Why Are There So Many Strategies?
Ever wonder why there are so many strategies when it comes to business and marketing? Seriously.
There are corporate and business strategies, marketing and go-to-market strategies, brand, media, creative and communications just to name a few more.
And all of them follow similar processes. Discovery, research, analysis, planning, implementation and optimization. Not to mention, they also often share similar inputs and outputs like mission, vision, and values, or audience insights and competitive opportunities.
And we would be remiss if we also didn’t mention that while each of these strategies are meant to support the broader objectives of the business, more often than not they operate on disparate timelines across different teams or departments with various kinds of oversight and metrics. Strategy isn’t simple work, but man have we made it messy.
So here is our attempt at cleaning things up a bit.
This isn’t an exhaustive list or a detailed best practice, but we wanted to provide a quick snapshot of the major types of strategy and what questions they can help you answer.
Corporate Strategy
Goal: It works to answer the question of what business an organization, at an enterprise level, is in and how it will build, sustain and grow within that market. It helps articulate the reason for and the market actions of the enterprise.
Definition: It is defined as an organizational management activity that sets alignment and priorities, focuses energy and resources, strengthens operations and humans, and helps assess and adjust an enterprise’s direction in response to an ever-changing environment.
Effective Corporate Strategy articulates where an organization is and where it is going, the actions needed to make that progress, and how it will know if it is successful. This type of strategy involves the plans that a larger enterprise must design in order to optimize the action of the portfolio in its entirety.
Business Strategy
Goal: It works to answer the question of how a business entity's activities are either optimized for a corporate strategy or optimized for the business itself. In the case of smaller businesses, you may not have a Corporate Strategy, and in this case the Business Strategy is the overarching strategy the day to day activities should support. It helps articulate the purpose and the direction of the business.
Definition: It is defined as a high-level analysis of a business’s competitive and core capabilities, and how each business, business unit, or vertical contributes.
Effective Business Strategy outlines the actions and decisions the business is and plans on taking to reach its goals and objectives. It also is designed to improve, accelerate and guide decision-making processes for internal operations.
Brand Strategy
Goal: It works to answer the question, how do you demonstrate and prove your value to the market, the consumer, and your internal stakeholders. It helps articulate the business case for change at a brand level.
Definition: It is the work of envisioning the future position of a brand in the marketplace based on the aspirations, both internally and externally, of the business or enterprise. It defines the rules and guidelines that articulate the purpose, positioning and proposition for all communications.
Effective Brand Strategy enables businesses and enterprises to understand what they need to do to be and stay competitive, the culture that is necessary to fuel the work, and solutions for the barriers ahead.Comms Strategy
Goal: It works to answer the question how, where, what and when do we want people to experience the brand out in the world?
Definition: It is defined as the in-depth plan of an organization’s entire communication efforts, and also a way to execute against particular marketing efforts, or creative ideas. Anytime you need to communicate on behalf of an objective, it requires some level of Communication Strategy.
Effective Communications Strategy enables businesses and enterprises to build the right story for a customer and define how that customer will experience that story throughout its channels and touchpoints. It also identifies the themes that will hold the storytelling together at scale.
Marketing Strategy
Goal: It answers the question, how do we sell our enterprise, business, product, service, or offering in the real world?
Definition: It is defined as the strategy that allows an organization to concentrate its resources on the greatest opportunities to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage and increase sales through external communications.Effective Marketing Strategy details out a business or enterprise marketing efforts over a specific period of time attached to a specific objective and metric. It is the overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into repeat consumers.
Each of these have a role. Each of these should work together. Not every business needs each, especially in the start up phase, but with growth comes the need for critical thinking, clarity, and consistency. We hope you have found this breakdown useful, and have helped you understand the purpose and objective of each.
Here at Hush we focus specifically on the relationship between brand, communications, and marketing strategies - and strengthening the collective impact and effectiveness of bringing these efforts closer together.
We’d love to connect with you if your strategic challenge lies at these intersections.