What we mean by ‘strategy’

Published: October 7, 2015 15:20 Author: Categories: Comment Design Work

Strategy is a much lauded work in consultancy, as such it means many things to many people. So here’s our take on what is strategy and the consultancy we offer when it comes to the use of this word.

Strategy, to us, is about devising a plan to help our clients take their product to market. But sometimes it goes even higher than that, it’s a pre-product decision. Our most effective consultancy (on strategy) comes when the product hasn’t been designed yet, let alone the marketing strategy to sell that product.

Let us elaborate.

Our most successful client relationship to date is with a financial services company who came to us with an outline of their business. They knew the sector to which they were going into and they had enlisted a group of stakeholders and investors who liked their idea.

The first job was to work out with this group (of 15+ individuals across 9 businesses) a consensus for what this company was going to ‘be’. Not the obvious ‘be’ of being a financial services provider, but the ‘be’ of culture. What type of business were they going to create. Our work here was about extracting from those individuals what each of them thought in an open forum with their peers, analysing and seeking agreement across all stakeholders to ensure that everyone was on the same page.

Now we knew what kind of a business we were creating the strategy for we could move on to analysing values, developing personality traits; putting in place the brand strategy. What this essential first-step did was give a central reference point for all future business decisions. It afforded them a clear grounding and a clear direction for growth and has helped them define their proposition ever since.

In short, an effective strategy.

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