The importance of sacrifice in strategy

According to Elton John, sorry seems to be the hardest word. 

I disagree. I believe No is the hardest word, for a lot of us, but especially those in brand and marketing. 

A post it note above my desk reminds me daily that “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,” courtesy of the famous (although not quite Elton John famous) academic Michael Porter. Decades earlier, the OG Mad Man David Ogilvy apparently said “The essence of strategy is sacrifice." 

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What do I take from these quotes? Learn to say No. It’s taken me a long time to understand this lesson, and is still something I struggle to apply (particularly for my own business. Oh boy do I struggle). 

This definition of strategy may come as a surprise. In an industry proliferating with ‘strategists’; content, brand, digital, CX… it often feels there’s a distinct lack of ‘sacrifice’ present in most strategy docs, irrespective of discipline. There are insights and benefits, audiences and personas, values and behaviours, goals and metrics. There are pages capturing everything you can do and might do, every potential user, and all of the tactics - eventually thrown at an annual calendar or journey map. When writing a good strategy, it should feel like some very important and potentially valuable audiences and offerings are left lying on the cutting room floor. It should not feel like the balancing act of filling your plate at an all-you-can-eat buffet. 

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But why is saying No important?  

Firstly, because all businesses have limited resources. Whether that’s energy, money, staff or time - you need to learn to say no in order to focus squarely on what you do want to achieve. Doesn’t matter if you’re Jeff Bezos, or a stay-at-home parent trying to scale a passion into profit - it’s critical to get clear on what you offer, who might care, and how you’re going to make sure they know about you. An important part of that process is working out what you’re not offering, who you’re not targeting, and what great features and benefits you’re not going to talk about. 

Saying No is also about getting assumptions out in the open. A friend leads in-house design teams within a SaaS company. It’s a big business, with revenue exceeding $7bn USD and over 4000 staff. Their internal briefing process includes writing goals AND ‘non-goals.’ By talking about who they’re not targeting, or what problems they’re not currently solving for, it catches assumptions that can otherwise undermine great work being done by large, decentralised teams.   

Saying No is not just about your own teams and resources, it’s about your audiences. You’re shouting into a void of over-communication and over-exposure to brands and messages. Customers don’t think about or care about your business and products anywhere near as much as you do (I know, it hurts). So with the limited attention you do manage to get, you need to really, really narrow focus on what you want that user to know. 

“Positioning …uses an oversimplified message to cut through the clutter and get into the mind,” is one of many gems from  ‘Positioning, the battle for your mind.’ The key word there is oversimplified. Work out what you want people to know about you – strip it right back to literally two or three key truths – and hammer it home at every opportunity. I shudder when I think back to early strategy docs I worked on; diagrams bulging with layers to accomodate the perspective of every senior stakeholder involved - because mangling diagrams was so much easier than getting to a couple of prioritised positioning tenets. 

Showing my junior self a little empathy, it’s really hard to get to that very focused position for your brand or product. It’s also really hard to decide to target certain segments over others - especially if it means targeting a group you don’t know much about, or who don’t know much about you. It’s really hard to ignore the digital gurus who are convinced PPC gives you greatest bang for marketing buck, when you barely even know what it means.

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So, what can you do to make saying No feel more comfortable? 

1. Research: 

Understand your audience in a way that brings them to life and ALSO gives you solid quantitative data. You may uncover that your customers drink oat milk when they’re out for virtue points, and drink good ol’ fashioned moo milk at home. What a tasty insight. But if you don’t know how many of these milk-drinkers there are, or how often they buy, there’s only so much you can do with this info. IF you have the opportunity to do some solid quant and qual research, those tough decisions don’t feel frighteningly arbitrary, they feel obvious (on a good day). 

2. Problem Diagnosis:

It’s so easy to spend time and money on ‘busy work’ that ultimately won’t get you closer to where you need to go. Einstein reportedly said “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Being clear on what you’re actually solving helps you say No whenever you get distracted by ‘low hanging fruit’; those opportunities that have a tendency to chew up and spit out your time and energy.

3. Goal setting:

If you know you have a problem (and let’s face it, you do. But you can call it an opportunity if you’re feeling optimistic), what are you going to do about it? Specific, measurable goals will help you evaluate the sometimes tiny distinctions between the myriad options ahead of you.  The jury is out on whether SMART / FAST / OKR or other emerging methods work best. I would say, with respect, it doesn’t matter as long as you set them and use them.

I’ve been re-reading Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, have Eat Your Greens and How Brands Grow on my desk always, and plan on finally finishing Playing to Win.

Any tips on who to follow/ what to read next?