Focus on strategies for growth

Strategy gets a bad name. A lot of people associate it with inaction. It's really anything but that.

Here's an extract of Richard Rumelt's fantastic book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters on the topic:

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The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:

1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.

2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

3. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

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Tactics are good, but they need a framework

When we think about growth in our businesses, it's often easier to jump to the tactics because tactics have fast feedback loops. For example:

Put some budget behind a paid ad > see whether it converts.

While you might get some feedback from that, you're unlikely to create reliable growth in your business.

Why?

Well, one reason this could go wrong is if a competitor copies your exact ad. When they do, and they start bidding on the same eyeballs as you, your acquisition costs will rise.

And then your tactic is useless. (And expensive).

This is particularly likely to happen when you're dealing with a big competitor. At doopoll, we're in a viciously competitive market (survey tools). That's why growth strategy is significantly more important to us than tactics.

Here's why strategy matters to growth

Strategy is an assessment of your challenge which leads to an idea for overcoming the challenge and a series of actions in line with the idea.

Take Coca Cola as an example. What is the Coke strategy?

Assessment: There are lots of colas but no other cola is Coke
Idea: Emphasise the uniqueness of Coke
Actions: Sponsor the Olympics to create the idea of 'uniqueness', the Christmas coke truck (there's only one Santa... and he drinks Coca Cola)

Beneath these actions, there are many tactics:

• Get Olympics branding onto McDonalds cups – everytime someone holds a McDonalds cup, no matter what's inside, they see Coke and the Olympics together.
• Physical events where they drive Coke trucks into city centres at Christmas and hand out free Coke to kids.

What are the steps to creating a strategy for growth in your business

1. Understand the reality of the marketplace – what are your competitors, who are the customers, what are the things customers are unhappy/happy with, what is the 'second curve' of this marketplace?
2. Find a guiding idea for your growth – Now you know how things currently are, what's the version of reality that your company is moving towards?
3. Build a series of actions around that coherent idea to practically move customers towards the version of reality that you believe in.
4. Align a series of tactics to that idea.

Challenge

So let me ask you: what's your strategy for growth?

I'd love to hear it in the comments 👇