On strategic marketing and strategy Michael Porter wrote [1]:
…many strategic plans are lists of action steps without a clear articulation of what competitive advantage the firm has or seeks to achieve and how.
Over 30 years later not much improvement has happened.
Why? Because the concepts of Differentiation, Segmentation, and Value still make little sense for far too many marketers.
How to think strategically
Words without a clean and unique meaning, like good, great, best, quality, just to mention a few, should be banned in business and they should never be used in strategic marketing documents.
Replace them instead with meaningful terms. The question to find an answer to is:
What do you mean with good?
And with quality?
We market high-quality products is a non-sense statement unless you clearly say what you mean with ‘quality’.
Learn how to write to learn how to think strategically.
Write short.
Write bold.
How to write strategies for strategic marketing
Strategies are written in comparison, for instance to a competitor or to a comparable technical performance, and can be clustered in three main groups:
- Different, according to the concept of differentiation
- Better, or claiming a superior product performance
- Cheaper
Strong strategies are often built upon a core competence, where core competence means a bundle of deep knowledge and material resources companies have and mastered [2].
The core competence in Calcium allowed P&G to launch extremely successful detergents, medical drugs, and cosmetics.
What core competencies does your company master?
How to use strategies
You read and re-read a strategy, till you memorize it.
That helps you stay coherent during the strategy execution.
Of course, if your strategy is pages long you may have your troubles memorizing it.
So, if you can’t memorize your strategy chances are it is not a strategy.
Strategies are short statements, say less than 50 words, backed up with supporting evidence. The evidence is written separately from the strategy, and it may take more space, say half to one page.
If you need more space to describe your strategies chances are you are not writing a strategy but rather an operating (executive), short-time oriented document. Strategies are long-term oriented, say 5+ years.
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[1] Michael Porter, Competitive Advantage. Free Press 1985.
[2] Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad, Competing for the future. Harvard Business School Press 1994.