Strategy Is About Choosing What Not to Do

One of the biggest changes in how I think about marketing is that I no longer see strategy as a big document full of objectives, actions, channels and dates. Those things can all be useful, but they are not necessarily strategy. A plan tells you what you are going to do. Strategy should explain the choices behind it.

That distinction sounds simple, but I think a lot of organisations struggle with it. You can have a beautifully presented marketing plan containing social media, email, advertising, events, PR, video and a new website, but still have no clear strategy whatsoever. If everything is important, every audience matters and every available channel is included, where have the choices actually been made?

Playing to Win helped put a framework around something I had increasingly started to recognise through experience. Strategy requires choices about where you are going to play and how you intend to win there. That means accepting that there are audiences you will prioritise more heavily, propositions you will push harder and activities that you simply will not do.

I have seen the importance of this through my work in sport. A football club could theoretically market itself to everyone in its town. Existing supporters, families, students, tourists, businesses, children, former supporters, away fans, sponsors and people who have never watched football could all be described as potential audiences. But trying to communicate with all of them in exactly the same way would result in fairly meaningless marketing.

Instead, a particular campaign might be about getting existing occasional supporters to attend more matches. Another might be designed specifically to attract local businesses. Matchday Teammates at Aberystwyth Town was different again, because the idea linked digital ticket buyers with offers from businesses around the town. The audience, proposition and behaviour we wanted were much clearer than simply saying we wanted to “increase awareness”.

The same applies at a much bigger organisational level. At Cardiff Met Sport there are countless things we could communicate and numerous audiences we could target. Students, prospective students, elite athletes, community members, gym customers, parents, alumni, governing bodies and commercial partners can all matter. A marketing strategy cannot simply give every one of those audiences equal weighting all of the time.

The uncomfortable part of strategy is therefore not deciding what you are going to do. Most marketers are very good at generating more things to do. The difficult bit is deciding what you are not going to prioritise.

That is also why I have become slightly suspicious of enormous marketing plans containing hundreds of actions. Activity can create the illusion of progress. A team can be incredibly busy without necessarily moving towards anything meaningful.

For me, the starting point has become much simpler. What are we trying to achieve? Where are we choosing to compete? Who matters most in this situation? What do we want them to think or do? Why should they choose us? Only then should we start discussing channels, content and campaigns.

Strategy should make the subsequent decisions easier. If the strategy creates another hundred unanswered questions, it probably has not made enough choices.