Most strategy decks answer a brief. This one did something I have come to prefer where the relationship is going to matter more than the pitch: it opened by stating the three most important things we had heard from the client, and turned each into a question we did not yet have the answer to.
I led Influence to Commerce and the social and digital practice for the region.
Playing a brief back before answering it is not a stalling tactic. It is the only cheap moment to discover that the thing the client believes they asked for is not the thing you heard, and the cost of finding that out after a campaign is built is enormous.
The three things
The first we called the iPhone metaphor. The brand wanted to be talked about as cutting edge, which raised a blunter question underneath: how does a product become more than a shampoo?
The second was the importance of the journey. Between 2015 and 2016 the basics had been addressed — search, owned media, and to a large extent social. So the question was what comes next, and how to judge which emerging technologies were worth connecting to a consumer journey that kept changing.
The third was the assumption that success equals cultural relevance, and that cultural relevance leads to sales. The deck said plainly that this was an assumption. If it holds, the question becomes how you actually change a perception, which is a different discipline from making something popular.
Naming the third one as an assumption rather than a goal is the part I am most pleased with. It is the sentence that gives everyone permission to test it later instead of being quietly held to it.
From product to platform, borrowed honestly
For the first question we used published work on the leap from product to platform — the observation that turning a product into a platform can multiply its value, that the path is treacherous and that most attempts fail, along with the conditions under which it tends to work: start from a defensible product with a critical mass of users, use a hybrid model that creates and shares new value, convert quickly, and act on the openings that deter imitation.
Citing the research rather than dressing its conclusions as our own insight matters for a reason beyond honesty. A client can go and read it, argue with it, and bring it to their own board. Proprietary-sounding frameworks cannot travel inside the client's organisation without you in the room.
That reduced the first question to a single usable form: how do we create and share new value? Everything else in the approach — purpose, engagement, content, channels — hung off that.
A workshop instead of a recommendation
The mechanism proposed for answering it was not a strategy document but a structured session with the client's own team: four hours, five to ten people, run in two parts.
The first part asked what benefit the team brings to the company and to the world, with well-known corporate purpose statements as calibration, and demanded an answer of no more than twenty words. The second asked what the team would have to change and what it must keep in order to deliver that, producing a written statement of working culture.
The word limit is the design. Twenty words forces a group to choose, and it produces something a person can repeat from memory in a meeting the agency is not attending, which is the only place brand purpose is ever actually tested.
Judging emerging technology
For the question about what comes next, the proposal was to hold new technology against a maturity curve rather than to react to it — a way of separating a technology at the peak of its noise from one that has come through the trough and is beginning to be useful.
The practical value of that is refusal. Most clients do not need help finding new technologies. They need a defensible reason to say no to four of them and yes to the fifth, and a curve everyone can see makes the no a judgement about timing rather than about taste.
What I would do differently
I would have brought a draft of the twenty words.
Handing a team a blank exercise respects them, and it also risks a four-hour session that ends in a committee sentence nobody can repeat. A deliberately imperfect draft — written by us, obviously wrong in one or two places — gets argued with immediately, and the argument produces the real answer far faster than the blank page does. Since then I have almost always preferred to walk in with something wrong on paper rather than nothing at all.