I've officially been a 'strategist' for ten months now. It hasn't greatly differed from when I had a different title and practiced 'strategy' in previous roles. But, given it's my formal bag now, I thought I'd jot down some observations on the year -- probably mostly for me, but I'd hope it prompts a bit of discussion amongst people doing similar things.
- Strategy, and more so, strategist, is an awfully non-committal word. This is probably the fundamental reason for the cynicism towards the discipline, and you can sympathise with that. 'Creative' is now tolerated as a proper noun - by most - but that hasn't made it universally palatable. Strategy is probably doomed to the same fate. Although it now suits the discipline of work it attempts to describe, there'll come a day of more precise language. I think job titles across industries should be a lot more about what someone does, than who they think they are.
- Which isn't helped by: most of the literature around strategy is clumsy. Not because people aren't trying hard enough to describe it (though, relentless evangelical LinkedIn guff doesn't help), but because a simple concept is very difficult to simplify further. That's why you see people try flawed metaphors and cryptically sparse attempts at truisms: how do you reduce simplicity?
- At this point, if I'm going to criticise, I'm obliged to offer my own interpretation of what strategy is, and what it means to a business. Whether creative strategy, business strategy, digital strategy: strategy is giving purpose to a process. This is a description so reductive that it could -- should -- be countered with "but that's just common sense." And, well, precisely. Mostly, that's what strategy is. Why are you doing something? Really - why? 'Why' gives you an objective, an objective gives you something to measure, and a measure gives you an indication of whether or not you did what you set out to do: so now, you have to do things with a purpose.
- So why hire strategists to just exercise commons sense? It's a fair question. It mostly comes down to the fact that it's much harder to analyse yourself than it is for someone else to do it, and it's the same for businesses. Bring in the unbiased eyes.
- There's different types of strategy; but there isn't, really. If you're doing a content strategy, you're pursuing a business objective; a digital strategy - business objective; marketing strategy - business objective. And if you're not doing these things with business objectives in mind, you need to think about why you're doing them.
- "We need a new website." That's often how it starts. But it generally turns out that businesses, people, don't really need a new website - rather, thinking they need a new website is a symptom of some other business problem. Interrogating the brief is essential, and being transparent and open about what you find seems to be rewarded.
- And that leads me to generosity. Generosity of thought, which could be extra work, or extra flexibility, or pragmatism, or whatever, seems crucial in strategy. Working to the brief begins to seem an anachronism: you've found out more, so why not try to provide a solution that incorporates all the nuances you discover?
- A word on planning, as far as I've understood how it differs to strategy. As happened with a host of other words, the advertising industry discovered a concept and had to brand it. Planning just seems to be the application of strategy to a creative campaign, which should have been happening since 1900 anyway. I'm curious as to why strategy and planning has broken out as a new pillar in agencies, because it was presumably happening somewhere prior to this movement. Unless data-driven research forced the hand. If you have some thoughts on this please leave them below.
vaporwave
romaincrisis
2087
titsay
yousharknotpass
