Strategy Matters

All too often, we talk to a company that has goals and tactics, but no strategy. And the correlation with failure is virtually 100%.

Granted, they wouldn't be talking to us if things were going well. But at some point you have to ask, Is this a case of "Killing turkeys causes winter," or is there some causation going on?

Over the past 25 years, we've found that the most successful campaigns are ones where we've followed the GOSTAM model: goals, objectives, strategy, tactics, activities and monitoring. And that means clearly differentiating between strategy and tactics. So what's the difference?

In brief, strategy provides an overarching intellectual framework for achieving objectives, where you take into account competition and environmental factors, while tactics are the things you do to make it happen. But that's easier said than done. After all, what makes something an overarching intellectual framework that isn't just some re-hash of goals and objectives, or the sum of a bunch of tactics?

The first answer is that strategies are independent of your particular product or market. They exist as classes of moves that can be applied to a variety of situations. For example, Market Development is a strategy. And Market Penetration is a different strategy. And there are many others that aren't quite so high level, like Substitution, Competitive Displacement, Front and Back, End-Around, Value-Add, Price Wars and more. But they all exist as formal frameworks for marketing and sales, and they all contain dozens of potential tactics and combinations thereof.

The second answer is that, for something to be a strategy, it has to also be independent of tactics. That is, if you're talking about email as a strategy, you're already off on the wrong foot. You first need to think about what it is that you're trying to achieve, within some objective, before you home in on the tool you're going to use to achieve it. And you need to think a lot about it. And write it down. Challenge it. Elaborate on it. And test it against results every day.

This brings us back to the idea of a framework. In a sense, "strategy" asks the question: What are things you need to achieve in marketing and sales that aren't either "creating awareness" (for marketing) or "closing" (for sales)? Because you know those aren't enough - otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.

Here's our framework.