One of the things that makes strategy tricky, is that it’s war against yourself.
It’s not really a knowledge-based discipline, like engineering or medicine, where you just have to know stuff. It’s more of a discipline of consistently and relentlessly going against your instincts, and what seems sensible at that moment in time.
It’s sort of like that episode in Seinfeld, where George’s life is going so badly that he decides to simply do the opposite of whatever he thinks in any given moment. After all, it can’t get any worse right? And of course, predictably, his counterintuitive choices all work out beautifully.
Yup, strategy’s kinda like that.
And this is why we see founders and CEOs constantly making the same mistakes. Because they don’t realise they’re mistakes. They think they’re doing the right, sensible, and logical thing.
(But right, sensible, and logical is rarely the way.)
Here then are the most common “seemingly right but actually wrong” things I’ve seen my clients do over the years.
Recognise any?
I. Selling with “purpose”
You don’t find that many brands these days that don’t have some sort of noble or virtuous purpose guiding their behaviour. It’s perhaps slightly on the wane, but there was a time when it seemed like people had forgotten that it’s OK for a brand to just be fun, or cool, or helpful, without solving the sins of the world.
Still, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with purpose – indeed it can be great for galvanising the team, and of course for making positive things happen in the world. But what is wrong is believing that people will buy from you because of it.
Get this straight: nobody cares except you. Or at least you should act like that’s the case, because otherwise you’ll tether your financial performance to your customer’s moral compass – and that’s a road to ruin.
The truth is that the market is driven by fundamentally selfish desires, and even the most purposeful brands out there are selling by appealing to these desires you examine them critically. So the same goes for you. If you want your purpose to actually happen, you must first ensure that the commercial strategy driving your business taps into these less virtuous forces.
Being “nice” is not a free pass to avoid the same tough strategic thinking as everyone else.
II. Sticking with your vision
When you’re building a company, you’re actually really building two of them:
- The one you think you’re building
- The one you’re actually building
The first corresponds to the plan or vision you had in your head. The thing you wanted to make, solving the problem you wanted to solve. The second corresponds to how the outside world interprets the business, and how it manipulates it to solve different problems.
Understand, this dichotomy is always at play, at least in part. There are always these two businesses there, it’s unavoidable.
The mistake here is cleaving too closely to your version of the business, and being unaware that the other version exists. This is especially problematic since it is that other version that makes money. That is the “real” business – your vision is just a chimera. A mirage. Something that may excite you but which in truth doesn’t really exist.
Your goal should be to unify your vision with the truth of the business that is emerging. To get on board with it and serve it – no matter how much it deviates from what you wanted to build.
Trust me, no matter how great your original idea was, this one is better.
III. Talking about yourself more than the customer
OK people don’t exactly think this one is a “good idea”, but it’s just so damn natural that they can’t help it anyway.
It is insane how pervasive this “me me me” style of communication is when you consider how often we’re told that it’s bad and ineffective. But I guess old narcissistic habits die hard; we talk about the thing that matters to us, and that is us. While our customers only want to hear about the thing that matters to them, and that is them.
I heard a superb analogy about this from Donald Miller, who said that the customer is James Bond, and your brand is Q. This really nails the dynamic you want to create here, both on terms of who the hero is in the relationship, and the ratio of attention each party deserves.
Roughly I would suggest making all your comms like this:
You
You
You
You
You
Me
You
You
You can literally fill in the blanks there with your comms and see massive dividends – even before you’ve done any more fundamental strategic thinking. It’s just such an insanely easy win that you’d be crazy to let it slide.
IV. Focusing on the customer for strategic insight
Hold up – we just said we should be focusing in the customer in our comms, but now we’re saying we shouldn’t be focusing on them for our strategy?
That’s right.
The customer should be the relentless focus of all comms, BUT they will not be your best source of strategic insight, and they will not tell you how you should direct your company, nor what role you should occupy in the market.
The reason for this is simple: pretty much all of the obvious needs of your customers will already be adequately served by the market. Everyone is asking them what they want, and trying to give it to them, so the chances that a lucrative opportunity has been “missed” is gonna be razor slim (though it does sometimes happen).
You need to uncover new opportunities and unimagined needs that customers could never tell you – and the way to do that is to focus on your competitors. Competitors define the landscape and context; they tell you what spaces are taken and what spaces are open; and by bouncing off them and counter-signalling them you can come up with fresh strategic ideas.
Now of course many of these ideas won’t be high value to customers (there’s no point in just being different for the sake of it), but if you examine the ideas for potential customer value you’re likely to find something. And that something will be something fresh which you could never have discovered merely by listening to them.
V. Trying to be better than your competitors
Finally one of my greatest hits, but it bears endless repeating:
The market does not reward better, it only rewards different.
Better is a synonym for “the same”, because it explicitly presupposes that the two things being compared are designed for the same job (which is the yardstick for determining “betterness” in the first place). If the job is different, then the concept of “better” becomes meaningless. What’s better, a Birkin bag or a paper bag? Better for what? It’s a dumb question.
Because of this implicit sameness, the market will simply bundle the two things being compared into the same sludge – and the winner will not be the one that is marginally “superior”; it will probably just be the one with more money, greater availability, and greater name recognition.
The business graveyard is overflowing with solutions which were “better” – and if you try that game, you’ll likely join them.
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Tricky isn’t it?
All that good sense, all those natural decisions, and yet each one only serving to imperceptibly suck you into the quicksand of commodification.
The price of escape is either extreme vigilance or natural contrarianism (or ideally both).
But on the plus side, if you manage it, you know you’ll be in a pretty exclusive club.
