Strategic brand
planning & development
in Denver

Most strategy documents are lists of ambitions, and every one of them is positive. Nothing in the document tells anyone what to refuse, so nothing in the document ever settles an argument.

A strategy earns its keep at the moment of a trade-off. The sales team wants a discount tier. The product team wants a feature that serves one large customer. Marketing wants to enter a category the company has no claim to. Each request is reasonable on its own. The question is which ones are consistent with the position being built, and that question needs written answers prepared in calm conditions.

Write the exclusions as plainly as the ambitions: segments not served, problems handed to a partner instead, price floors held, channels avoided, and claims the company will not make even when competitors make them. Four or five entries are enough if they are specific.

Test each one against a real decision from the last year. If an exclusion would not have changed anything, it is decoration. Replace it with one that would have.

Exclusions also make the positive half credible. A company that serves everybody is describing capacity rather than a position. A company that names the work it declines is making a claim a buyer can verify, and buyers do verify it, usually by asking for a case in their own industry.

Review the list once a year, with the exceptions that were granted written next to it. Repeated exceptions are the signal that the strategy has moved and the document has not.

Share the list beyond the marketing team. Sales feels the exclusions first, and support hears about them second. Neither can hold a line they have never seen.

Keep it short enough to remember. A page that has to be searched for will be quoted from memory anyway, and memory keeps about five things. Write the five that would change a decision.

A strategy document is easy to agree with and hard to use. The test is simple. Take a decision the company argued about in the last quarter, and ask whether the document settles it.

Run the test with the people who made that decision. Give them the positioning, the exclusions and the audience definition, and nothing else. Then ask them to choose. If three people reach three answers, the document is describing an ambition rather than guiding a choice.

Fix what the test exposes. Usually one sentence is doing too much work, or an audience is defined by industry when the real pattern is a buying situation. Rewrite that part and run the test again on a different decision.

Do it twice a year. Markets move, and a document that was decisive in January can be silent by autumn. Two hours of rereading is cheaper than an argument that repeats every month.