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Number
15: August 13, 2003
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This week in Katydid:
Marketers
Get out Your Chess Sets
The dot.bomb era left many casualties in its wake, but none more so than
language words such as leverage, power, virtual, and integrated have
become clichι or oxymoronic. No word has suffered more than strategy.
Many businesses offered strategic value, strategic thinking, or
strategic solutions that turned out to be best practices, operational
efficiencies, or just plain gimmicks. Now, few customers have any
interest in anything with that word attached.
Lest you think this is an American phenomenon, a recent
article from New Zealand describes similar pains.
As a writer, I believe words have power, and the right word used
properly has exquisite power. The problem is that in our hesitant
economy, we are rejecting precisely what we need most.
The word 'strategy' has suffered from overuse and misapplication, so
we need to start with its real meaning. It comes from the Greek root strategos
for a military general. By contrast, the root for tactics is taktikos,
which means arrangement. Therefore, a strategist directs plans, while a
tactician moves things around. (This leads to the notorious management
principle, always seek to define yourself as the former and everyone
else as the latter.)
But in the comfort of your office, with the door safely closed,
quietly ask yourself, "Am I directing or arranging?" because
the success of your company depends on it.
Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School defines strategy this
way:
"Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position,
involving a different set of activities. If there were only one ideal
position, there would be no need for strategy. Companies would face a
simple imperative win the race to discover and preempt it.
"What Is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, Volume
74, Number 6, pp 61-78
To be different, to be unique we understand the importance. It's
driven home by Seth Godin in Purple
Cow. I often hear it echoed by marketing directors, "We can't
be all things to all people."
Well, let me put it in the context I usually hear it, "I know
we can't be all things to all people, but
" promptly
followed by how they can't give up on some market segment that might
have ready cash. This is like saying, "I know smoking is bad for
me, but
"
To be different means you have to choose not to be many other
things like your competition for example. This is much the way a
chess player might let their queen be captured in order to set up their
bishop and knight for checkmate. Strategy means making sacrifices in
order to gain opportunity.
For marketers, it might mean that you choose not to cater to a
certain demographic, or to solve a certain problem in order to serve
another audience better. This is why market intelligence is so
important. You have to know who to go after. You have to know what they
value. You have to assess the strength of your competition. You are
reconnaissance the scouts.
This intelligence is what gives the CEO the confidence to employ a
strategy, and there are few things more inspiring to people than
leadership that makes a tough choice.
To understand the importance of strategy, consider again the military
origins of the word. What happens to troops when leaders change
strategies mid-battle? How successful will a campaign be if the troops
question the strategy of their leadership? The answer is that when the
pressure is high, people will panic, self-preservation will prevail as a
local strategy, and the enemy will pick them off one by one.
The biggest obstacle to taking action is the inertia. It's easy to
look around the office and feel powerless even if you're the CEO.
You can avoid this by developing true strategies. Arm yourself with
information on your market, analyze which position will give you a
unique advantage, develop a plan to claim that position, and then rally
everyone behind the strategy.
I know this will work because, if you do those things, you will have
developed a compelling story. And a great story trumps an efficiency
report every time.
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How
to Be Strategic
Editing is great strategic training. You constantly have to make
sacrifices in order to improve understanding. That can mean cutting
volumes of words, and even scrapping everything and starting over. For a
writer, each word, each sentence is a choice that automatically excludes
other choices. Once you write, "Zak picked up his laser
rifle," you can't be writing a western (at least not a traditional
one).
As a consultant, I'm often in the position of helping people make
tough choices. Because digital marketing is highly targeted, it can be
compelling to focus on every audience one e-mail campaign at a time. So,
"All things to all people" becomes, "This thing to this
person, another thing to another person, etc." For example,
"We have no-frills flights for people on a tight budget," and
"Our business-class seats have extra leg room."
You can still target potential customers but it's better to deliver
your consistent strategic positioning (there I said it) in terms that
make sense to various segments. For example, "Our no-frills flights
save business travelers thousands every year," and "Our
no-frills flights make it easy for families to get together more
often."
If your organization still bristles at the word, 'strategic' then
consider calling it something else i.e. making sacrifices to
increase market share, or, simply, planning ahead.
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Campaign
Tracking Gets Easier
I've been encouraging companies to track their campaigns since
there have been web sites. At Hotwire
Interactive, we developed a white
paper on the subject. Some companies defined their entire strategies
around it. Usually, the struggle wasn't about what to do, but how to do
it.
One of the difficulties facing marketers when they want to track
campaigns is that their web sites aren't set up for it. The IT
department may not have the budget or the time to develop a solution.
For some marketers there may not be an IT department at all.
Now, there's an easy way to track campaigns that requires only a few
lines of code and lets you track a practically unlimited variety of
campaigns with simple URLs. Digital
Dogs, a company with which I've had a long alliance, recently
published a white
paper outlining the technique. It's a clever trick and seamless to
the end user. Most importantly, it quickly puts more vital information
into your hands.
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Thanks for Reading
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Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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