Strategy Tragedy

Let’s do a little experiment. See if you can read the following text and NOT have a visceral reaction. Think of it as a text version of a YouTube try not to laugh video. Try not to eye-roll. Ready???

Marketers must be storytellers.?

I’ll let your vision stabilize for a sec…Ok, good, welcome back. I know what you’re thinking; I couldn’t possibly be attempting to ride the tired, cringeworthy marketers-as-storytellers theme? Not exactly.

We’re in the thick of marketing strategy season. Most marketing leaders are tackling the epic annual challenge of aligning to business priorities and working through talent, technology, and budgets while navigating Game of Thrones-worthy organizational dynamics. It’s a high-stakes, high-intensity time of year. The most common artifact of all the organizational effort and angst is the marketing strategy document. I review a lot of these documents in my work with CMOs and have come up with a few common document types:

• The monstrous behemoth - These massive tomes begin with the planet's origins and work to the modern day. The thinking behind these documents seems to be that what we lack in strategy, we’ll make up in volume.?
• The laundry list - A cousin to the behemoth, these strategy documents are, in reality, operations plans featuring every tactical detail for every program from every corner of the organization. These documents seem designed to impress others with marketing busyness.??
• The WTF - A non-sensical amalgam of factoids, jargon, useless frameworks, and cliches. These documents have a Dilbert on hallucinogenics vibe. Sometimes entertaining, always confusing.?
• The templateer - Some organizations force every function to use the same one-size-fits-none templates. The resulting documents are unsurprisingly generic and usually devoid of context and strategy. If it works for procurement, it should be perfect for marketing.????
• The agency helped us - The beautiful people of strategy documents. Great photography, brilliant graphics, and frequently a not very thinly-veiled sales pitch for agency services.?
• Excel-lent strategy - The CFO favorite, these strategy-by-spreadsheet documents tend to be more forecasts and revenue models than anything that could be considered strategic.???

Of course, I also have an opportunity to see plenty of thoughtful, intelligent, well-crafted marketing strategy documents. Here’s a far from exhaustive list of common patterns in effective marketing strategy documents:?

Anchor to business priorities - The best marketing strategy documents are explicitly, almost obnoxiously, rooted in the three to five core overall business priorities. FWIW, in my experience, there’s a clear correlation between the influence and impact of a CMO and the congruence of marketing to core business priorities.???

Articulate the marketing problems to be solved - Building on business priorities, the best strategy documents detail the related marketing problems to be solved, laying the groundwork for the subsequent overview of initiatives. Most core business priorities involve multiple functions. It’s a huge mistake to assume that even an astute audience will connect the dots on what marketing needs to do to support a given priority.?

Communicate strategy, not tactics - This is a tricky one. Of course, at some point in the strategy document, there needs to be some level of detail on programs and initiatives. But between the problem and the activity is the approach, the strategy, and the consideration of different styles of solving the problem. Enter a new market fast and hot or slow and stealthy? Lean hard on a quality or price narrative? Go directly at a competitor or de-position them in a more subtle manner? This is essential context that can bring an otherwise dry strategy document to life.?

Always include the asks - Every strategy document is a sales document. As a CMO, you’re addressing a business problem, proposing a set of thoughtfully considered solutions that require approval and often additional resources. Never forget to go for the close and be explicit about what you need.??

Your strategy story shouldn’t be complicated. Show you’re focused on core business priorities, identify and communicate the related marketing problems to be solved and provide some meaningful context on why you’ve chosen to propose your selected approach. By the time you get to the ask, it should be almost painfully obvious why you need whatever you’re requesting

A good story respects its audience, starts strong, builds through interesting and meaningful context, and finishes with a compelling crystalization of everything shared along the way. Give your marketing strategy story the delivery it deserves. Strategy-teller feels a little clunky, we’ll have to work on a better name.??