pays off in the marketplace must pay off in brand power or business results.

The ideal structure for the vision, key issue, and strategy statement

Let’s now look at how to turn your smart strategic thinking into writing a strategic objective statement that can provide specific marching orders to everyone who works on the brand. The vision is the aspirational target five to ten years from now. The key issue looks at the gap between the aspiration and current projection and asks what is in the way. The strategy statement then answers the key issue.?

We want our process to cover all five elements of smart strategic thinking. Above, you can see the brand vision and key issue statement we came up with through our Strategic ThinkBox. This covers the first strategic element. Next, you need a strategy statement to cover the remaining four other strategic elements, including the program investment, focused opportunity, market impact, and the performance result.?

Here’s how that brand strategy statement includes all four remaining elements:?

A: Build capabilities to deliver the vision: The investment in capabilities to deliver the strategy whether building the brand promise, brand story, purchase moment, product innovation, and consumer experience. These crystal-clear marching orders to the team leave no room for doubt, confusion, or hesitation. In this example, the strategic program is to “Communicate Gray’s new “guilt-free” positioning.”?

B: Focused Accelerator: The breakthrough point where the brand will exert pressure to create a market impact. In this example, the focused opportunity is the “to a growing “proactive preventer” consumer who is new to the category.”?

D: Market impact: Achieves a specific desired market impact with a stakeholder you will attempt to move, whether it is consumers, sales channels, competitors, or influencers. In this example, the desired impact is to “attract and tempt them to try Gray's”?

D: Performance result: Drive a specific performance result linked to the market impact, either making the brand more powerful or more profitable. In this example, “resulting in a higher market share.”

Turn your thinking into brand strategy statements

Our unique strategic model will force you to pick answers to build a strategy statement with marching orders for those who follow your plan. As you build your brand plan, I recommend you use these four elements of smart strategy statements to ensure you structure and demonstrate your great thinking.

Writing your brand strategy statements

Here is a cheat sheet to help you write your brand strategy statements.

Start by investing in capabilities, whether that delivering the brand promise, brand story, purchase moment, product innovation, or consumer experience. And who will you target? Choose your focused opportunity. For the market impact, will you attract, inform, close, service, or delight consumers? What do you want them to do? For performance results, choose one of four ways to get more powerful or wealthier, by pushing penetration, frequency, pricing or entering new markets.??

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