Strategy isn’t SIMPLE
The consensus these days is that most brand strategies are too complicated.
Models are roundly ridiculed, whether they’re onions, keys or pyramids.
And jargon really gets it in the neck. Only assets and associations escape the flack.
The advice is always Keep It Simple Stupid.
But the catch is that brand strategy is hard. At least, I think it is.
Of course, there’s no surprise the strategy world is full of proprietary models and jargon. That’s because it’s full of strategists trying to differentiate themselves.
The people who argue most strongly for simplicity are invariably those selling training courses for strategists.
It’s popular now to reframe brand strategy as a series of questions to be answered, generally inspired by Simon Sinek’s Why-How-What.
That can play well with senior clients, who love being asked the big questions. But the assumption is often that the strategy answer lies within the organization itself. Classic inside-out thinking
The other big theme is that strategy is choice, which is true. It’s no use writing long lists of attributes, values and personality traits. You’re never going to get many of these into the minds of your target. If you’re lucky there’ll be space for two or three associations, with a similar number of assets to trigger them.
So you have to choose. Distill your brand down to its essence. That’s why I still use that word for what a brand stands for.
But how to get there?
Case studies can be useful. Mark Ritson’s current fave is good old KitKat. He shows a chart with four assets - the double-K logo, the red pantone, the four-finger product and the ‘Have a break, have a KitKat’ slogan, first used in 1958.
And at the top is a single association, KitKat’s belief that ‘breaks are good for you’.
Like all great examples, this makes it look oh-so-easy. I mean, what have the rest of us been doing these past sixty-six years?
But everyone’s been there, floundering around in a whirlpool of features and benefits and behaviours and needs.
And opinions, of course, Strategy isn’t just choice. It’s also bringing others along with you. No use being the only one who understands the positioning.
Some things help a lot. Trawling through past research, interrogating the product, studying the competition, interviewing key people, running team workshops, developing hypotheses, validating through qualitative research and yes, capturing the conclusion in a succinct, inspiring way.
But you have to accept this is a complex process. So what’s needed is a kind of complex simplicity.
Steve Jobs explained that concept like this: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”
See, told you ‘essence’ was a good word.
One last thing. It’s hard to come up with solutions to difficult problems in a step-by-step way.
So another take on complex simplicity is it’s the ability to go from A to Z in a single step. And you don’t know how you did it, but you just did.
Sometimes this happens in the briefing, other times as you’re finalising the final presentation. As long as there’s still time to work back through it, so you can explain how you got there.
Because the trick with any strategy is to make it sound simple.
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