Friday 19 August 2011

Is your marketing strategy a pastiche?

You're in a life-drawing class, walking round behind the artists to see what they're doing. You're careful not to disturb them, but as you look over their shoulders, you soon see the differences in the artists' work. Some are doing a full length study, others just a portrait of the head. Some are flamboyantly expressive, others meticulous and detailed.

But one catches your eye in particular. The artist is working quickly, with a vivid style and confident strokes. The result, taking shape before you, certainly looks impressive, like a proper professional drawing you'd see in a gallery.

Something, though, isn't quite right. It looks strangely familiar, but as you look longer, you have to admit that you'd not necessarily recognise the model. The shape of the face isn't right and the shape of the torso looks more like the generic figure of an anatomical diagram. In fact, this picture could be of almost anyone, 'though you'd have to change the hair a bit, maybe, or the shape of the chin or length of the nose.
After a while, the model gets up to leave. But this artist, without looking up, keeps drawing...

There are lots of marketing strategies that feel like they were done by that artist. Accomplished, professional, well-trained even, but totally disconnected from what's in front of them. Far too many feel like they've filled out a form, with sections labelled 'Mission, vision, values, objectives...' etc. It's far too easy to produce something that looks like a marketing strategy, but which is actually an entirely context-independent pastiche.

Or worse, they become a type of fold over Monster drawing game. The head is some generic corporate mood-music that noone could disagree with. Then the body is a formulaic situation analysis (the sort of SWOT and PEST that list 'our people' as a strength and 'the internet' as an opportunity). This body is then balanced wonkily on a 20 page action plan, with little obvious connection to the first two (or sometimes worse, only obvious connections). This marketing-strategy-by-template approach is surprisingly widespread, given that it's got little to do with marketing and nothing to do with strategy.

There is another way to do it and it's clearly described in Richard Rumelt's 'Good Strategy, Bad Strategy'. It doesn't pull it's punches when describing 'template style strategy':

This template style planning has been enthusiastically adopted by corporations, school boards, university presidents, and government agencies. Scan through these documents and you will find pious statements of the obvious presented as if they were decisive insights.
and
...consultants have found that template style strategy frees them from the onerous work of analyzing the true challenges and opportunities faced by the client. Plus, by couching strategy in terms of positives - vision, mission and values - no feelings are hurt'.
Instead, he describes strategy as made up of a kernel made up of three elements: diagnosis of a challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and a set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. The whole strategy is built around some key insight (or insights) that address a critical challenge and focus activity on a few levers that will have most impact on that challenge.

Does that sound like your marketing strategy, or did you recognise the pastiche or the monster drawings more?

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