Brand strategy reviews can vary from pointless charades to highly effective processes that ensure the strategy has a high probability of delivering on its promises. Whether your review process is the latter rather than the former depends on how well four critical questions are addressed by the brand team and the senior executives doing the review.
The first of these questions: ‘What do we know that our competitors don’t?’ and how to answer it was the subject of the first article in this series (The killer question, PME March 2024). The second question: ‘How does our brand strategy differ from our competitors?’ was asked and answered in the second article (What’s the difference?, PME July/August 2024). In this third article of four, we get down to the nitty-gritty of strategy execution, when those senior leaders ask a third question: ‘Do the parts of your brand strategy fit together?’
The complacency window
There’s a moment during the brand strategy review that is notorious for trapping naïve brand team leaders and leaving their professional reputation in shreds. I call it the ‘complacency window’ and it opens when the senior reviewers have signalled agreement in principle to the proposed strategy, move onto execution then ask some version of the ‘does it all fit together?’ question. If, at this point, the presenters think their task is almost complete, they have forgotten the maxim that business is 5% strategy and 95% execution. Senior executives have absorbed this lesson and instinctively probe for ways that question even the best strategies, unless they are more than the sum of their parts. This leads them to dig into the nooks and crannies of the brand plan in what can appear to be a random, idiosyncratic way. Many brand teams fall victim to this, not least because it seems near impossible to anticipate the left-field questions they are going to be asked.
But, as ever, a minority of brand teams do find a way to foresee where they are going to be challenged. This prescience enables them not merely to anticipate the reviewers’ questions, but also to develop strong answers. They can do this because they recognise that strong and weak execution differ in four ways. In the following paragraphs, I’ll describe these four characteristics and how they strengthen your brand strategy execution.
Read the article in full here.